pérez-

oramas

león ferrari and mira schendel

tangled alphabets

tangled alphabets
león ferrari and mira schendel
series of works on paper, developing a practice in which organic,
gestural forms can appear both as abstractions and as explora-
tions of the codes of writing, whether legible or indecipherable.
Deeply concerned with the ethical role of the artist, Ferrari later
fused his avant-garde formal interests with a more political, con-
frontational kind of art. Still fully active in Argentina’s contempo-
León Ferrari and Mira Schendel are among the most significant rary-art scene, he lives in Buenos Aires and won the Leone d’oro
Latin American artists of the twentieth century. Living respec- at the Venice Biennale of 2007.
tively in Argentina and Brazil, both began to make art in the 1950s Born in Zurich in 1919, Schendel moved with her family to
and hit their stride in the early 1960s, maturing during a period Italy while still an infant. In 1936 she entered a Milan university to
when not only artists but philosophers and indeed a broad range study philosophy, but three years later, facing the threat of anti-
of intellectuals were developing a fascination with language. Semitic persecution, she fled into exile, and once the war was
Interested equally in speech and the written word, Ferrari and over she left Europe for Brazil. It was there that she began to make
Schendel made language their subject matter. In this they may art, producing first ceramics, then painting, and, beginning in the
seem to resemble the Conceptual artists, their contemporaries in 1960s, a volume of work based on the use of Japanese paper
North America and Europe, but their work differs fundamentally but involving uncategorizable, often self-invented methods. Like
from the generally accepted canon of Conceptual art in using Ferrari, Schendel was highly sensitive to the ethics of artmaking,
language not as a transparent vehicle of ideas but as a material, and approached art as the most radical possible expression of
an almost physical medium to shape and mold. the human condition. She continued to experiment with forms
Ferrari was born in Argentina in 1920. He has worked in and materials until her death, in São Paulo in 1988.
a wide range of art forms and mediums, from sculpture, paint- Written and conceived by Luis Pérez-Oramas, The Estrellita
ing, drawing, and assemblage to film, collage, mail art, poetry, Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art at The Museum of Modern
and sound. While living temporarily in Italy in the 1950s, he made Art, León Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets presents
ceramic sculptures stylistically connected to the European new insights into these artists’ visual deconstructions of language
abstraction of the time. On returning to Argentina, he produced and examines the connections and collisions among visual art, the
sculptural works of metal wires and rods before beginning a word, and the social world.
ISBN: 978-0-87070-750-6

MoMA
león ferrari and mira schendel
luis pérez-oramas

león ferrari and mira schendel

tangled alphabets

with essays by andrea giunta

and rodrigo naves

The Museum of Modern Art

New York
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Tangled Alphabets: © 2009 The Museum of Modern Art, New York Contents
León Ferrari and Mira Schendel, organized by Luis Pérez-Oramas, Copyright credits for certain illustrations are cited on p. 199. All rights
The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art, The Museum reserved Foreword 7
of Modern Art, April 5 through June 15, 2009 Acknowledgments 8
Luis Pérez-Oramas’s essay was translated from the Spanish by
The exhibition is made possible by Agnes Gund, The International Kristina Cordero. Andrea Giunta’s essay was translated from the León Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets 12
Council of The Museum of Modern Art, and Estrellita B. Brodsky. Spanish by Elise Nussbaum. Rodrigo Naves’s essay was translated Luis Pérez-Oramas
from the Portuguese by Michael Reade. Mira Schendel’s writings in
Generous support is provided by Beatriz and Andrés von Buch, The that essay were translated from the Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers. Léon Ferrari: A Language Rhapsody 46
Bruce T. Halle Family Foundation, and Fundación Cisneros/Colección Andrea Giunta
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros with additional funding from Clarissa Distributed in the United States and Canada by D.A.P./Distributed
Alcock Bronfman, Andrea and José Olympio da Veiga Pereira, Leopoldo Art Publishers, 155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd floor, New York, New York 10013 Mira Schendel: The World as Generosity 58
Rodés and Ainhoa Grandes, Mrs. Yvonne Dadoo de Lewis, Mr. and (www.artbook.com) Rodrigo Naves
Mrs. Guillermo Cisneros, TEN Arquitectos/Enrique Norten, and Mr. and Distributed outside the United States and Canada (except Brazil)
Mrs. Nicholas Griffin, Eva Luisa Griffin, and Tomás Orinoco Griffin. by Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181 High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX Plates 70
United Kingdom (www.thamesandhudson.com) Chronology 169
This publication has been prepared with the assistance and support Distributed in Brazil by Cosac Naify Selected Bibliography 184
of Mr. Charles Cosac and Mr. Michael Naify. Index of Plates 196
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009922634
Cosac Naify Publishing House acknowledge the cooperation received ISBN: 978-0-87070-750-6 Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art 200
from Mrs. Ada Schendel, Mr. André Millan, and Mr. Carlos Jereissati
Filho, to whom they wish to express their gratitude. Front cover
Left: León Ferrari. Torre de Babel (Tower of Babel; detail). 1964
Produced by the Department of Publications Stainless steel, bronze, and copper, 6' 6 3/4" x 31 1/2" (200 x 80 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York Lent by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery 2008. See plate 72
Right: Mira Schendel. Untitled (detail) from the series Objetos gráficos
Edited by David Frankel (Graphic objects). 1973
Designed by Amanda Washburn Transfer type on thin Japanese paper between transparent acrylic
Production by Christina Grillo sheets, 22 x 22 x 3/8" (55.9 x 55.9 x 1 cm)
Printed and bound by Conti Tipocolor, s.p.a., Florence, Italy Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. See plate 93

This book is typeset in Chalet and Century Schoolbook. Back cover

The paper is 170 gsm Luxosamt Offset León Ferrari, late 1960s; and Mira Schendel, São Paulo, 1980s

Published by The Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53 Street, New York, Frontispiece

New York 10019 (www.moma.org) and Cosac Naify, rua General Jardim, León Ferrari, Galeria Levi, Milan, 1962; and Mira Schendel with a
770, São Paulo, Brazil, 01223-010 (www.cosacnaify.com.br) Droguinha, São Paulo, 1980s

Printed in Italy
foreword
7

The Museum of Modern Art has a history of conceiving comparative their work together in New York and in Europe, we bring to bear on
retrospectives, exhibitions exploring parallels and divergences among them an international perspective that transcends a purely national
two or more artists. Following one of the original legacies of modernity, understanding and will no doubt crucially inflect our understanding of
the understanding that symbolic forms only produce meaning through Western modern art.
their differences, we have embraced this curatorial model from our open- We are enormously grateful to Ferrari and to the Schendel
ing in 1929, with a show of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, and Gauguin, to estate, as well as to the collectors and institutions lending works for
the recent Matisse Picasso of 2004. Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and the exhibition. A project this complex demands the collaboration of a
Mira Schendel extends this curatorial and philosophical tradition. great number of people and we are grateful to the writers, curators,
Tangled Alphabets focuses on two outstanding artists whose and other members of the Argentine and Brazilian art worlds who have
work is too little known in North America and Europe. The first U.S. contributed to the exhibition’s materialization. The excellence and cre-
retrospective to pair León Ferrari, from Argentina, and the late Mira ativity of the Museum’s own staff is crucial to the success of all our
Schendel, who was based in Brazil, it provides a consistent analogical projects, and Luis Pérez-Oramas, The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin
survey of their contribution to contemporary art and, we feel, a ground- American Art, and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Curatorial Assistant
breaking moment of awakening to the quality and significance of their in the Department of Drawings, have worked tirelessly on every detail
work. The Museum’s commitment to Latin American art of course goes of this exhibition from inception to realization. We are deeply grateful
back many years, and today more than ever we are committed to to Agnes Gund, The International Council of The Museum of Modern
bringing attention to overlooked chapters of modern art history and to Art, Estrellita Brodsky, Beatriz and Andrés von Buch, The Bruce T. Halle
shaping curatorial initiatives through an awareness of the complexity Family Foundation, Clarissa Alcock Bronfman, Andrea and José Olympio
of our present world. da Veiga Pereira, Leopoldo Rodés and Ainhoa Grandes, Mrs. Yvonne
Art is a history of diaspora, of the relocation, assimilation, and Dadoo de Lewis, Mr. and Mrs. Guillermo Cisneros, TEN Arquitectos/
transformation of forms, ideas, practices, and intellectual movements. Enrique Norten, and Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Griffin, Eva Luisa Griffin, and
Ferrari, the Argentine son of an Italian immigrant, and Schendel, a Tomás Orinoco Griffin for their enthusiasm and support for this exhibi-
Swiss/Italian who emigrated to Brazil, have tirelessly addressed visual tion and its catalogue. We warmly thank Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
art as capable of positing the most radical and demanding existential and the Fundación Cisneros for important funding of the exhibition, and
questions. At a time when a good deal of Western art was linguisti- Patty for her tireless efforts to raise awareness and support not only for
cally based, they addressed language as if there were no difference this presentation but for all Latin American art. The Brazilian publishers
between signs, codes, words, and any other visual form. Instead of Cosac Naify were extremely generous and helpful with the production
using language as a substitute for the art object, they produced art of the catalogue, and this assistance is greatly appreciated.
objects that made language a visual subject. Both artists knew hard-
ship and tragedy; Schendel, who came from a Jewish family, became a Glenn D. Lowry
refugee fleeing the Nazis during World War II, and Ferrari had agonizing Director, The Museum of Modern Art
experience of the Argentine junta’s “dirty war” of the 1970s and ’80s, to
the point where he was forced into exile. Both made art a form of sur-
vival, conceiving original techniques for producing it and opening up
new repertories for abstraction and language-based work. Their contri-
bution has been transformative in their own countries, but in exhibiting
acknowledgments
9

