1. Alexandra do Carmo: Time’s Archeologist
by Jonathan Goodman
More than anything else, the New York based-artist Alexandra do Carmo is an archeologist, scrutinizing memory on both a public and private plane. Her video Wild m5 and series of dinosaur drawings articulate a process whereby the impact of the art has much to do with the audience’s perception; the activities presented in the video, in which a paleontologist sifts through mud and silt while looking for such things as tiny teeth that would date the material being studied, enderings of what we do not easily internalize. Both video and drawings present a specifically materialist point of view and a deeply personal reading of what creativity and content is capable of, very early in the 21st century. do Carmo, like many other artists working today, proceeds along oblique paths, trusting to a degree of indirection that may make initial understanding of her work difficult in all its metamorphic implications.
Part of the struggle to understand, and in a way to complete, do Carmo’s art, stems not so much from the complications of her vision as it does from the increasingly indirect notion of creativity itself. The context surrounding the art object has become as meaningful as the artwork itself; this is because many of the ideas in contemporary art are intellectually driven, understandable only insofar as the ideas surrounding the work are made intelligible to those viewing the object. Much art conceived of in this way is political by implication; there has been a steady push to politicize the implications of art because we are entering an age in which the democratization of culture is seen as central to the art effort. The ideas inherent in such work are likely best adumbrated as language-based communications, in which the idea of the piece takes over as the justification of its meaning, rather than the sensuous given of the image itself. do Carmo’s art doesn’t necessarily trade on the politicization of her message, but the implications of what she does are profoundly intellectual, and therefore conceptual to an extent. The brilliance of her dinosaur series is that it is based on an extended understanding of drawing--what mark making means. Her barely visible imagery at first suggests misty mountains in the Chinese tradition; however, closer appraisal shows the landscape to consist of specific dinosaur forms, for example, the head and teeth of Tyrannosaurus rex.
In certain kinds of metaphorical understanding, one thing becomes another, which becomes another. There is a protean freedom in our reading of art whose intellectual basis supports, indeed encourages, multiple readings on the part of the viewer. When the notion of memory is also invoked, the interpretation of the image is made richer and more complex by virtue of its relationship to tradition as an environment supporting the artist’s current efforts. In do Carmo’s video Wild m5, we see a physical paleontologist sift through a small amount of dirt as he searches for the small teeth and bits of bone that will in fact date the ground from which the material was taken; later in the video, we see larger amounts of mud, in which the hard remnants of animals are seen. If the short scenes of research are taken together, the film becomes an inspired attempt to read such activities as central to the process of finding, even of categorizing the act of scientific research as a major way of ordering the world, of making sense of our environment. What do Carmo is after, in her powerful filmic exposition of the scientific method, is not so much an expression of the physical specifics of research (although that is a meaningful part of the video) as a sense of tradition that would bind the anthropological effort to the image-making undertaking. The search in the mud for small evidence of animals is not unlike the artist’s search for an imagery adequate to the genuine intricacies associated with living in contemporary life--the key to both endeavors is a sense of history, no matter whether literal, as occurs in the video, or oblique, as intimated by the artist’s efforts to forge a new vision based on the past.
For many reasons, memory is crucial to do Carmo’s understanding of art and tradition. The scientific process attempts to quantify the past, while the artist’s psyche is driven to interpret it, yet the point of the artist’s work is that the two processes are not so different from each other as might seem at first. The viewer is also an important part of the equation, as he or she completes do Carmo’s task of presenting processes and images in time. Research may be a central part of the artist’s equation, whose elements are dug out from time much as an archeologist might unearth bits of culture from dust; however, the viewer’s interpretation of what is seen depends upon how the drawing is read--as a version of the Chinese landscape, as a seamless representation of the dinosaur, or as a comment on the nature of creativity itself, namely, the representation of something just barely visible in the imaginative landscape, in which mark making becomes a trope aimed at demonstrating the importance of the effort--searching the mud, marking the paper--in a larger quest for meaningfulness in the postmodern landscape. do Carmo’s gift to us is that she refuses to align herself with any single interpretation in particular, in part because she knows that the constraints of a single reading do not do justice to the complexity of her task.
