Vista de sala de la exposición. Cildo Meireles, 2013

Interview to Cildo Meireles

Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro

miércoles 19 junio 2013
4:59
Installation
Criticism
Visuality
Latin América
Space
Conceptual Art
Sculpture

Cildo Meireles’ work is one full of contrasts, ranging from installation to action, flowing with ease through different fields like drawing, which he used with fineness and metric precision at the beginning of his career; or large installations, where, in recent years, the concepts and ideological body of his artistic production converge. The contrasts find their coherence in the materials, in the proportions and in the game between the individual and the crowd, and their equivalent between the object and its successive multiplication until it creates a volume both symbolic and loaded with meaning.

The exhibition at the Palacio de Velázquez gathers together part of his artistic production, from the beginnings of the 60’s up to today, showing the audience the complexity of Meireles’ artistic production.

The artist himself has shared with the Museo Reina Sofía Radio some reflections on his work, from which it is inferred not only the ideas that led him to produce some of his most representative works, as Insertions into Ideological Circuits, but the ones still present today in his thinking and artistic stance in works with a political overtone such as Amerikkka, which bring us closer to critical stances from a strong physical and aesthetic presence.

Production

María Andueza

License
Creative Commons by-nc-sa 4.0

Interview to Cildo Meireles

Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro

Cildo Meireles.  From May 24 to September 29, 2013.

"My job is the production, distribution and control of information. That is what it is about."

1970, Insertions into Ideological Circuits

I never liked this thing of the propagandistic art. It clearly had to have a moment of continuance, but I also wanted it to have some efficiency, to be something that could help the distribution of information that was, at that time, utterly controlled.

The project Insertions into Ideological Circuits is about the medium and the mode. The medium is always a circuit and the mode is an insertion, but that happens in painting, engraving… it does not matter what we show you, it is always an insertion in a medium.

The work is an attempt to show a circuit which does not have such an easy control. The radio, the papers, the TV… they all have a really wide audience, but at the same time they are easily controllable. What I sought was a kind of situation of freedom for the individual. In some way, I was interested in that, but also in other formal and structural things such as responsibility ¬– no one was going to sign the list of people who were dead or tortured at that time. The issue of anonymity, which was very important and closely related to responsibility, the issue of scale, too – at that time I was interested in how the solitary individual could come closer to a very big thing.

Installations
Large scale pieces were a bit like the opposite of insertions, in the sense that they were made for one person at a time, for as long as required, conveying also a sense of isolation.

In Brazil, we had to create our own… because we did not have a reference. In the 50’s, mostly with the Neo-Concretists, we began to set up a singularity in this area. One of the points of singularity was multisensoriality. It was very important placing sight at the same level as the rest of the senses, and it is characteristic to the Brazilian production in the 50’s.

I never liked the term ‘visual arts’, as it was used in America, because I thought it would not reflect the complexity of art profession in Brazil, with sound works, etc. I have always preferred to use the term ‘plastic arts’, because I think it is closer to this practice.