I remember an early afternoon in the late 1990s in São Paulo, when including her father and aunt, Knut and Erika Schendel, and her chil- Hector Babenco; Julie Belfer and Felipe Chaimovich, Museu de Arte The observations of friends such as Luis Camnitzer, Nicolas Guagnini,
I first saw a retrospective of works by Mira Schendel. I had barely seen dren João, Nina, and Max Schendel. Max also contributed to the book Moderno de São Paulo; Jones Bergamin; Peter and Flavio Cohn; Israel Jorge Macchi, Gabriela Rangel, Eduardo Stúpia, and Beto de Volder
this magnificent, compelling art before, and I felt privileged to share my as one of our main photographers in Brazil. I thank Claudia Vendramini Furmanovich; Esther and Edward Galvão; Carmela Gross; Afonso were instrumental as I was building my personal cartography of both
astonishment with Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Paulo Herkenhoff. Reis and André Millan, dear friends and esteemed colleagues. André, Hennel and Cristina Sá; Antonio Hermann; Ana Maria Hoffman and Paulo artists’ work.
I could not have asked for a higher blessing than being there with an exceptional gallerist, gave us an incredible amount of help; he was Roberto Barbosa, Museo de Arte Contemporâneo, Universidade de In the United States and abroad, we have depended on the
Patty, who really brought me to Latin American art and introduced me a constant guide and advisor, and I am deeply grateful for his dedi- São Paulo; Paulo and Marta Kuczynski; Eduardo Leme; Francisco Leite; assistance of a wonderful group of collectors and gallerists: Anton
to friends and guides like Paulo. I am and will forever be grateful to cation to this wonderful project. We could not have succeeded with- James Lisboa; Heitor Martins and Fernanda Feitosa; Marli Matsumoto; and Victoria Apostolatos, Francisco and Pia Arevalo, Pablo and María
them both. out his devoted partners and staff—Socorro de Andrade Lima, Sophia Andrea and José Olympio Pereira; Cesare Rivetti; Paulo and Helene Cristina Henning, Ernesto and Cecilia Poma, and Cecilia de Torres. I have
As fortune had it, that first encounter led me to friendships that Whately, Adriana M. de Brito, and Amanda Rodrigues Alves—who gave Mendes da Rocha; Nara and Daniel Roesler; Clara Sancovsky; Jayme been privileged in the friendship and intellectual support of Edward
paved my path toward the work of Schendel and León Ferrari. These us unconditional support. I was also privileged to share many hours Vargas da Silva; Susana and Ricardo Steinbruch; Eduardo and Alberto Sullivan, Dean of Humanities at New York University, whose unparal-
amis de grande profondeur are many, and no words can express my of work and talk with León in his Buenos Aires studio. The exhibition Tassinari; and Martin Wurzmann. Special gratitude goes to the pub- leled generosity and enthusiasm have given me strength. Mari Carmen
gratitude to them. I would first like to thank Glenn D. Lowry, Director of could not have taken place without the tireless help and devotion that lisher Charles Cosac and to the team of professionals working with him Ramírez, Worham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine
the Museum, whose continuing enthusiasm for both artists has been his family, assistants, and friends demonstrated along the way, in par- at the publishing company Cosac Naify, particularly Augusto Massi and Arts, Houston, has shared insights and knowledge on both artists.
the touchstone of this project; Gary Garrels, former Robert Lehman ticular Julieta Zamorano, Marcela Roberts, Andrea Wain, and Juan José Cassiano Machado. Their generosity, as well as that of Charles Cosac Erika Franek, Registrar at the same museum, and Catherine Clement,
Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings, who inspired me to think of Firpo (Yaya). I am also grateful to León’s family in São Paulo, including and Michael Naify, has made a transformative difference in this book. Registrar at Tate Modern, London, have been instrumental in expedit-
Schendel and Ferrari as acquisition and exhibition priorities here; John Pablo Ferrari, Anna Ferrari, and Patricia Rousseaux, for receiving us in In the Argentine art world too we have met a seemingly unlim- ing key loans. I am grateful to the staff of the Fundación Cisneros,
Elderfield, former Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting their homes. ited welcome. I would first like to thank Eduardo Costantini, President including Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Director; Guillermo Ovalle, Collection
and Sculpture, for whose wise and inspirational advice I will always be There are a number of studies of Schendel, including Sonia of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (malba), for his Manager; and Ileen Kohn, Projects Manager, all of whom have given
grateful; Jay Levenson, Director of the Museum’s International Program, Salzstein’s exhibition catalogue No vazio do mundo, which remains a ongoing support. Marcelo Pacheco, Chief Curator of malba, embraced us incredible assistance and support. Amelia Sosa-Zimerman, Senior
with whom I first visited Ferrari’s Buenos Aires studio along with Victoria major reference. Geraldo Souza Dias’s research on the artist is the most the idea of this parallel retrospective of Ferrari and Schendel early Associate, Programs and Communications, at the Fundación Cisneros
Noorthoorn, who pointed out the almost total absence of Ferrari’s work comprehensive to date; I was fortunate to have access to both his doc- on, and his friendly advice, intellectual input, and concrete help have has given us unconditional assistance, particularly in the fundraising
in the Museum’s collection at the time; Kathy Halbreich, the Museum’s toral dissertation and his forthcoming book, Mira Schendel. Do espiritual been invaluable. I am also grateful to his assistant, Victoria Giraudo, aspect of the project. Museum Trustees such as Kathy Fuld, Mimi Haas,
Associate Director and an ardently supportive advocate of the global à corporeidade, which will be published later this year by Cosac Naify and to Cintia Mezza, Registrar, who were always ready to answer our Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis, and Emily Pulitzer have long supported
cause behind this exhibition; and Guy Brett, whose brilliant insights have and will certainly prove a fundamental scholarly tool. My knowledge of questions. Many Argentine intellectuals, critics, and artists have shared the work of both Schendel and Ferrari. I am especially grateful to the
been instrumental in the constitution of my own view of Schendel’s art Schendel, and this exhibition and catalogue, are permanently indebted with me their knowledge of Ferrari’s work and life. Andrea Giunta, an sponsors of this exhibition: Agnes Gund, MoMA’s International Council,
and whose patience and understanding were critical in accomplishing to Souza Dias. The Brazilian historian and art critic Rodrigo Naves pro- exceptional art historian and one of the most devoted and trustworthy Daniel and Estrellita B. Brodsky, and Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and
major acquisitions of her works at the Museum. vided vital input on Schendel’s life and work, and collaborated further by sources of intelligence on Ferrari’s work, contributed an essay to this the Fundación Cisneros, tireless allies in MoMA’s Latin American initia-
The conception, production, and realization of a project like this writing an essay for this catalogue. I am grateful to Rodrigo for introduc- book. Luis Felipe Noé, a major artist and an intimate friend of Ferrari’s, tives, who have continuously supported all of our endeavors involv-
one are a labor of many, and the professional collegiality and human ing me to Paulo Celso and his son, Fernando Vilela, both of whom shared generously shared time, memories, and information. Collectors, gal- ing Latin American art; Beatriz and Andrés von Buch; Bruce and Diane
generosity of the numerous contributors to the creation of this publi- intimate information about Schendel’s friendships with Dominican friars lerists, and art lovers such as Orly Benzacar, Ruben Cherñajovsky, Halle, exceptional collectors of Latin American art; and Clarissa Alcock
cation and the exhibition it accompanies have been an immense privi- in São Paulo in the early 1970s. Debbie Frydman and Mariela Rossi, Mauro and Luz Herlitzka, Ignacio Bronfman, Andrea and José Olympio da Veiga Pereira, Leopoldo
lege. I am forever indebted to Ada Schendel, Schendel’s daughter, and Many members of the Brazilian art world have come to our Liprandi, Luisa Pedrousa and Gianni Campochiari, Perla Rotzait, and Rodés and Ainhoa Grandes, Mrs. Yvonne Dadoo de Lewis, Mr. and Mrs.
to León and Alicia Ferrari, all major lenders to the exhibition. Both Ada rescue with priceless advice for which I am forever thankful: the col- the staff of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and of the Museu Sívori Guillermo Cisneros, TEN Arquitectos/Enrique Norten, and Mr. and Mrs.
and León have been generous in sharing their time and their memories lectors Gilberto Chateaubriand and Adolpho Leirner, good friends of were invaluable guides. Photographers in both Argentina and Brazil Nicholas Griffin, Eva Luisa Griffin, and Tomás Orinoco Griffin.
with me, and have been invaluable to the entire process of this exhi- the Museum; Ricard Akagawa; Aracy Amaral; Marcelo Araújo, Director, did an amazing job of capturing the artists’ works: Vera Albuquerque, A challenging curatorial and intellectual project like this one
bition from the start. I have shared many moments with Ada’s family, Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo; Raquel Arnaud and Yannick Carvalho; David Clarke, Romulo and Nicole Fialdini, and Adrían Rocha Novoa. can only be achieved within the framework of a unique, supportive,
10 11