The dinosaurs in the series first read as mountainous landscapes hidden by mists; a more careful look shows that the forms are dragon’s heads and long teeth, portrayed with a subtlety and delicacy that belies the ferocity of the real-life dragons do Carmo is portraying. The artist just barely portrays the forms with an orange pen; she demands that we not only casually see the imagery but also study it for the sake of the meaning it makes upon closer scrutiny. That the images reaches toward invisibility is central to Carmo’s esthetic because absence is as important to her as the presence of form. Drawing is not only a matter of imposing form on the page; it also concerns the experience of absence or emptiness, which the artist presents as though her structures were conforming to a nearly Zen investigation of what is no longer there. That the dinosaur drawings conform to another genre, their seeming appearance as Chinese landscape, complicates do Carmo’s rhetoric, wherein the given is treated as a multiple reality. The artist’s interest in forms of the real is available to her audience in a process of becoming that implies a belief in more than one reality; this gives do Carmo her interest in an imagery that may be applied to more than one notion of being. The complications bring out the idea of drawing as a phase of creativity; understood in its largest manifestation, drawing possesses a realism that implicates or includes its absence or anti-self. As a result the forms, which are literally taken from a child’s natural history book, participate in their own undoing.
do Carmo’s esthetic, then, involves its own negation--a stance whose remarkable sophistication is understood by its very absence as form. As an audience, we are invited not only to see, but also to imagine a reality whose presence is implied as much as it is publicly stated. The video convinces us of the parallel between the objectivity of science and the subjectivity of art, just as the drawings hover delicately between absence and existence; both the video and the drawings wait for completion on the part of their viewer, who internalizes the material he or she sees in a process that imitates the creativity of the artist herself. As a result, meaning is generated within the triangle of the artist relating the work to her audience, in a way that reads creativity quite democratically--as one form of information among others. This is why do Carmo spends her time filming the working paleontologist; she sees his activities as parallel to her own. Both do Carmo and the paleontologist are archeologists of time, even though the time of the mud and teeth is literal and the time of the imagined dinosaurs is figurative or metaphorical. Both activities insist on an inner integrity, through which statements about the past may be made. The dinosaurs are icons of patience, relating brilliantly to the slow, methodical work of the scientist in the film.
do Carmo is unusual, even remarkable as an art artist because she insists on so much: the ability of her drawings to function as landscape and creature, the ability of her film to serve as a point of creative representation. Her largest theme is the meaningfulness of creativity, which she extends to include much more than what we usually associate with such a concept. For all her art’s complexity, a simple reading, based upon democratic impulse, is capable of being just to what she does. It is an interpretation that calls attention to the meaning of observant activity: an awareness of the call of the real in actions that serve as metaphors for ways of living in the world. Consequently, do Carmo’s demand that we read her art in all its intricacy becomes in its own way a request that we suspend our judgment in favor of more sophisticated awareness--of absence, of the deeply metaphorical nature of our own actions. Drawing becomes the stand-in for creativity, such that it becomes its own reality. The play of form, based as it is upon absence and archeological awareness, is saved for its expression in, of all places, a natural history museum, where memory treats all manner of action and object as material for study. do Carmo is as much a paleontologist studying meaning as she is an artist making things, and it is this extra awareness that makes us respect her essentially allegorical impulse as an important, indeed a central, view of the creative act. She intends a complexity best regarded as an imaginative treatment of the imagination, in which the theoretical implications of her art are as important as the art itself.
Jonathan Goodman
Jonathan Goodman is a poet, teacher, and writer specializing in contemporary art. Alexandra do Carmo was a student of his at Pratt Institute.
__________________________________________
2. Alexandra do Carmo: Dinosaur Drawings
By Robert Knafo
What does it mean to construct the image of the head of tyrannosaurus rex out of a thousand or more marks of a very fine orange pen, as if making a huge edifice out of so many exponentially smaller building blocks? What does it mean that these images of a dinosaur head are, at first sight, actually unrecognizable…and seemingly something else? What is this? one is likely to wonder initially: a landscape? Are these not hills and valleys, and, ah, mist, perhaps?
