SAO PAULO.- Imagine an elephant in the middle of a room and everyone walking by without paying it any attention. This is the central idea of the installation that the British artist Stuart Brisley (1933) will mount for the first time in Brazil, at the Galeria Jaqueline Martins, in September. “The origin is from the English phrase, ‘elephant in the room’, used to refer to a situation when there is an evident problem or controversial topic but that everyone avoids. It’s when everyone knows it, but nobody speak of it,” explains Maya Balcioglu, who accompanies Stuart, documenting his performances.
Stuart Brisley, who came to the public’s attention in 1972 when he sat in a bath full of stagnant water for two weeks, will create a large-scale piece resembling a cage, scaled to the ground floor space of the gallery, which will set the bearings for the exhibition. The work is connected to what he presented at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1985. The difference is that on that occasion people could walk through the piece, which had dirty clothes inside it, and almost touch things they did not want to touch. “Stuart works very much on this idea that what is thrown away is not necessarily garbage,” explains the João Laia, the exhibition’s curator.
This time, the installation does not allow visitors to pass through it. It will be like a narrow cobbled floor, with metal meshes that allow one to look inside, occupying the whole room and a corridor dividing the space. “It will not be possible to enter it, but only to walk around it,” João explains. “Stuart discusses the redefinition of the space and the way in which people interact with it. This reconfiguration is what will engage the work and make one reflect on the fact that people are not imprisoned inside the work, but rather from the outside as they cannot get in,” he concludes.
From a political perspective, always present in the artist’s works, the discussion revolves around the suspension that the work proposes. “The question is: Are you going to face it or not? If not, what will happen? It might be seen as an echo of what is happening here in Brazil. A country in suspension. The population’s participation or lack of it in what is happening will have very important consequences,” says João. The artist also became well known for his works in the 1960s, working with factory workers in English cities and for his ability to formalize political questions in his installations.
The exhibition will also bring publications, books, two videos entitled Next Door (the missing text) and Before the Mast, and a series of photographs of the artist’s works.
Stuart Brisley took part in the Biennial and, only in 2015, 30 years later, in another collective exhibition. I believe it’s a huge responsibility to host at the gallery Brisley’s first individual exhibition in Brazil. This will expand people’s knowledge of his work to beyond performance, the media for which he is generally associated with and has dominated since the 1960s; named as the ‘father of performance’ by many. The critical tone of his work, both politically and socially, fits as an underlying message to the dominant system, which I believe can provoke the public at the present time in our country,” states Jaqueline Martins, who planned the exhibition.
In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Gramschi’s analysis represents a condition of tensed-time, a live proposal. It is about the current time, the present time. Time of performance, time of the present situation and of the participants themselves.