demanding institution, and what has made Tangled Alphabets: León Management System team of Ian Eckert, Jeri Moxley, Kristen Shirts, outstanding skills in its beautiful and elegant design. She was always Curator; Curatorial Assistants Esther Adler, Maura Lynch, and Samantha
Ferrari and Mira Schendel possible is The Museum of Modern Art. This and, in the past, Eliza Sparacino and Susanna Ivy worked closely with open to our ideas and has materialized them beautifully. Outside the Friedman; Preparators David Moreno, Mary Saunders, and Eleanor
institution comprises a multitude of bodies and souls, who have given us in maintaining our checklist and responding to our endless queries. Museum, Kristina Cordero, Clifford Landers, Elise Nussbaum, Michael White; Research Assistant Carrie Elliot; and Ji Hae Kim, Assistant to
us much more than could properly be asked of them in the fulfillment The outstanding staff of the Museum’s Department of Imaging Services, Reade, and Marguerite Shore, provided translations from Spanish, the Chief Curator. The exhibition has also relied on the tireless help of
of their everyday work as staff members here. I would like to thank including Robert Kastler, John Wronn, and Thomas Griesel, elegantly Portuguese, and Italian. Without them there would be nothing to read. an amazing team of interns, who dedicated endless hours to research
Jennifer Russell, Senior Deputy Director for Exhibitions, Collections, and photographed many of the works for this book. The Department of I have benefited from the interest and understanding of my col- for the exhibition and its book: Gabriela Baez Bastarrachea, Luis Gordo
Programs, who, working with Maria DeMarco Beardsley and Jennifer Graphic Design, and particularly Bonnie Ralston, Inva Cota, and Claire leagues in other curatorial departments and have enjoyed their advice Pelaez, Carmen Hermo, Maya Jimenes, Heather Reyes, Jessica Ventura,
Manno, has supported this exhibition in the most exemplary way. The Corey, have given the exhibition a brilliant design that echoes the and feedback: Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief and Ed Ubell. Above all, this project came to fruition with the assis-
high standards of this team are an endless lesson in discipline and originality of the artists’ own production. The Exhibition Design and Curator, and Lilian Tone, Assistant Curator, Department of Painting tance and collaboration of Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Curatorial
intellectual efficiency for any curator in the field. Peter Reed, Senior Production team under the leadership of Jerry Neuner counts among and Sculpture; and Deborah Wye, The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chief Assistant, whose outstanding professional and human qualities have
Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, has been an advisor from the the most understanding and imaginative professionals I have had the Curator, and Christophe Cherix, Curator, Department of Prints and been absolutely fundamental to making this project and catalogue
moment of the show’s inception to the realization of the exhibition and privilege to work with; Lana Hum, Production Manager, has excelled Illustrated Books. Last but not least, the entire Department of Drawings possible. Geaninne has been a real intellectual partner along this life-
its catalogue. Ramona Bannayan, Director, Collection Management and as an unparalleled exhibition designer. I am in debt to Peter Perez, has supported, accompanied, discussed, and enhanced this project time process, from its inception to its materialization, and there are
Exhibition Registration, and Sacha Eaton, Senior Registrar Assistant, who has reached artistic heights of taste, execution, and understand- in a myriad of ways: Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation simply no words eloquent enough to express to her my fondest grati-
have excelled in executing the shipping of the works for the exhibition ing of the works when it came to providing them with frames. Rob Chief Curator, who exemplifies the best intellectual and human form tude and intellectual debt.
in a safe and caring way. Michael Margitich, Senior Deputy Director for Jung and his team of preparators have given us crucial hands and of leadership; Jodi Hauptman, Curator, who as Interim Chief Curator Friendship is key in the life of ideas, and I have counted on the
External Affairs, and Todd Bishop, Director of Exhibition Funding, have minds, eyes and arms, for the installation of the works in the exhibition. provided me with invaluable insights and brilliant advice during the constant support and advice of my friends Juan Iribarren and Michel
achieved funding for the project during the most difficult of economic The most outstanding group of conservators ever imagined, under the inception of this project; Kathy Curry, Assistant Curator, whose experi- Weemans, and of my dearest partner, Samuel Guillen.
times. Jay Levenson’s advice, support, and intelligence have accom- direction of Jim Coddington, has cared for every work in the show. ence is a treasure for any exhibition project; and John Prochilo, whose
panied me in all my projects at MoMA, and Carol Coffin, who serves Karl Buchberg, Senior Conservator, in particular provided masterful management skills and intellectual intuitions have tirelessly guided and Luis Pérez-Oramas
as Executive Director of the Museum’s International Council, was knowledge of paper conservation, and Anny Aviram, Lynda Zycherman, protected me. I am also thankful to Christian Rattemeyer, Associate The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art
instrumental in getting its support. Wendy Woon, Deputy Director for and Roger Griffith oversaw the paintings and sculptures and provided
Education, Pablo Helguera, Director of Adult and Academic Education, conservation for key works in the exhibition.
and Laura Beiles, Associate Educator, have worked closely to organize A quiet but essential protagonist in the complexities of a curato-
an exciting series of educational programs. Allegra Burnette, Creative rial project is the Publications Department, whose staff produces the
Director, Digital Media, and her team of designers have worked tire- exhibition’s lasting memorial, its catalogue. I have been fortunate in
lessly on the exhibition’s website. Kim Mitchell, Deputy Director an extraordinary team: Christopher Hudson, Publisher, handled inter-
for Communications, Margaret Doyle, Assistant Director, and Meg continental negotiations to give the show a well-funded catalogue that
Blackburn, Senior Publicist, have taken special care in fostering the will be internationally distributed and translated into Portuguese and
best communication strategy and reaching the Latin American press Spanish; David Frankel, a gifted editor and challenging reader, has
both in the United States and abroad. surpassed the most exigent heights of intellectual competence and
Any curatorial project involves ongoing intellectual research, and knowledge, and it has truly been a privilege to work with him; Kara Kirk,
here the outstanding resources of the Museum’s Library are key. My Associate Publisher, Christina Grillo, Associate Production Manager,
special gratitude goes to Milan Hughston, Chief of Library and Museum and Marc Sapir, Production Director, have contributed hugely to the
Archives, and to Jenny Tobias, Sheelagh Bevan, and Alexa Goldstein production, organizational, and financial details of creating the book;
for their tireless support and attention. Our Collections and Exhibitions and Amanda Washburn, an amazing designer, has surpassed her own
luis pérez-oramas león ferrari and mira schendel:
tangled alphabets

Man, Discurso do Capibaribe (Capibaribe discourse): “Whatever lives is thick/

because he lives, like a dog, a man,/like the river./Thick/like everything real.” The Objetos
clashes with the living. gráficos, as their title suggests, explore the thickness of language,
To live the objectlike density of its graphic root, the existential bulk of words,
is to wend among the living. traces, marks, whether written or drawn by brush. Opaque bodies,
Whatever lives obstacles, suspended in our presence as fields of both seeing and
inflicts life reading, these works are bodies to be deciphered with the body (fig. 1).
on silence, on sleep, on the body One might even say that Schendel’s entire oeuvre is about the body,
that dreamed of cutting itself the single link through which we understand the world, and about the
clothes out of clouds. body of art that may emerge from this ceaseless effort to understand.
Whatever lives clashes, In that light it is significant that in one of these works, as if in a modern
has teeth, edges, is thick. palimpsest, Schendel inscribed the poetic key to the corporeal dimen-
Whatever lives is thick sion of her work, and perhaps to the Objetos gráficos as a whole, in the
like a dog, a man, form of poems and quotations. And she did so in the most transparent
like the river. and bare, the least dense and thick, of all of the Objetos gráficos.
—João Cabral de Melo Neto, O cão sem plumas Both art and language have the potential for opposite dimen-
(The dog without feathers) sions: opacity, or density and thickness, and transparency, or immediacy
and clarity. Perhaps between these poles we may frame an approach
O the frenzied alphabet to the work of Schendel and of León Ferrari. The two artists were born
—César Moro, Prestigio del Amor, 2002 on different continents—Ferrari in Argentina, Schendel in Switzerland,
though she spent her later life in Brazil—but they are contemporaries,
born in 1920 and 1919 respectively (Ferrari is still working, Schendel
The Tumult of Language Among the Objetos gráficos (Graphic objects) died in 1988), and both have found their principal visual source in lan-
shown by the late Mira Schendel at the 1969 Venice Biennale, one piece guage as both writing and gesture, that is, as both verbally intelligible
stands out for its sobriety, rigor, nakedness, and transparency (plate 90). and purely visible matter. Even at its most silent, intimate moments,
That work contains not scattered letters, like most of the rest of the their art is imbued with the protean tumult of language’s countless
Objetos—variously inscribed sheets of Japanese paper, sandwiched faces and incarnations, from voluntary silence to aphasia, passing
in transparent acrylic—but whole fragments of text. Some of these along the way through whisper, prayer, accusation, sermon, dialogue,
passages quote the conversation and lecture notes of the artist’s quotation, stutter, shout, onomatopoeia, collage, argument, alphabet,
friend Max Bense, the philosopher and linguist. Others include refer- and poetry. Both artists knew poets well—Haroldo de Campos in the
ences to samba, and to the general spirit that made the name of that case of Schendel, Rafael Alberti in that of Ferrari—and both at one time
Brazilian dance into a verb (sambar, to dance samba) that for Schendel or another were poets themselves.
described an entire existential endeavor; lyrics by the popular song- To understand the meaning of an art infused with language, to
writer Chico Buarque de Hollanda; and extracts from the verses of the understand what such infusion can mean and how it can help us to
great Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto, taken from his book talk about that art’s specificity, we should remember something obvi-
O cão sem plumas (The dog without feathers), better known as the ous but often overlooked: Schendel and Ferrari emerged during a time