And then comes the moment: Of course. There are the famous ferocious teeth, there are the cold reptilian eyes, there is the now universally recognizable, monstrously bumpy head—there is the iconic ancient monster, known from a million encyclopedia and magazine reproductions, from Jurassic Park I and II, from the grammar-school trips to the Museum of Natural History. (The source image, the head of a tyrannosaurus rex in profile, is from a children’s book the artist found in a bookstore.) But recognizing the nature of these images is likely to take some time…and what does that mean? What does it mean to fail to “see the forest for the trees,” as the expression goes, to lose sight of the whole in the proliferation of a thousand or more constituent parts? What does it mean that in encountering these images—or at least, the first such image— we are (or so we are able to realize retrospectively) engaged in a deliberate, intended, process of deferral, in which the resolution of ambiguity that fundamentally underlies, indeed defines, the process of seeing, of “recognition,’ is placed in momentary suspension? (This process of reduction of visual ambiguity that we handily call “seeing” has a correlative to a concept in information theory, and may at bottom amount to the same thing. The British scientist Richard Dawkins explains: “An informative statement is one that tells you something you didn't know before. The information content of a statement is measured as reduction in prior uncertainty. If I tell you that Evelyn is male, you immediately know a whole lot of things about him.”)
At the point that we have reduced our prior visual uncertainty and ascertained that these are dinosaur heads, we are faced with more tangential ambiguities: What does it mean that, of all the images in the massive universe of images, the artist Alexandra do Carmo has chosen this subject, a dinosaur, by which to launch us on this journey of cognition (and miscognition)? And what does it mean that the maker of these images has repeated this singular process of composition of a dinosaur head not once, or twice, or three times, but over a dozen times, and (one learns) intends to keep on going? (The series now comprises nearly 20 large-scale drawings).
All these questions have one thing in common, obviously: What does it mean-the interrogatory prelude to a fixing of meaning, the problematic of interpretation. The project of setting the conditions for an open-endedness of interpretation, and a closely related imperative, the subversion of any fixed or clear meaning, is at the heart of the work of Alexandra do Carmo. This has become, not incidentally, the point in much recent art. Parkett magazine editor Cay Sophie Rabinowitz organized a show this past summer (2004) at Apexart in New York that featured work by Efrat Shvily, Liliana Moro, Paul de Guzman and Wade Guyton. She wrote in the accompanying essay: “Each of the works in this show somehow interrupts convention, leaving unfulfilled the expectation that form can be decisively linked to meaning.” What I find interesting here is that some esthetic projects of disruption, or extreme rerouting, of that link between form and meaning can produce very different results: some art causes a kind of semiologic dyspepsia; it seems to actively frustrate comprehension, and appears arbitrarily, even perversely, impervious to interpretation. On the other hand, artistic stances and strategies such that of do Carmo, even as they disorient, can at the same time seem engaging, resonant, and challenging; instead of throwing up an impregnable wall, they throw open more than the usual number of doors and windows. (In addition to these drawings that demand the active engagement of the viewer, do Carmo produces installations - essentially parameters for participatory activity - in which viewers are also effectively invited to take part in producing the meaning of the work in question.)
While a committed member of the current ranks of subversives in the attack on the stability of meaning, do Carmo makes work that multiplies and compounds meaning rather than frustrates it. It does so by among other things, reflecting an ethos of generosity and inclusiveness toward the viewer; opening an epic engagement with a parallel investigative practice/methodology - which is paleontology - more on that below; and displaying a nuance, poeticism, and sensuality that can come from the trace of pen or pencil on paper. The dinosaur imagery - but more to the point, the way of creating the images of these extinct beasts - patiently, bit by bit, over a long time - instills in the work an implicit parallel to scientific investigation, and more precisely to paleontology. As do Carmo says about this parallel: “Paleontologists create moments...they find something, they take notes…one step leads them to the next step.” (All quotes in this text are from the author’s conversations with the artist).
By invoking the dinosaur, and the science by which we understand and literally and figuratively “see” the dinosaur, do Carmo’s images also invoke a key temporal dimension – the question, or rather the many questions, of time. This is something one first senses intuitively: one look at the drawings and we are aware of one kind of time, namely the substantial amount of time it must take to create these images - to effectively be producing meaning slowly and patiently out of minuscule component marks. It is a process, not accidentally, akin to the work of paleontologists, who, operating on their own axis of natural history, must also slowly make their way and produce meaning out of initially inconclusive bits. But, do Carmo emphasizes, “this is after all art, and not science.” It is important to note the difference within the similarities in these drawings; the way they are absolutely the same, in some ways, and at the same time uniquely, different, one from the other. This difference-in-sameness, or to put it more conventionally, these variations on a theme, reflects something very important to the artist, who understands drawing not as something with a predetermined goal, an image that looks like this or that, with this or that characteristic, but as “an open practice. There are millions of possibilities in the act of drawing. With pen and paper, and with the same image, you are still never doing the same thing.” In other words the quality of open-endedness in these works is to be found both in the artist’s practice and in the experience of the viewer.
