Defining the Politics of Perception

Visitors to Clido Meireles' first North American retrospective bend iron with their eyes. In Meireles' exhibition at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art (his only U.S. venue), he presents the viewer with an open box containing two iron bars, one straight and one curved. The title of the work tells us they are "To be Bent with the Eyes." Beneath the bars, a graph paper background adds pseudo-scientific validity to the notion that over time our vision will exert some kind of material force on the art object. Here Meireles makes us his collaborator, and we can only wonder how many viewers it will take until the bars curl completely and break through their box.

"To Be Bent with the Eyes" (1970) is just one of the many pieces in the ICA's thoughtfully installed show which explicitly explore the viewer's relationship to the work of art by confounding normal perception. One of Brazil's most important contemporary artists, Meireles is often associated with Conceptual Art, which engages the viewer with an idea rather than an actual art object. Meireles, like the most famous Conceptual artists, including Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner, gained critical acclaim in the 1970s. Through the medium of language, Kosuth and Weiner examine such issues as the commodification of the art object as well as the relationship between art's visual and intellectual impact.

Yet Meireles' use of specific materials and their symbolic associations allies him more closely with the German artist Joseph Beuys than with his American contemporaries. Although he clearly shows an interest in their theoretical concerns, his work depends on the viewer's physical experience of the actual work. For example, the show's most arresting installation, "Volatile," was conceived in 1980 but not executed until 1994, and I'm sure it didn't work on paper.

The installation consists of an anteroom where visitors take off their shoes and socks and a U-shaped main room filled with six tons of talcum powder. A single candle placed around the corner from the entrance provides the only light in the dark, dusty chamber, which is filled with the bitter smell of natural gas. Although the work's title warns of an impending explosion, made plausible given the smell, exposed flame and ankle-deep powder covering the floor, the piece seems unable to provoke anxiety in its visitors. It's just too sexy.

Even though the circle of footprints in the talc around the candle may evoke visions of eerie nocturnal rituals, the sheer physical pleasure of padding over the silky tracks induces giggles rather than fear. As we leave our traces around the room, Meireles appeals to all of our senses but taste. Yet it is somehow impossible to find an underlying grammar to order our perceptions. Although his materials seem related to combustion (the talc could double as gunpowder or ash), they are somehow irreconcilable. Candles don't smell like gas and neither they nor pure gas fires produce ash. Where is the wood, or the warm smell of gunpowder? In the end, Meireles leaves us not with easy equivalencies, but heightened perception through the uncanny juxtaposition of carefully chosen stimuli.

In another witty piece, "Blind Mirror" (1970), Meireles muddles the relationship between vision and touch. The work is a white hospital mirror covered with thick, sticky caulking. In theory, a blind person could make an impression of his face in the mirror, and then "look" at himself through touch. On first viewing the work this explanation seems undermined by a blind person's simple ability to touch his own face. Why worry about getting your eyebrows and facial hair stuck in an uncomfortable mirror? But then at the bottom of the frame we notice a key to the piece, its title embossed in backwards letters, like the "mirror writing" in Da Vinci's notebook. "Blind Mirror" enables a blind subject to experience the alterity and reversal of a normal glass mirror. The body is "seen" outside itself and reversed, not from left to right, but from positive form to impression.

While they also demand viewer participation, Meireles' installation "Mission/Missions (How to build cathedrals)" (1987) and his series "Insertion into Ideological Circuits" (1970) are his most overtly political works. In "Mission," which was on display at Harvard's Carpenter Center until March 2, Meireles created an environment with a floor covered by 600,000 pennies beneath a ceiling of 2,000 bones. In the center of the room, a column of Catholic hosts connects the bones and pennies, setting off a chain of associations including colonial exploitation, charity, death and even cannibalism. In his "Insertion" series, Meireles stamped slogans and questions like "Yankee go home" or "What is the place of the work of art?" on currency and Coke bottles which were than reinserted into circulation. Since they depend so heavily on their actual use, these works are unfortunately as difficult to experience in the museum as "Volatile" would be on paper. But we can still imagine the surprise of being handed a "Yankee go home bill" as change in a Brazilian McDonalds.

In the ICA's well-produced orientation video, Meireles likens the place of a Latin-American contemporary artist to the spectator at the back of a movie theater, watching the film and the audience reacting in front of him. So while he and other Latin-American artists like Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica may have had their eyes on the art world, few could see them in the back row. Yet as his retrospective proves, he has consistently engaged, and sometimes foreseen, the same theoretical issues and artistic strategies of his better-known international counterparts. His installations of room corners, whose walls and base boards seem to seep into the floors, play with spatial perception in a way similar to the work of German artist Blinky Palermo. Mysteriously prescient, his stamped "Insertion" slogans even anticipate Jenny Holzer's "Truisms," which would begin to appear on envelopes and T-shirts nearly 10 years after Meireles' last Coke bottle was recycled. Finally, the ICA's excellent show welcomes Cildo Meireles to the front of the theater.