1. Mira Schendel
Installation view, Venice Biennial, 1968.
Mira Schendel Estate
14 pérez-oramas 15

marked by the use of linguistic models to understand the world, a time dematerialization of the art object assumed to be implicit in it.4 Not
when many intellectuals—anthropologists, filmmakers, philosophers, only did Conceptual art aspire to be an art form without genre, it also
sociologists, psychiatrists, psychologists—made language a para- was, or tried to be, an artistic option opposed to the formalisms of the
digm for thought and for the world itself. These thinkers were reacting late modern period and most of all to painting, as an art of subjective
against the tendency during the early part of the twentieth century expression, a materialization of the spirit.
to take the organism, the machine, natural selection, and other such In that crucial year of 1964, not only did Ferrari and Schendel start
models as organizing systems through which to explain reality.1 It is to derive work from language, or more specifically from its constant
important, then, to understand what in the realm of facts the language dérive, or drift, they also reacted against painting—Schendel by aban-
in Schendel’s and Ferrari’s works refers to, or uses as a backdrop or doning that art form for works on paper, and Ferrari, although he had not
frame, a context or pretext—what provokes that language, what guides painted since his earliest days as an artist and would not again until the
it, where it is directed. And: what distinguishes the art of Schendel and 1980s, still rejecting it, subtly but clearly, in Cuadro escrito. In describing
Ferrari from so much other work of the same era that was based on what Ferrari would have painted had God blessed him with painterly tal-
and revolved around language. ent, the text of this written drawing illustrates an impossible, nonexistent
The early 1960s were crucial years in the development of painting, a nonpainting, an imaginary painting, the utopian painting cre-
Schendel’s and Ferrari’s work—that is, in its materialization of new and ated by the erotic yearnings of God.5 Ferrari’s and Schendel’s distance
different forms—and 1964 in particular seems to have brought both from painting, however, which in Schendel’s case was temporary, makes
artists to turning points. That was the year of Ferrari’s Cuadro escrito neither of them a Conceptual artist. On the contrary: since language as
(Written painting; plate 41), which followed a period of intense focus a material presence, a body of signs and traces, brushstrokes and ges-
on drawing that led him from abstraction (fig. 2) to deformed, illegible tures, far more than as a vehicle of concepts or ideas, prevails in their
writing (fig. 3), and then to the sophisticated but no less hermetic cal- work, we cannot claim that “the idea or concept is the most important
ligraphy of his written drawings (plate 58). That same year, Schendel aspect” of it. In fact execution is key here, making each work an unre-
embarked on a phase of her practice exclusively dedicated to works peatable operation—the polar opposite of LeWitt’s sense of execution as
on paper—specifically, rectangular sheets of the Japanese paper often a “perfunctory affair.”6
called rice paper. To make her drawings of this period—around two The works of Ferrari and Schendel describe an ingrown, inter-
thousand of them—she used a self-invented technique, her own in both connected language, a written materiality, language as a trembling of
the application of the ink and the actual physical gesture.2 The period the hand, a shudder of the body—language that itself has shuddered, a
ended in the second half of the 1960s with the creation of her most language that voices an idiosyncratic, irreplaceable subject. Of course
emblematic objects: the Droguinhas (Little nothings, c. 1965–68; fig. 4), their art involves ideas and concepts, indeed, often, ideas and concepts
Trenzinho (Little train, 1965; plate 77), and the Objetos gráficos (fig. 5). in their barest state, an obstinately repetitive plundering of barely leg-
In North America and Europe, these years also saw the emer- ible names, words, fictions, definitions, locutions. But these things are
gence of an art form that used no single medium, or at least that could depicted in a physical circumstance, where the materiality of signs and
not be understood from the perspective of the qualities of a single 4. Mira Schendel
symbols resonates like a dissonant, distorting echo of the ideal and per-
medium or material. Instead, as Sol LeWitt wrote, this was an art form Untitled (detail; see plate 73) from the series haps fictional purity of the mind and of ideas. Perhaps this, in one sense
in which “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the Droguinhas (Little nothings). c. 1965–68 at least, is what the tumult of language means to these two artists: that
2. León Ferrari work.”3 From the start, the critical writing on this work—Conceptual Japanese paper, dimensions variable, c. 35 1/2" (90 cm) words are opaque and out in the world.
Untitled. 1962 art—developed what would prove to be one of its essential myths, the fully extended Clearly the key to LeWitt’s famous declaration lies in the mean-
Ink on paper, 18 1/4 x 12 1/4" (46.4 x 31.1 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Scott Burton Fund
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
5. Mira Schendel
3. León Ferrari Untitled from the series Objetos gráficos
Carta a un general (Letter to a general). April 13, 1963 (Graphic objects). 1967
Ink on paper, 18 7/8 x 12 3/16” (48 x 31 cm) Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper between
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. transparent acrylic sheets, 39 3/8 x 39 3/8 x 3/8" (100 x 100 x 1 cm)
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Collection Diane and Bruce Halle
16 tangled alphabets pérez-oramas 17

ing ascribed to the word “aspect”: while language as an ideal vector

of meaning is a central “aspect” of the Conceptualists’ art, Ferrari and
Schendel are concerned with the “aspect” of language in the sense of
its visual appearance. This distinction is crucial if we are to understand
their specific contribution, and to defend them from the stereotypic,
homogenizing tendency of the label “Conceptual,” with its baggage of
aesthetic and artistic myths: dematerialization, ideality, and so on.7 It is Clark, and Amilcar de Castro to Antonio Manuel, Cildo Meireles, and
also crucial in approaching a complex moment in which the legacies of Waltercio Caldas, the fundamental premises of Concrete art tended
the historical Western avant-gardes began to multiply in a more global to relativize the art object, underscoring its perceptual pliability and
geography, the classic modern styles to break apart and evolve in a conceiving it as a transitional form somewhere between the field of art
variety of relocalized or, rather, repoliticized forms. The shift contrib- and the field of political or everyday experience. We may also recall the
uted to the rise of practices in which objective content, a discursive distinctly literary tendency in the art of Argentina and Uruguay, where
dimension (by which I mean the use of linguistic enunciation as con- artists from Joaquín Torres-García (fig. 6) and Alejandro Xul Solar (fig.
tent in visual art, a strategy in various work of the postwar era, both 7) to Alberto Greco, Alejandro Puente (fig. 8), Leandro Katz, Roberto
within and beyond the Conceptual canon), the power to say things (not Jacoby, and Ferrari himself favored narrative and discursive, illustrative
just show them), would reach new relevance. and textual methods, working especially on relationships between the
Between 1945 and 1965, “modernity”—the large and complex image and alphabetic or verbal codes.
repertory of artistic practices that accompanied modernization—gave The ideologues of modernism, by ignoring basic historical facts,
way to “modernism,” an artistic ideology that contributed to the sum- had ascribed to canonical modern art the idea of the primacy of the
ming up of modernity and modern art in their most characteristic and purely visual, and this and related notions—the identification of the art-
hegemonic versions. Existing modern works became the object of mul- work with the specificity of its medium, for example—had become the
tiple reappropriations, and began to be used to legitimize the practice connecting threads of modernist aesthetics.9 As nongeneric practices
of late modern artists. The spectacular public reception of these latter began to emerge, as more and more artists embraced hybrid media,
artists’ works, instrumentalized by the European and American culture and as the presence of discursive intentions became more common,
industries during the second half of the twentieth century, was key in varied, and widespread in visual art, this ideology fell to pieces. By
order for modernity to become an ideology, a canon, a universal formal the late 1960s, the possibility of identifying an artwork with a specific
model.8 At the same time, for various reasons—World War II; the end statement rather than with a specific medium, and tautological, alle-
of many traditional institutions of colonialism; the emergence of new gorical, narrative, or literally textual modalities—“something alien to the 7. Alejandro Xul Solar
Pan Game and Marionette I Ching. c. 1945
nations; diasporas of entire communities, along with their artists and late modernist tradition of painting, namely the specific operation of
Painted wood and metal, 54 pieces,
intellectuals; the Cold War; the industrialization of tourism; the advent language,” as Alexander Alberro has put it —had once again become
10
overall dimensions variable
of new information technologies, and so on—the idea and promise of a general currency in Western art.11
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of
single form of modernity happily fell apart, making way for the rise of It is important to say, however, that canonical Conceptual art was Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, through the Latin American
alternative local versions of what it meant to be “modern.” not alone responsible for the shift. The work of Ferrari and Schendel, and Caribbean Fund, in honor of Agnes Gund
In many of these versions of the modern, the idea of the auton- unclassifiable within the usual parameters of critical discourse on the
omy of the artwork did not exist, or took very different form from its art of the postwar period, shows this conclusively. In and beyond the 8. Alejandro Puente
expression in canonical modernism. In Brazil, from Hélio Oiticica, Lygia West, and in and beyond recent decades, certain art practices have Todo vale. Colores primarios y secundarios
llevados al blanco (Everything goes. Primary and
secondary colors brought up to white). 1968–70
Cloth, iron, and pigments. Pencil, felt-tip pen, cut-and-pasted
6. Joaquín Torres-García printed paper, transfer type, watercolor, felt samples, and
Composition. 1932 staples on seven sheets of paper, 29 1/2 x 68 7/8" (74.9 x 174.9 cm)
Oil on canvas, 28 1/4 x 19 3/4" (71.8 x 50.2 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Latin American
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. and Caribbean Fund with additional funding provided by
Gift of Dr. Román Fresnedo Siri Beatriz and Andres von Buch on behalf of Fundación arteBA
18 tangled alphabets pérez-oramas 19