But why, we may finally ask, this broad-front esthetic assault on meaning, in the work of this artist and others? In a brilliant essay on do Carmo’s work, published on the occasion of her exhibition of the dinosaur drawings at the Sala do Veado no Museu Nacional de Historia Natural em Lisboa (the Deer Room of the National Museum of natural History in Lisbon), in the summer-fall of 2004, the critic and poet John Goodman relates this open-endedness of meaning to the implementation of a principle of democratization in esthetic experience. I think he is absolutely right to discern that democratizing ethos in do Carmo’s project. But I would also point the finger at another pillar of contemporary western culture, which is global capitalism. It may seem far-fetched to invoke these vast social dynamics in the consideration of a set of drawings of dinosaurs; but here is the thesis in a nutshell. Let us grant that there are political and economic forces that work to favor certain esthetic developments. I would argue that such forces can be perceived in these particular works of do Carmo’s. They reflect the effect of both a democratizing, empowering impulse - a positive desire to shift the terms of esthetic experience toward an active and autonomous rather than a passive viewer. In doing so they also reflect, I think, a kind of repudiation; a reaction to an oppressive, disempowering force, namely globalized corporate power and its dominance of the visual domain. The quality of ambiguity, the rewarding of patient and active looking and interpretation, and a structuring of esthetic experience that favors an individual coming-to-awareness—all these qualities can be interpreted as a consequence of both a democratic impulse and a reactive and tacitly critical response to a contemporary visual regime in which the meaning of images is routinely reduced, simplified, over-determined, and compromised by a multiplicity of market, economic, consumerist, and corporate agendas. In this current empire of the image, artists like do Carmo are in effect finding ways to provide events of resistance and refuge, to establish a kind of temporary autonomy of meaning.
_______________________________________________
3. “Looking for Fragments”
Publico
Luisa Soares de Oliveira
September 18, 2004
The exhibition begins with a video, entitled Wild M5. A scientist looks through a microscope at fragments of rodent teeth that will permit her date the layer of mud in which they were found. The activity of the scientist has little of the romantic aura that still surrounds her profession. With the help of tweezers, she separates minuscule fragments that she will wash and finally catalogue. Recognize, choose, wash, name and store: the diverse phases of the recollection of objects that precedes interpretation.
In another room, a series of drawings hanging side by side occupies the main wall of the Sala do Veado [The Deer Room]. The walls, raw and unpainted, and the lighting conditions of the room, lit only by windows looking out onto the Botanical Garden, do not facilitate the spectator’s appreciation. You detect reddish stains on the paper, and only with close attention and effort are forms distinguished. To your surprise, they are not the mountains, streams or rivers of Chinese painting as they first appear, but heads of dinosaurs, drawn with a red pen.
After a long period in the United States, this main exhibition in Portugal by Alexandra do Carmo affirms that the scientific and the artistic working process have more in common than one would suppose. The process of choosing objects among undifferentiated mud in the first case and the choice of forms between the infinity of motives that contemporary culture puts at your disposal in the second instance achieves diverse final results from common mental process.
Alexandra do Carmo chose the lab work of the paleontologist to establish a comparison that gives meaning to the exhibition. The paleontologist in his or her search for the prehistorical truth can only count on the fragments that time didn’t destroy. Here, with the study of rodents the lived in Serra de Aires 40 or 50 thousand years ago, the scientist hopes to contribute to the global vision of the habitat in that region during the epoch in question. If the scientist wants to know the truth, he knows that his work will never give him more than a fragment of it-- something in its complexity will always escape him. You can say from the paleontologist that the unsuccess is the reason for being professional.
From the artist on the contrary, the truth is the one she makes every day on the sheet of paper, on the canvas, on the computer chip. Here is where the fundamental difference between the artist and scientist resides. The fact is that for the first and by opposition to the second, the truth does not run away, but materializes in each work in each drawing in each line of dinosaur brain.
