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on a sticker. As the liquid disappears from the bottle, the message (Yankees go home!) associated with the content also disappears, swallowed up by the transparency of the glass. The bottle is now ready to be reintroduced into the distribution system, and is now a carrier of the subversive message-virus. An essential feature of Cildo Meireles’s work is its capacity to convert action into intervention: the concept of strategy is linked to action and intervention at various levels. Inserçôes em circuitos ideológicos can and should be defined as an anti-ready made: Meireles does not appropriate the fetish-object of the Coca-Cola bottle, the Warhol emblem of capitalist consumption, but rather the market mechanisms. It is precisely these mechanisms, those which cause the bottle-containers to circulate from the producer to the consumer and back to the point of departure for recycling and subsequent re-circulation after refilling, which in the end, are transformed into a new kind of immaterial and ideological ready-made. However, when the squandering of consumption swamped the market with nonreturnable glass and plastic bottles, such a strategy was no longer viable, becoming an historical condition impossible to make into a fetish, contrary to what happened with Duchamp’s bottle drier. A similar direction is evident in the works which used money or banknotes as their support. Belonging to Inserçôes em circuitos ideológicos, the Cédula project comprises the introduction, through tampons, of disturbing messages which are politically or socially subversive, onto legal tender banknotes, messages which are of course circulated through everyday payments. In The Money Tree (1969), the artist explores the differences in the use of value and exchange value of a wad of banknotes, and in Zero Cruceiro / Zero centavo / Zero dollar (1974-78), produces a fictitious issue of paper money almost exactly the same as that of legal tender, but with ironic differences in detail (such as the caricature of Uncle Sam on the dollar bill worth 0). In the
Oblivion, 1987-89. Camping tent, American Countries bills, bones, candles, charcoal , audio. 315 x 157 in. Artist’s collection.
case of the bill worth 0 cruzeiro, the effigy of a patriotic hero is replaced by the image of a native from the Amazon, with a patient from a psychiatric hospital on the other side. Those who have been forgotten in a system of exchange rates become the protagonists of their zero value, i.e. their lack of any value, and their presence in turn claims their social and political existence. In the Eureka / Blindhotland (197075) project, which proposes a radical analysis of the relationship between time and space in terms of the equivocal relationship between density and volume, space is tactile, sonorous,
physical, and eminently mental. It is not a space for perceiving only with the senses, but with concepts – but once again, not in the style of the North American conceptualists, but in a more sensual manner. The same is true of the concept of space and density in Glove trotter (1991), in which a steel net encloses balls of different sizes and colors. Although at times Meireles’s work seems to be excessively intellectualizing, the door is always left open to the “possibility for poetic materialization”. It offers a kind of space for withdrawal, a place for contemplation and above all, for reflection and questioning.
NOTES 1. Wilson Coutinho, A estratégia de Cildo Meireles. 2. Catherine David, “Da adversidad e vivemos”, in the catalogue of the exhibition Tunga Lezarts / Cildo Meireles Through, Kunststichting - Kanaal - Art Foundation, Kortrijk, 1989. 3. In this sense Carlos Basualdo sees the Latin American avant-garde and modernity as a living project within a constant process of evolution. See Carlos Basualdo, “Bodywise”, in Art from Brazil in New York, 1995, exhibition catalogue. 4. Catherine David, op.cit. 5. Guy Brett, “Cildo Meireles”, in Tunga / Cildo Meireles exhibition catalogue, op.cit. 6. Helio Oiticica, Anotaçôes sobre o Parangolé, published by the artist on the occasion of the exhibition Opiniâo 65, Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, 1965, and reproduced as an abstract in the catalogue of the traveling exhibition Hélio Oiticica, 1992-94. Spanish edition Fundació Antoni Tapies, Barcelona, 1994. Translation: Brian Mallet SANTIAGO OLMO Spanish art critic and historian, based in Madrid.