and European Conceptual art, we may consult Fredric Jameson’s dis- The Silence of Things All this, in the work of both artists, begins in
tinction between “classical moderns” (a “rather unsatisfactory des- the same way that we may imagine language itself beginning: through
ignation,” he admits), who embraced artistic practices with neither silence, the silence of objects, and the effort to capture silence with
names nor theories, and “late modernists,” who were aware that they a name.
were working within a canon. “Conceptual art,” following Jameson’s
15
Ferrari got a late start as an artist, sometime after he had turned
distinction, is a constellation of artistic practices; “Conceptualism” thirty and after he had graduated as an engineer from the Universidad
reflects their stylistic canonization and (belated) conversion into ideol- de Buenos Aires. In 1946 he married Alicia Barros, who gave birth to
ogy. By highlighting the differences between Ferrari and Schendel, on the couple’s first daughter, Marialí, in 1948. Until then Ferrari had been
the one hand, and those artists who tend to align themselves with the working as an engineer for his father, the architect and painter Augusto
canonical forms of ”Conceptualism,” on the other, we argue against Ferrari, who specialized in the construction and decoration of churches.
the strategic or tactical use of the term “Conceptualism” as a canoni- It seems to me that Ferrari’s art may have been decisively affected by
cal method of including, legitimizing, and homogenizing highly diverse two traumatic family events, which would prove crucial to his life and
practices beyond North America and Europe. 16
perhaps to some of his most significant decisions in terms of art.
proven themselves indifferent to the famous distinction between the Ferrari and Schendel are visual artists who never abandon the In 1952, Marialí Ferrari contracted tuberculous meningitis.
arts of time and the arts of space that Lessing established in the word. On the contrary: even in their most silent, empty images, they Through the treatment, with streptomycin, she lost her hearing and
eighteenth century, and that would serve as the theoretical basis for make the word the center of their work, protesting what Roland Barthes with it her ability to speak. It was as a result of this tragic loss, this
modern aesthetic formalism. Centering on linguistic codes and texts,
12
called the “segregative law” that in the West separates the poet from absence of language, that Ferrari began to collect words. “We were
on narratives and narrative images, these practices have produced a the novelist, the graphic artist from the painter.17 More specifically, what desperate, bewildered,” Alicia Ferrari would write;
sophistic visual art, an art based on the potential of language not for is still clearer in their work than language, even when the text is impos-
clarity but for ambiguity.13 From William Blake and Francisco de Goya sible to identify, is writing—writing in Barthes’s sense of scription, the Our daughter was deaf, she had entered a different world that we
to Théophile Bra, Marcel Duchamp (fig. 9), Francis Picabia, Marcel “muscular act of writing, of drawing letters,” in other words the epo-
18
had to share and know in order to help her . . . we gathered 100
Broodthaers (fig. 10), Félix Bruly Bouabré, and Ferrari and Schendel, ché or suspension of writing as trace, its radical material reduction, perfectly pronounced words, which we jotted down one after the
images are manifested through texts and texts through images—in fact and the revelation of its capacity to function as a visual representation other without really knowing what we were doing. This list of words,
images are texts, texts are images. In this sense it is insufficient to
14
of enunciation. The work’s guiding spirit, then, more than language, is
19
which became the basis of her reeducation, included proper
say that Ferrari and Schendel practiced an alternative Conceptual art. the word itself—the word as a limitless substitute for the human voice. nouns. . . and the common names of all sorts of everyday things.20
Rather, Conceptual art is just one manifestation of a various, often con- Ferrari and Schendel don’t give us the neutral, subjectless sentences
tradictory phenomenon: a reinvention of visual art through operations that anyone might say, impersonally, as if language were an ideal form What relationship can we draw between this list of words com-
involving language, and occurring during a specific period in Western of transparency. Instead we get opaque texts, wounded, fragmented, posed by Alicia and León, as loving parents trying to help their daugh-
intellectual and social history that was dominated by the paradigm of obsessive signs, abandoned, delirious, solitary letters. In the end it is ter reenter the world, and the obsessive, curious collecting of strange
language as the operator for understanding human reality, as asserted not language that shines through but writing—whether abstract or tex- and unintelligible words that Ferrari would undertake years later for
in the writing of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Umberto tual, alphabetic or architectural, deformed or infinitesimal, nominal or the baroque, satirical texts of some of his written drawings? He must
Eco, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and others. transitive—and, above all, its body: the graphic gesture. have scoured the dictionary for these rare, surprising, foreign-sounding
To avoid convoluted, generalization-driven interpretations that words: agerasia (youthfulness in age), butuco (squat), cañucela (reed),
would lump this huge variety of practices within the framework of either desavahar (to expose to air), encambijar (to conduct water by aqueduct),
alignment with or reaction against the hegemonic form of American menuceles (trifles), oploteca (museum of ancient weapons), perulero
(narrow-rimmed vase), arrizafa (royal garden; fig. 11).

10. Marcel Broodthaers

9. Marcel Duchamp Pour un art de l’écriture et pour une écriture de l’art
Monte Carlo Bond (No. 12). 1924 (On the Art of Writing and on the Writing of Art). 1968
Cut-and-pasted gelatin silver prints on lithograph Oil and photograph on linen mounted on composition board, 11. León Ferrari
with letterpress, 12 1/4 x 7 1/2" (31.2 x 19.3 cm) in two parts, 40 5/8" x 7' 3 3/8" (103.2 x 221.9 cm). Page from Notebook 3, November 15, 1964
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Raymond J. Learsy Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
Gift of the artist and Gabriella De Ferrari Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
20 pérez-oramas 21

of a God—for Ferrari, an invention of human masochism—indifferent to

human tragedy.
In 1952, when Marialí Ferrari lost the gift of language, words
began to abound in her father’s life. Yet years would pass before they
would take center stage in his work. Seeking better medical care for
Marialí, and still living as an engineer, Ferrari moved his family to Italy,
and it was there, in Rome, that he first began to work as an artist, spe-
cifically a ceramist (fig. 14). From his conversation one deduces that his
experience in Italy, from 1952 to 1955, was also his first experience with
politics—that this was how the Catholic-born Ferrari became, like so
many postwar Italians, vaguely Communist, if never a Party activist.
Ferrari’s three-dimensional works from these years, almost all
now lost, echo a certain vein of Italian modernity traceable back to
Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana (fig. 15), Fausto Melotti (fig. 16), and maybe
Piero Manzoni. Mute in relation to his later art, they involve no graphic
writing—only the texture of the surface and the shaping of the clay into
organic curves (fig. 17). The objects sit ambiguously between abstrac-
tion and use. A photograph from 1955 (fig. 1, p. 46) shows Ferrari in his
Trastevere studio, surrounded by sculptures, vessels, and mobiles with,
often, two striking features: a swollen center, perhaps a reference to
Palabras ajenas (“Words of others,” but also “Strange words”), not pregnancy, and the presence of clay rings and ribbons, oval openings
just words out in the world, seem from this point on to have guided like those in certain bones, some of them acting as handles from which
Ferrari’s work—whether the words robbed from the ears of a little girl the objects hang. There is little continuity between these ceramics and
who had lost her hearing, or the most unfamiliar words in the dictionary. most of Ferrari’s later art, except perhaps for the love of curving lines,
Later, during the political furor of the 1960s, Ferrari would write a book and of organic, corporeal shapes, that is visible in his calligraphy. The
called Palabras ajenas—a kind of protest play, the impossible script for clay mobiles suspended from the ceiling, however, may relate more 14. León Ferrari
a polyphonic performance among different kinds of power (figs. 12, 13.).21 specifically to Ferrari’s recent hanging sculptures in polyurethane and Untitled. c. 1955
Later still, in 1976, it was at the hands of Argentine state power—which plastic, which include bones and similar round swellings (plate 144). Ceramic

Ferrari had always opposed in written pictures and angry words and It is almost as though, having begun in the abstraction of language Location unknown

works—that his son Ariel was silenced in turn, and permanently, like many implicit in silent objects, the work had concluded symmetrically, after
15. Lucio Fontana
other young Argentines sacrificed at the dawn of their future promise. long labor amid the sound of voices and the murmur of writing, in the
Crucifixion. 1948
If the first traumatic event, involving his daughter, led Ferrari to muteness of bodies and their bones. Ceramic, 19 1/8 x 12 3/8 x 9 1/8" (48.6 x 31.4 x 23.2 cm)
words, the second, involving his son, brought home on him the gravitas The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase
of his political responsibility, the need to align his work with a constant In 1948 Schendel emigrated to Brazil, leaving behind her in Europe
protest against the hell of history, political power, religion, and that her Catholic youth and her ambition as a poet—along with scenes 16. Fausto Melotti
other source of muteness, that other unbearable silence: the silence of war and destruction, death-filled refugee camps, the silent fate of Bowl. 1953
Majolica, 2 1/4" x 5 1/2" diam. (5.7 cm x 14 cm diam.)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Phyllis B. Lambert Fund
12. León Ferrari 13. León Ferrari
Palabras ajenas (Words of others). 1967. Cover Palabras ajenas (Words of others). 1967. Title page 17. León Ferrari
Buenos Aires: Falbo Editor Buenos Aires: Falbo Editor Untitled. c. 1955
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Ceramic
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Location unknown
22 pérez-oramas 23