Therefore, it is indifferent that Alexandra do Carmo has been using a children’s book of science as a model for her drawing. It is not about the reconstruction of the true appearance of each animal, but the establishment of a distance between these two kinds of work, although the proximity is established.
by Jonathan Goodman
More than anything else, the New York based-artist Alexandra do Carmo is an archeologist, scrutinizing memory on both a public and private plane. Her video Wild m5 and series of dinosaur drawings articulate a process whereby the impact of the art has much to do with the audience’s perception; the activities presented in the video, in which a paleontologist sifts through mud and silt while looking for such things as tiny teeth that would date the material being studied, enderings of what we do not easily internalize. Both video and drawings present a specifically materialist point of view and a deeply personal reading of what creativity and content is capable of, very early in the 21st century. do Carmo, like many other artists working today, proceeds along oblique paths, trusting to a degree of indirection that may make initial understanding of her work difficult in all its metamorphic implications.
Part of the struggle to understand, and in a way to complete, do Carmo’s art, stems not so much from the complications of her vision as it does from the increasingly indirect notion of creativity itself. The context surrounding the art object has become as meaningful as the artwork itself; this is because many of the ideas in contemporary art are intellectually driven, understandable only insofar as the ideas surrounding the work are made intelligible to those viewing the object. Much art conceived of in this way is political by implication; there has been a steady push to politicize the implications of art because we are entering an age in which the democratization of culture is seen as central to the art effort. The ideas inherent in such work are likely best adumbrated as language-based communications, in which the idea of the piece takes over as the justification of its meaning, rather than the sensuous given of the image itself. do Carmo’s art doesn’t necessarily trade on the politicization of her message, but the implications of what she does are profoundly intellectual, and therefore conceptual to an extent. The brilliance of her dinosaur series is that it is based on an extended understanding of drawing--what mark making means. Her barely visible imagery at first suggests misty mountains in the Chinese tradition; however, closer appraisal shows the landscape to consist of specific dinosaur forms, for example, the head and teeth of Tyrannosaurus rex.
In certain kinds of metaphorical understanding, one thing becomes another, which becomes another. There is a protean freedom in our reading of art whose intellectual basis supports, indeed encourages, multiple readings on the part of the viewer. When the notion of memory is also invoked, the interpretation of the image is made richer and more complex by virtue of its relationship to tradition as an environment supporting the artist’s current efforts. In do Carmo’s video Wild m5, we see a physical paleontologist sift through a small amount of dirt as he searches for the small teeth and bits of bone that will in fact date the ground from which the material was taken; later in the video, we see larger amounts of mud, in which the hard remnants of animals are seen. If the short scenes of research are taken together, the film becomes an inspired attempt to read such activities as central to the process of finding, even of categorizing the act of scientific research as a major way of ordering the world, of making sense of our environment. What do Carmo is after, in her powerful filmic exposition of the scientific method, is not so much an expression of the physical specifics of research (although that is a meaningful part of the video) as a sense of tradition that would bind the anthropological effort to the image-making undertaking. The search in the mud for small evidence of animals is not unlike the artist’s search for an imagery adequate to the genuine intricacies associated with living in contemporary life--the key to both endeavors is a sense of history, no matter whether literal, as occurs in the video, or oblique, as intimated by the artist’s efforts to forge a new vision based on the past.
For many reasons, memory is crucial to do Carmo’s understanding of art and tradition. The scientific process attempts to quantify the past, while the artist’s psyche is driven to interpret it, yet the point of the artist’s work is that the two processes are not so different from each other as might seem at first. The viewer is also an important part of the equation, as he or she completes do Carmo’s task of presenting processes and images in time. Research may be a central part of the artist’s equation, whose elements are dug out from time much as an archeologist might unearth bits of culture from dust; however, the viewer’s interpretation of what is seen depends upon how the drawing is read--as a version of the Chinese landscape, as a seamless representation of the dinosaur, or as a comment on the nature of creativity itself, namely, the representation of something just barely visible in the imaginative landscape, in which mark making becomes a trope aimed at demonstrating the importance of the effort--searching the mud, marking the paper--in a larger quest for meaningfulness in the postmodern landscape. do Carmo’s gift to us is that she refuses to align herself with any single interpretation in particular, in part because she knows that the constraints of a single reading do not do justice to the complexity of her task.