the stateless. As soon as she settled in Brazil, in the town of Porto Alegre, a house with a lush garden (figs. 18, 19). “Unfortunately speech object-making, Schendel gave up written language—silent, but preg- drawings is difficult,” he wrote, and he experimented laboriously, with
Alegre, Schendel took on the voice of her fellow refugees and émigrés is not my means of expression,” she wrote to a friend during these nant with latent speech—for the inescapable, fated muteness of the an alchemy of inks, to get the color of a “blood that is a bit dead, like
in an open letter to a newspaper, a powerful attack on the bureau- years.24 She dealt with her abandonment of writing by becoming an physical gesture; and the muteness of the gesture (and gesture physi- dry, opaque blood.”
cratic mediocrity of institutions and the state. She seems always to artist, beginning, strangely enough, with surely the most manual art cally shapes writing) became for her the place of language’s silence, Aerial and corporeal at the same time, the result is surely one of
have been generously rebellious, and her constant protests against form: ceramics. Like Ferrari in Italy, Schendel in Brazil devoted herself of the voice deferred, buried, contained in and by the hands that write the most spectacular drawings of Ferrari’s career, and silently echoes
the state of things clearly manifest her search for self among others, to kneading and shaping clay, making works that we now can only or knead clay. “Writing,” said Barthes, “in short is nothing more than a Alberti’s poetry:
her need for the world. imagine, for none survive. kind of fissure. It is a question of dividing, of plowing, of discontinuing
Schendel’s parents, Karl Dub and Ada Saveria Büttner, had Soon, however, in 1950, Schendel decided that painting was “a a flat element, sheet, skin, clay tablet, wall. . . . the hand, the eye, guide I know, I consent: it is time—time to strike through the voice
divorced when the child was an infant. In 1937, Ada had taken a sec- question of life or death.” Perhaps she transferred to her early paint-
25
the writing, not the reason of language.” 28
that transfixes all things, from the ice on the wheat to the beak
ond husband, Count Tommaso Gnoli, the director first of the Biblioteca ings the rugged texture of her ceramics, the impenetrable silence of of the bird that renounces the earth and waits for a day when the
Nazionale Braidense in Milan, later of the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria the cups, vessels, and bottles that she had sculpted with her hands Written Pictures: The Visible as Verb Ferrari and Schendel estab- sky will be quartz and all grind to a halt for a moment, at last . . .
in Modena. Schendel, then, spent her young adulthood in an august (plate 3). In any event critics felt in these pieces a somewhat melan- lished the basic repertoires of their respective bodies of work in the while something that shames me and heaves me aloft, undermines
context of humanistic and Catholic culture, among prelates, poets, cholic, perhaps even metaphysical quality, recalling a pair of artists 1960s. Ferrari had gone through a period of experiment in which he me and drowns me, still drains me, abandons me and puts all to
theologians, and philosophers. At the beginning of World War II, when who almost certainly influenced Schendel in the Brazil of the 1950s: continued to produce sculpture, briefly explored wood carving, and flight again for which I know no name but: my blood.32
Mussolini’s anti-Semitic laws prevented her from finishing her studies Giorgio Morandi (fig. 8, p. 66) and Milton Dacosta.26 Her still lifes and made some of his first works in wire, including Gagarín (Gagarin, c. 1961;
in philosophy, she embarked on her long exile. She first intended to go abstractions already reveal a dissatisfaction with the limits of the pic- plate 26). This spherical piece, which allegorizes the widespread early The composition comprises two planes of lines that join in a
to Sofia, Bulgaria, but was stopped in Vienna by the German invasion ture plane. In one, a white oval, an egg, is an uncanny presence among enthusiasm for the world’s venture into space, manifests a theme of complex labyrinth of tangles and crisscrosses. These planes corre-
of Hungary. She settled instead in Sarajevo, where she met the man bottles and glasses depicted as emphatically flat silhouettes (plate 6), Ferrari’s that would evolve in a number of directions: spheres, rockets, spond to two colors, black and red, which seem in turn to refer to
who would become her first husband, Josip Hargesheimer. Here, while while in another, thick, rough-textured paint is the backdrop for promi- missiles, and even atomic explosions, in the recent mushroom-shaped two levels of the body—outside, the grain of skin and hair, and inside,
living among Croatian refugees, Schendel would recall seeing a girl of nent geometric forms that stand out three-dimensionally (plate 1). On sculptures in polyurethane.29 the circulation of blood—which, however, are inverted, the network of
six or seven playing with a rabbit until she finally killed it: “just as they one level this latter work is a game of tonal values focused on the “It would be so wonderful,” Ferrari wrote in 1962–63, “to make blood vessels appearing on top of the field of hair. The voice of blood
did with the Jewish children,” she wrote in a diary. “As long as life is edges of these nameless presences (which makes it the most Morandi- a kind of mappa mundi, a globe of some imaginary planet, ‘the planet becomes an eloquent vision, and while the work contains no literal writ-
considered the supreme good, this scandal will subsist.”22 like of Schendel’s paintings, even while it is iconographically unlike where I don’t live,’ a totally drawn sphere. . . . It could be made of solid ing, there is indeed a poem, a text, underlying its complex process.
Schendel would rarely mention the grim experience of war, him).27 On another, it is about penetrating the density, the thickness, of iron, welded and painted.” 30
“A totally drawn sphere”: beyond the role The bodily dimension of Ferrari’s drawing may be traceable to
whether in writing or conversation. Nor would she describe it through paint and watching forms emerge from it, less compositional imposi- of Gagarín as allegory, portrait, or sculpture, Ferrari’s notes show that his early days as an artist. In 1962, while he was living for a period in
any direct symbolism in her work, perhaps because it was so extreme tions than organic outgrowths. he saw the work graphically, as a kind of three-dimensional drawing. Milan, the collector and author Arturo Schwarz invited him to contrib-
and impossible to communicate. In her polemic in defense of European This literal emergence of form would become essential to He wrote these notes at the same time that he was working on his ute to a portfolio of prints by artists of the international avant-garde,
émigrés in Brazil, Schendel wrote of freeing herself from the “sectarian Schendel’s art, and we will be looking at it later with respect to the first great drawing, the 1962 Sin titulo (Sermón de la sangre) (Untitled leading to a drypoint etching that would prove the starting point for
spirit that identifies us so strongly with the desire to monopolize the technique she developed for drawing on Japanese paper. For now, [Sermon of the blood]; plate 12), based on a poem by Alberti. his drawings. His drawing practice, then, began with incision, the most
greatest pain.”23 A related agnostic impulse seems to have led her to it is enough to say that after she stopped writing poetry, painting “[Rafael] read some poems,” Ferrari wrote in his notebook, “and radical form of drawing and perhaps also an originary form of writing:
try to understand the meaning of her own religion, Catholicism, through emerged in her work not, as one might guess, as an exercise pitting then I left him. I started to work on the poem ‘Sermón de la sangre’ with Saint Luke, the patron saint of artists, combined the practices of writ-
the work of reform-minded, antiestablishment writers such as Leon art against writing, but definitively as an object. In the manual tradition the idea of doing something very complex (either in black or colored ing (revelation), drawing (portraiture), and incision (surgery). No less
Bloy, Emanuel Mounier, Teilhard de Chardin, and Ferdinando Tartaglia, of both her and Ferrari’s ceramics, and in the earthy, tactile texture of ink), whether directly on paper or on a piece of cellophane covered an artist than Giotto, according to Vasari, began his life as an artist
with whom she often corresponded before emigrating. Schendel’s paintings before 1963, we see a plasticity that may be read with alizarin red, for blood.”31 The notebook mentions four or five ver- by scratching an image into a rock with a sharp stone.33 Ferrari, in his
Schendel wrote the texts of her last poems on the backs of as a metonym for the body, and, in the case of Ferrari’s pregnant fig- sions of the drawing and reveals a meticulous, painstaking process. notebook, described his early Músicas [Musics] series (plate 17), begun
photographs of herself and Hargesheimer in their first home in Porto ures, for his own generative potential (plate 2). In giving up poetry for Ferrari wanted absolute control in the work’s execution: “Copying these in 1962, as “evolving toward drawn bas-relief.”34

18. Mira Schendel and an unidentified friend, 19. Mira Schendel

Ilha das Flores, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1949 “Canção do exilio” (Song of exile). September 3, 1949.
Verso of fig. 18
 pérez-oramas 25

tive content, for a discourse on art; on the world, with all its contra- ings, and ovals, all of which would reappear in her drawings. One of
dictions and nonsense; and, usually sarcastically and critically, on the these works, Sem titulo (Achilles) (Untitled [Achilles], fig. 24)—perhaps
powers of church and state. None of these early works are violent, or her first “written painting”—depicts a kind of threshold, a “doorway,” as
At the same time, it is worth remembering that Ferrari’s first show the kind of anger and protest that would appear in his art later Geraldo Souza Dias has described it.38 Above it is written a full English
abstract drawings had a pretext in text (in the Alberti poem, for example), on, as a natural reaction to the tragedies of Argentine history, which sentence: “Froude and myself at the time, we borrowed from M. Bunsen
while the Músicas, by invoking musical scores, aspired to be seen as would scar his own family directly. The period begins with works like a Homer and Froude chose the words in which achilles returning to the
textual events. These works would lead Ferrari toward the abstract draw- Sin titulo (Sermón de la sangre), an abstraction based on an existing battle says you shall know the difference now that I am back again.”
ings of the Escrituras deformadas (Deformed writings) series and to the piece of writing, and can be seen as ending with La civilización occi- Several features of this work deserve attention: the presence
Cartas a un general series of 1963 (Letters to a general; plate 37), which dental y cristiana (Western Christian civilization; fig. 21), a sculpture fus- of text in a good-sized painting (thirty-seven by fifty-two inches); the
in turn would close in 1964 with the inception of the great repertory ing a crucifixion with an American bomber. Exhibited at Buenos Aires’s use of capital letters, apparently stenciled, rather than calligraphy; the
of written drawings that begins with Cuadro escrito. As such, Ferrari’s Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in 1965, the work was ultimately censored, way the text dominates the upper part of the picture, superimposed
drawing practice was and is an inscribed body of work (fig. 20), the after which Ferrari abandoned artmaking for a time. During this brief over the black arch and over the somber colors of the visual field; the
result of a corporeal practice of inscription, or of Barthes’s scription— period between 1962 and 1965, Ferrari established the foundations of hermetic character of the sentence, despite its reference to Achilles,
“This gesture by which a hand picks up a tool (point, reed, pen), presses his entire future repertory, in abstract drawings such as the Músicas, whose name stands out in white, the only brightness in an other-
it to a surface, advances it heavily or caressingly, and traces regular, the Escrituras deformadas, the Cartas a un general, the wire sculptures, wise dark composition; and the philological and aesthetic moment in
recurrent, rhythmic forms.”35 the boxes, and the written drawings such as Cuadro escrito. Schendel’s development that the painting marks.
It is interesting to note that this progression began with abstrac- The sentence is a quotation, never correctly identified before,
tion and ended with writing. Ferrari has said that it was as if he had Between 1957 and 1963, Schendel too stopped artmaking to concen- from the writings of John Henry Cardinal Newman, and specifically
inverted a modern order, as in the work of Antonin Artaud and Henri trate on raising her daughter, Ada, her child with her second husband, from his preface to the Lyra Apostolica of 1836, a collection of religious
Michaux, in which writing is abstracted into a calligraphy that is illegible, Knut Schendel. (The couple had lived together since 1952 and would poems by writers such as John Keble, Richard Hurrell Froude, Newman
indecipherable. In fact he may have repeated the ontogeny of writing,
36
marry in 1960.) Knut (fig. 22), a German who had emigrated to Brazil himself, and others, all figures in the Oxford Movement, a nineteenth-
if we agree with the theories of the philosopher André Leroi-Gourhan in 1936, sensing the horror then brewing in Europe, would become a century English expression of Roman Catholicism and European
or the linguist Jacques Van Ginneken, as summarized by Barthes: crucial figure in Schendel’s life; although after she married him she romanticism.39 Visiting Rome in the winter of 1832, Keble, Froude,
“Writing,” he says, “would have to have come before oral language,” only signed her work with her first name, Mira, some of the abstract and Newman had met the German theologian and diplomat Christian
given that its origins must lie between the age of purely gestural com- calligraphy in her drawings on Japanese paper resembles his signa- Charles Josias, Baron von Bunsen, and, as Newman wrote, had bor-
munication and the age of communication through clicklike phonemes, ture, as though she were rewarding his name with a gesture, making it rowed from him a copy of Homer. In the Iliad, on returning to battle
like the sounds that newborns make with their mouths—but before the a feature of her work (plate 25). after the death of Patroclus, Achilles promises, “You shall know the dif-
rise of an articulated language. According to Leroi-Gourhan, Barthes Knut ran the São Paulo bookstore Canuto, a significant importer ference, now that I am back again.” In quoting this line in the preface
writes, graphics would have come before writing: “Writing, outside its of technical literature during the years of Brazil’s modernization (fig. 23). to the Lyra Apostolica, in the sentence in turn quoted in Schendel’s
semantic constituent, is lines and marks engraved on bone or stone, His business presumably gave Schendel access to books and paper. In painting, Newman was describing his and his friends’ frame of mind at
little equidistant incisions. In no way figurative, these traces have no 1963, she began to paint again, making abstract, materially oriented can- the book’s inception.
precise meaning; they seem to be rhythmic manifestations, perhaps vases. Soon, however, she chose instead to work on sheets of Japanese On returning to London after touring the Mediterranean with
incantatory in nature. In other words, writing begins not in imitation of paper, all (with rare exceptions) in the same vertical rectangular format, his friends, Keble gave his “National Apostasy” sermon protesting
the real but in abstraction.”37 twice as high as wide—the sum of two squares. In her last paintings of the decline of the Church of England. This speech would become the
If Ferrari’s abstract drawings are purely aesthetically a high point this period, Schendel combined numbers and letters with a series of foundational document of the Oxford Movement, which attempted
of his work, his written drawings begin to serve as a platform for objec- basic forms—lines, rectangles, shapes contained within shapes, open- to reestablish a more primitive connection with the Church, a kind