The dinosaurs in the series first read as mountainous landscapes hidden by mists; a more careful look shows that the forms are dragon’s heads and long teeth, portrayed with a subtlety and delicacy that belies the ferocity of the real-life dragons do Carmo is portraying. The artist just barely portrays the forms with an orange pen; she demands that we not only casually see the imagery but also study it for the sake of the meaning it makes upon closer scrutiny. That the images reaches toward invisibility is central to Carmo’s esthetic because absence is as important to her as the presence of form. Drawing is not only a matter of imposing form on the page; it also concerns the experience of absence or emptiness, which the artist presents as though her structures were conforming to a nearly Zen investigation of what is no longer there. That the dinosaur drawings conform to another genre, their seeming appearance as Chinese landscape, complicates do Carmo’s rhetoric, wherein the given is treated as a multiple reality. The artist’s interest in forms of the real is available to her audience in a process of becoming that implies a belief in more than one reality; this gives do Carmo her interest in an imagery that may be applied to more than one notion of being. The complications bring out the idea of drawing as a phase of creativity; understood in its largest manifestation, drawing possesses a realism that implicates or includes its absence or anti-self. As a result the forms, which are literally taken from a child’s natural history book, participate in their own undoing.
do Carmo’s esthetic, then, involves its own negation--a stance whose remarkable sophistication is understood by its very absence as form. As an audience, we are invited not only to see, but also to imagine a reality whose presence is implied as much as it is publicly stated. The video convinces us of the parallel between the objectivity of science and the subjectivity of art, just as the drawings hover delicately between absence and existence; both the video and the drawings wait for completion on the part of their viewer, who internalizes the material he or she sees in a process that imitates the creativity of the artist herself. As a result, meaning is generated within the triangle of the artist relating the work to her audience, in a way that reads creativity quite democratically--as one form of information among others. This is why do Carmo spends her time filming the working paleontologist; she sees his activities as parallel to her own. Both do Carmo and the paleontologist are archeologists of time, even though the time of the mud and teeth is literal and the time of the imagined dinosaurs is figurative or metaphorical. Both activities insist on an inner integrity, through which statements about the past may be made. The dinosaurs are icons of patience, relating brilliantly to the slow, methodical work of the scientist in the film.
do Carmo is unusual, even remarkable as an art artist because she insists on so much: the ability of her drawings to function as landscape and creature, the ability of her film to serve as a point of creative representation. Her largest theme is the meaningfulness of creativity, which she extends to include much more than what we usually associate with such a concept. For all her art’s complexity, a simple reading, based upon democratic impulse, is capable of being just to what she does. It is an interpretation that calls attention to the meaning of observant activity: an awareness of the call of the real in actions that serve as metaphors for ways of living in the world. Consequently, do Carmo’s demand that we read her art in all its intricacy becomes in its own way a request that we suspend our judgment in favor of more sophisticated awareness--of absence, of the deeply metaphorical nature of our own actions. Drawing becomes the stand-in for creativity, such that it becomes its own reality. The play of form, based as it is upon absence and archeological awareness, is saved for its expression in, of all places, a natural history museum, where memory treats all manner of action and object as material for study. do Carmo is as much a paleontologist studying meaning as she is an artist making things, and it is this extra awareness that makes us respect her essentially allegorical impulse as an important, indeed a central, view of the creative act. She intends a complexity best regarded as an imaginative treatment of the imagination, in which the theoretical implications of her art are as important as the art itself.
Jonathan Goodman
Jonathan Goodman is a poet, teacher, and writer specializing in contemporary art. Alexandra do Carmo was a student of his at Pratt Institute.
__________________________________________
2. Alexandra do Carmo: Dinosaur Drawings
By Robert Knafo
What does it mean to construct the image of the head of tyrannosaurus rex out of a thousand or more marks of a very fine orange pen, as if making a huge edifice out of so many exponentially smaller building blocks? What does it mean that these images of a dinosaur head are, at first sight, actually unrecognizable…and seemingly something else? What is this? one is likely to wonder initially: a landscape? Are these not hills and valleys, and, ah, mist, perhaps?
And then comes the moment: Of course. There are the famous ferocious teeth, there are the cold reptilian eyes, there is the now universally recognizable, monstrously bumpy head—there is the iconic ancient monster, known from a million encyclopedia and magazine reproductions, from Jurassic Park I and II, from the grammar-school trips to the Museum of Natural History. (The source image, the head of a tyrannosaurus rex in profile, is from a children’s book the artist found in a bookstore.) But recognizing the nature of these images is likely to take some time…and what does that mean? What does it mean to fail to “see the forest for the trees,” as the expression goes, to lose sight of the whole in the proliferation of a thousand or more constituent parts? What does it mean that in encountering these images—or at least, the first such image— we are (or so we are able to realize retrospectively) engaged in a deliberate, intended, process of deferral, in which the resolution of ambiguity that fundamentally underlies, indeed defines, the process of seeing, of “recognition,’ is placed in momentary suspension? (This process of reduction of visual ambiguity that we handily call “seeing” has a correlative to a concept in information theory, and may at bottom amount to the same thing. The British scientist Richard Dawkins explains: “An informative statement is one that tells you something you didn't know before. The information content of a statement is measured as reduction in prior uncertainty. If I tell you that Evelyn is male, you immediately know a whole lot of things about him.”)
At the point that we have reduced our prior visual uncertainty and ascertained that these are dinosaur heads, we are faced with more tangential ambiguities: What does it mean that, of all the images in the massive universe of images, the artist Alexandra do Carmo has chosen this subject, a dinosaur, by which to launch us on this journey of cognition (and miscognition)? And what does it mean that the maker of these images has repeated this singular process of composition of a dinosaur head not once, or twice, or three times, but over a dozen times, and (one learns) intends to keep on going? (The series now comprises nearly 20 large-scale drawings).
All these questions have one thing in common, obviously: What does it mean-the interrogatory prelude to a fixing of meaning, the problematic of interpretation. The project of setting the conditions for an open-endedness of interpretation, and a closely related imperative, the subversion of any fixed or clear meaning, is at the heart of the work of Alexandra do Carmo. This has become, not incidentally, the point in much recent art. Parkett magazine editor Cay Sophie Rabinowitz organized a show this past summer (2004) at Apexart in New York that featured work by Efrat Shvily, Liliana Moro, Paul de Guzman and Wade Guyton. She wrote in the accompanying essay: “Each of the works in this show somehow interrupts convention, leaving unfulfilled the expectation that form can be decisively linked to meaning.” What I find interesting here is that some esthetic projects of disruption, or extreme rerouting, of that link between form and meaning can produce very different results: some art causes a kind of semiologic dyspepsia; it seems to actively frustrate comprehension, and appears arbitrarily, even perversely, impervious to interpretation. On the other hand, artistic stances and strategies such that of do Carmo, even as they disorient, can at the same time seem engaging, resonant, and challenging; instead of throwing up an impregnable wall, they throw open more than the usual number of doors and windows. (In addition to these drawings that demand the active engagement of the viewer, do Carmo produces installations - essentially parameters for participatory activity - in which viewers are also effectively invited to take part in producing the meaning of the work in question.)
While a committed member of the current ranks of subversives in the attack on the stability of meaning, do Carmo makes work that multiplies and compounds meaning rather than frustrates it. It does so by among other things, reflecting an ethos of generosity and inclusiveness toward the viewer; opening an epic engagement with a parallel investigative practice/methodology - which is paleontology - more on that below; and displaying a nuance, poeticism, and sensuality that can come from the trace of pen or pencil on paper. The dinosaur imagery - but more to the point, the way of creating the images of these extinct beasts - patiently, bit by bit, over a long time - instills in the work an implicit parallel to scientific investigation, and more precisely to paleontology. As do Carmo says about this parallel: “Paleontologists create moments...they find something, they take notes…one step leads them to the next step.” (All quotes in this text are from the author’s conversations with the artist).
By invoking the dinosaur, and the science by which we understand and literally and figuratively “see” the dinosaur, do Carmo’s images also invoke a key temporal dimension – the question, or rather the many questions, of time. This is something one first senses intuitively: one look at the drawings and we are aware of one kind of time, namely the substantial amount of time it must take to create these images - to effectively be producing meaning slowly and patiently out of minuscule component marks. It is a process, not accidentally, akin to the work of paleontologists, who, operating on their own axis of natural history, must also slowly make their way and produce meaning out of initially inconclusive bits. But, do Carmo emphasizes, “this is after all art, and not science.” It is important to note the difference within the similarities in these drawings; the way they are absolutely the same, in some ways, and at the same time uniquely, different, one from the other. This difference-in-sameness, or to put it more conventionally, these variations on a theme, reflects something very important to the artist, who understands drawing not as something with a predetermined goal, an image that looks like this or that, with this or that characteristic, but as “an open practice. There are millions of possibilities in the act of drawing. With pen and paper, and with the same image, you are still never doing the same thing.” In other words the quality of open-endedness in these works is to be found both in the artist’s practice and in the experience of the viewer.