21. León Ferrari

20. León Ferrari La civilización occidental y cristiana
Untitled. 1964 (Western Christian civilization). 1965
Ink on paper, 9 7/16 x 6” (24 x 15.3 cm) Installation view of León Ferrari
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Retrospectiva. Obras 1954–2004
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, 2004 22. Knut Schendel, Berlin, 1932 23. Knut Schendel’s Canuto bookstore, São Paulo
26 tangled alphabets

paper absorbed the ink. This method let her balance the difficult equa-
tion between spontaneity and intention, both of which come through
in these drawings: “She would meditate or do nothing for a period and
then dash off drawings one after another rapidly, scratching on the
paper laid over an inked glass, renewing it and doing another.”44
In the Monotipias, the drawing in fact shines through. Its body
of primordial, almost preecclesiastical Christianity. It should hardly themes—faith’s independence from reason, humanity’s radical secular- precisely inhabits the paper’s transparency; its traits lie in the trace,
surprise us that Schendel was reading Newman at a time when she ism, ecumenism, the embrace of poverty, social action—were important the physical gesture, the muscular weight that produced it, as well as
was deeply involved in issues of Catholic reform. Nor should it seem
40
to her during these years, years in which she subtly but laboriously and in the paper’s intensified presence. It is as if the darkness of the drawn
odd that her interest in different forms of early Christianity, both pre- completely revised her ideas about ecclesiastical, artistic, and political line grew integrally from the paper’s white clarity without compromis-
and even antiecclesiastical, would lead her to profound differences, institutional structures. ing either value. For Naves, the poetic meaning of this technique of
both personal and theological, with the Church. Schendel also knew The period that began in 1963 with the quotation of Newman Schendel’s lies in her ability to make the drawing seem to emerge from
that the reformist principles embedded in the Oxford Movement had perhaps ended in 1969 with a quotation from the Book of Kings, used within the support, rather than being imposed upon it from outside.45
contributed to the ideas of the Second Vatican Council, conducted in a spectacular installation on the voice of God as absolute, indeci- Through this key observation we recognize the equivalence of her
during precisely this period, from 1962 to 1965. Pope Paul VI, Cardinal pherable silence. Ondas paradas de probabilidade—Antigo Testamento, gesture here to that of those modern artists who tried to reduce the
Montini, had personally helped Schendel during her years as a refu- Livro dos Reis, I, 19 (Still waves of probability—Old Testament, I Kings 19; practice of painting to its minimal conditions of possibility, for example
gee in Europe. This same Pope would publicly declare that Vatican II fig. 25) was Schendel’s contribution to the 1969 Bienal de São Paulo, to its flatness. Schendel’s project, however, is something other than
had been “Newman’s hour.”41 which activists against Brazil’s military dictatorship were boycotting; formalist, something other than an attempt to identify the drawing with
Achilles’s words in the Iliad herald a furious battle—an energy the work, then, was politically as well as theologically radical, defying its medium, or to reduce it to the materiality of its support; the number depart from the mythic role of the sign as an expression of the artist’s
emulated by the Oxford men in their critique of England’s government not only the state but its opponents. Ondas paradas de probabilidade and variety of the Monotipias show that she conceived them as figural will, transferring to the paper the organic quality that Walter Benjamin
and Church, and by Schendel on resuming work as an artist in 1963. juxtaposed the archaic voice of the Bible with modern transparency, or figurative fields, fields in which the most radical abstraction and reserved for the “mark” as opposed to the “absolute sign”: “Whereas
The quotation, though, is eccentric, obscure. Isolated from its literary but before she could make it Schendel had had to follow a tortuous the most minimal gesture have symbolic or allegorical weight. Writing the absolute sign does not for the most part appear on living beings
and theological context, surrendered to painting, it is almost a textual path, through the Monotipias, the Droguinhas,42 and Trenzinho. breaks down into fragments, furious gestures, or is transformed into but can be impressed or appear on lifeless buildings, trees, and so
readymade. But Schendel was announcing her return to painting, to Rodrigo Naves has repeatedly argued that the Monotipias—the song, recitation, prayer. Here it is as clear as a monogram (plate 30), on, the mark appears principally on living beings (Christ’s stigmata,
the struggles of art and of the self, with the weapons she would be drawings on which Schendel labored intensely from 1964 until the end there it decomposes, its signs divided, its physical matter torn. The blushes, perhaps leprosy and birthmarks).”46 This distinction, informed
using to make her symbolic gestures: lines, words, impeccable sur- of the decade—should not be called by that name, since no repro- writing in one of the most interesting monotype drawings—interesting by Judaic theology, between imaginary absolutes of sign and mark is
faces, empty fields. duction process was used to make them, not even the limited form in part because Schendel changed format, making the drawing hori- important in thinking about Schendel, particularly in understanding her
Schendel’s religious feelings should not be underestimated; her of reproduction involved in printing monotypes. 43
Naves stresses the zontal and slightly larger than the rest—describes how the paper was marks as links to notions of sin (Benjamin’s “blushes”) and innocence
work returns obsessively to eschatological issues, the difficulties of faith, poetry of the technique that she invented to produce this large series accidentally ripped, and this tear becomes the work’s symbolic center, (his “stigmata”). It becomes crucial, though, when we recall that for
and the contradictions within the Catholic Church of the time. The unfath- of works; the fragility and light weight of the Japanese paper become its symbol (plate 27). This risk of accident, of the torn image, the frac- Benjamin the mark works a kind of “temporal magic,” fusing the past
omably immense expanse of the paper on which she inscribed her enor- essential rather than incidental, medium rather than support. Since a tured object, embodies the poetry of the Monotipias. (of guilt) and the future (of atonement). He continues, “The medium
mous production of Monotipias (Monotypes)—this was the battlefield more conventional inscription of the kind Schendel was making could These drawings should be read through the logic not of the of the mark is not confined to this temporal meaning; as we are dis-
on which her spiritual ideas materialized, as fragments, floating words, have scratched or torn the paper, she instead devised a method of sign but of the symptom, not of the imprint but of the emergence, tressed to see in the case of blushing, it also tends to dissolve the
terse symbols, hermetic paraphrases, nominal sentences. Schendel coating a pane of inked glass with a layer of talc, to shield the paper the spontaneous stain or mark. The strokes, forms, signs, and ges- personality into certain of its basic components.”47
was not afraid of religious struggle, a struggle of the Church, with the she next laid on it from the ink. Then she would press on the paper with tures in the Monotipias suggest tangible traces rising to the surface of A symptom is an involuntary, purely organic warning of a physi-
Church, against the Church that she knew all too well. Newman’s great her fingernail or some other firm tool. Where she applied pressure, the an absorbent substance, a lucent yet material support. As such, they cal state. What does it mean for a text to take that form? The signs and