But why, we may finally ask, this broad-front esthetic assault on meaning, in the work of this artist and others? In a brilliant essay on do Carmo’s work, published on the occasion of her exhibition of the dinosaur drawings at the Sala do Veado no Museu Nacional de Historia Natural em Lisboa (the Deer Room of the National Museum of natural History in Lisbon), in the summer-fall of 2004, the critic and poet John Goodman relates this open-endedness of meaning to the implementation of a principle of democratization in esthetic experience. I think he is absolutely right to discern that democratizing ethos in do Carmo’s project. But I would also point the finger at another pillar of contemporary western culture, which is global capitalism. It may seem far-fetched to invoke these vast social dynamics in the consideration of a set of drawings of dinosaurs; but here is the thesis in a nutshell. Let us grant that there are political and economic forces that work to favor certain esthetic developments. I would argue that such forces can be perceived in these particular works of do Carmo’s. They reflect the effect of both a democratizing, empowering impulse - a positive desire to shift the terms of esthetic experience toward an active and autonomous rather than a passive viewer. In doing so they also reflect, I think, a kind of repudiation; a reaction to an oppressive, disempowering force, namely globalized corporate power and its dominance of the visual domain. The quality of ambiguity, the rewarding of patient and active looking and interpretation, and a structuring of esthetic experience that favors an individual coming-to-awareness—all these qualities can be interpreted as a consequence of both a democratic impulse and a reactive and tacitly critical response to a contemporary visual regime in which the meaning of images is routinely reduced, simplified, over-determined, and compromised by a multiplicity of market, economic, consumerist, and corporate agendas. In this current empire of the image, artists like do Carmo are in effect finding ways to provide events of resistance and refuge, to establish a kind of temporary autonomy of meaning.
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3. “Looking for Fragments”
Publico
Luisa Soares de Oliveira
September 18, 2004
The exhibition begins with a video, entitled Wild M5. A scientist looks through a microscope at fragments of rodent teeth that will permit her date the layer of mud in which they were found. The activity of the scientist has little of the romantic aura that still surrounds her profession. With the help of tweezers, she separates minuscule fragments that she will wash and finally catalogue. Recognize, choose, wash, name and store: the diverse phases of the recollection of objects that precedes interpretation.
In another room, a series of drawings hanging side by side occupies the main wall of the Sala do Veado [The Deer Room]. The walls, raw and unpainted, and the lighting conditions of the room, lit only by windows looking out onto the Botanical Garden, do not facilitate the spectator’s appreciation. You detect reddish stains on the paper, and only with close attention and effort are forms distinguished. To your surprise, they are not the mountains, streams or rivers of Chinese painting as they first appear, but heads of dinosaurs, drawn with a red pen.
After a long period in the United States, this main exhibition in Portugal by Alexandra do Carmo affirms that the scientific and the artistic working process have more in common than one would suppose. The process of choosing objects among undifferentiated mud in the first case and the choice of forms between the infinity of motives that contemporary culture puts at your disposal in the second instance achieves diverse final results from common mental process.
Alexandra do Carmo chose the lab work of the paleontologist to establish a comparison that gives meaning to the exhibition. The paleontologist in his or her search for the prehistorical truth can only count on the fragments that time didn’t destroy. Here, with the study of rodents the lived in Serra de Aires 40 or 50 thousand years ago, the scientist hopes to contribute to the global vision of the habitat in that region during the epoch in question. If the scientist wants to know the truth, he knows that his work will never give him more than a fragment of it-- something in its complexity will always escape him. You can say from the paleontologist that the unsuccess is the reason for being professional.
From the artist on the contrary, the truth is the one she makes every day on the sheet of paper, on the canvas, on the computer chip. Here is where the fundamental difference between the artist and scientist resides. The fact is that for the first and by opposition to the second, the truth does not run away, but materializes in each work in each drawing in each line of dinosaur brain.
Therefore, it is indifferent that Alexandra do Carmo has been using a children’s book of science as a model for her drawing. It is not about the reconstruction of the true appearance of each animal, but the establishment of a distance between these two kinds of work, although the proximity is established.