24. Mira Schendel 25. Mira Schendel

Sem titulo (Achilles) (Untitled [Achilles], detail; see plate 42). 1960s Ondas paradas de probabilidade.
Oil on canvas, 36 5/8 x 51 15/16 x 1 3/8 (93 x 132 x 3.4 cm) (Still waves of probability). 1969
Private collection, São Paulo Installation view, Bienal de São Paulo, 1994
 28 tangled alphabets pérez-oramas 29

writings in the Monotipias are indexical: rather than naming things, they Insofar as Cuadro escrito resembles the discursive practices of imperturbably objective sentences that could have been produced by
point them out. They present—rather than just represent—the organic some Conceptual art, in which a text replaces the object it describes, anyone or no one. The “I” in these sentences, if there is one, is negligible,
personality that has produced them or, rather, that has allowed them it has been called a Latin American precedent for such works.51 This functional, dispensable. Like the paintings of the Renaissance—the origi-
to be produced, but that also dissolves them in their primitive discon- may be so, but it is superficial; Cuadro escrito is far more complex than nary paintings of humanist history—these language operations aspire to
tinuity, their material stutter, their suspension and fragmentation. The is suggested by this simple alignment with Conceptual art, to which be neutral, universal statements.
logic of a drawing that emerges from the interiority of the paper is not Ferrari usually says he felt entirely indifferent at the time. The implicit Cuadro escrito is anything but a universal statement. Its “I” is not
strictly artistic and certainly not formalist, at least in Schendel’s case. It links between Conceptual art and a humanistic archaeology of the a nominal transparency but a being in existential distress, and it begins
responds to a metaphysical reason that Schendel expressed years later visual arts as understood before Lessing have yet to be fully explored. with a recognition of limitations, of impotence. In this sense that open-
when she described the Monotipias as “the result of a hitherto frustrated It seems clear, though, that by rejecting the primacy of the art object in ing sentence could not be more diametrically opposed to canonical
attempt to capture discourse at its moment of origin,” for which she had favor of the operations of language, and particularly of administrative Conceptualism, which tends to describe the concise execution, com-
sat down to “wait for the letters to form, to take shape on the page and language,52 Conceptual artists gave up the spatial dimension of visual plete or potential, of a singular operation. Ferrari begins instead by
connect to one another in a text predating the literal and logical.”48 art; they gave up structural extension in favor of intention, and also of saying what he would do if God had touched him—in other words by
cognitive intentionality.
53
saying what he cannot do.
With the possible exceptions of Sem titulo (Achilles) and the monotype In this sense it can be argued that by opposing the modernist As sarcastic and intricate as Ferrari’s text may be, it is exis-
drawing A Trama (A fabric net; plate 27), whose inscription refers self- ideology of art’s identification with its medium—an identification implicit tentially consistent: anything a man is unable to do, from creating a
reflexively to drawing, none of Schendel’s work has the meticulously in the primacy of painting—Conceptual art engineered a return of sorts painting to any other frustrated potential, is attributable to the fault
descriptive character of Ferrari’s. Yet his written drawings too are to the humanistic origins of Western art. If Renaissance painters devised of the divine. Here Ferrari initiates his inversion of Western theology:
imbued with theology, and with the presence of God, if in a negative mimetic structures that functioned like, for example, the periodic sen- the mistake is divine, not human, and in place of a call for humans to
sense—negative in that Ferrari is radically opposed to religion. tence prized by rhetoricians, the verbal and visual equivalences of the atone there is a condemnation of the cultural abuses and phantasma-
Cuadro escrito (fig. 26), the first and most important of these Conceptual artists resembled tautological sentences, restoring early goria surrounding religion, like the idea of hell or the prudish sexual
works, begins with the remark, “If I knew how to paint, if God, in His humanism’s favoring of verbal structures in visual art. Of course there
54
attitudes of the Catholic Church. More than anything, though, Cuadro
haste and bewildered by mistaken confusion, had touched me. . . . ” is more in Conceptual art; some artists—possibly Lawrence Weiner (fig. escrito initiates an aesthetic of confusion—confusion about any kind of
Cuadro escrito is an argument against God, against painting, against 27), certainly Joseph Kosuth (fig. 28)—have a “philosophical” impulse, assertion, confusion about the truth—that would become essential to
the deification of painting. This complex work takes a stand against the a drive to make their work mimic the clarity and formality of analytical, Ferrari and would appear in a variety of ways, including an abundant
Western tradition that made painting the summit of the plastic arts—a mathematical, or logical intellectual operations. This may imply, inciden- repertoire of visual and textual camouflage. Buried and invisible within
humanistic tradition that began in the Renaissance by establishing an tally, a second, more consistent confluence between the accepted canon Cuadro escrito, that potential painting that Ferrari would have painted
equivalence between pictorial practice and the arts of poetry, rhet- of Conceptual art and the pictorial theory of the Renaissance, when the if he could, is “the hidden heart of the entire work: forty square centi-
oric, and geometry.49 By showing poetic stories in a space ruled by representation of history demanded the neutralization of the subject who meters deliberately concealed in the work’s various measures so that
perspective—in other words, by geometry—painting was freed of its observed it—a form of desubjectivization. This was achieved through the no one perceives its inaudible language.”55 The reference to Balzac’s
stigma as a manual, only pseudo-intellectual craft. Over three centu- establishment of the Renaissance model of perspective, in which vision celebrated Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu is clear,56 but one might also think of
ries would pass before Lessing’s distinction between the arts of time is monofocal and the observing subject agrees to make his or her body the painting described here as an anticipation of Ferrari’s camouflage
(such as poetry) and of space (such as painting and sculpture) undid equivalent to a point—in other words, to reduce his or her subjective paintings and assemblages of the 1990s (fig. 29), his clearest inver-
this equivalence. It was ultimately Lessing’s argument that established density to the smallest coordinate of Euclidean geometry. Conceptual sions of the traditional pictorial strategies of Christianity. In these later
the basis for the modern understanding of painting as nonverbal, anti- art also diminished the density of the subject, through neutral, objective
literary, spiritual—a dominant aesthetic model in modernist ideology as language operations: sentences that establish strictly logical and nomi-
conventionally understood.50 nal equivalences between language and impersonal representations, 28. Joseph Kosuth
One and Three Chairs. 1965
Wood folding chair, mounted photograph of a chair,
26. León Ferrari 27. Lawrence Weiner and photographic enlargement of a dictionary
Cuadro escrito. (Written painting, detail, see plate 41). With a Relation to the Various definition of “chair.” Chair: 32 3/8 x 14 7/8 x 20 7/8" 29. León Ferrari
December 17, 1964 Matters with Various Things. 1973 (82 x 37.8 x 53 cm), photographic panel: 36 x 24 1/8" Mimetismo (Mimicry). c. 1995
Ink on paper, 26 x 18 7/8" (66 x 48 cm) Lithograph, 16 3/16 x 12 1/4" (41.1 x 31.1 cm) (91.5 x 61.1 cm), text panel: 24 x 24 1/8" (61 x 61.3 cm) Painted plaster on printed fabric,
Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 6' 7/16" x 55 1/8" x 5 1/8" (184 x 140 x 14 cm)
Art & Project/Depot VBVR Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
30 tangled alphabets pérez-oramas 31

works, by covering the Christ figure in camouflage, Ferrari inverts a cel- and the image’s ideal quality or force—between the painting and the during the Reformation, and more recently in the Constructivist-era writ- Babel and the Sophistic Image Recent scholarship on Philostratus
ebrated remark by Erasmus, in his Enchiridion Militis Christiani (1504), image that is painted, or, to use Philostratus’s terms, between pinakes ing of N. M. Tarabukin, in the ironic voice of Duchamp on viewing an has called the mental, conceptual image that we have seen originate
according to which the Devil moves in disguise.57 and graphè. In his preface Philostratus applies the first term to “paint- airplane propeller, in Robert Rauschenberg’s 1961 telegram to the art in his writing a “sophistic image.”63 One of those scholars, Françoise
In this light Cuadro escrito is essentially a manifesto, though a ings set into the walls”—presumably murals and in any case objects or dealer Iris Clert (“This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so”), in the critic Graziani, reminds us that the rhetoricians of the Second Sophistic—
manifesto that speaks for just one person, rather than for a movement or things, parts of the physical solidity of the world. Graphè, meanwhile, Gregory Battcock’s 1969 essay “Painting Is Obsolete,” and in many more that is, Philostratus’s predecessors and contemporaries of the second
collective aesthetic, and that is also a work of art. And what is it a mani- he uses to refer to a representation, a mental, intentional construct, such examples.61 century a.d.—sought “mastery through the ambiguities of language.”64
festo of? As we have seen, the text uses baroque, jumbled sentences to emancipated from the world. One agent of this crucial, often unnoticed Years of an unprecedented reawakening of painting, the 1960s Philostratus similarly sees painting as mastering ambiguity—or, as he
describe a potential, impossible painting. It is impossible in part because distinction, then, is the description, the ekphrasis—the genre of writing also insisted, like never before, on painting’s end, the last picture. With says in his prologue, “Not to love painting is to scorn the truth.”65 That
it is an erotic object, an object of desire, so that its impossibility as a established in Philostratus’s book. 60
admirable modesty, indifferent to the antipictorial Conceptualist heat of truth, however, is something different from the intellect’s adequacy to
painting mixes with the impossibility of desire’s fulfillment. This fictional This distinction has many consequences, but perhaps the most the day, Ferrari simply said that God had not touched him—that the day reality. Rather, it speaks in a “low voice,” figuratively, as a sophism: it is
status, this nonexistence or falsehood, recalls age-old Western ideas far-reaching is the feeling that every embodied image is a thing before it was his turn, God’s “hand was enjoying itself making the mounds, val- “a logos whose function is not to distinguish but to confuse things, that
about art: in making his painting something it is not, Ferrari could have it is a representation, and that every representation exists in the uni- leys, buttocks of Alafia and was so enthralled with Alafia that He did seeks not to circumscribe what it names with univocal definitions but
been unwittingly following Cennino Cennini’s fifteenth-century formula- verse of cognitive intentions—that is, it is a mental image, a weightless, not want to remove His hand even though it was my turn; He refused rather to formulate the relationships between things and ideas, which
tion of the task of the painter as making visible what had not seemed deobjectified entity. This means that every image administers its own to take His hand away and He refused to touch me.” Ferrari says that can only be expressed through ambiguity.”66
to exist.58 This is the claim of the text of Cuadro escrito: that what Ferrari conversion into a description, an ekphrasis. Residing in that conversion he cannot paint because of an ontological irony. It is worth emphasiz- The final sentences of Cuadro escrito are explicit about Ferrari’s
would have painted, had he been able to, would have been “true and as is the possibility of the image’s intellectual circulation and interpreta- ing, as a special quality of Cuadro escrito, his radical idiosyncrasy, his sophism: had it been possible, had God touched him, he would have
such nonexistent,” as he wrote in his notebook. tion. All images have this capability of existing somewhere other than inability to serve as a universal model; “Only in me, León Ferrari, is paint- created a painting that set out “to attain the obvious confusion of the
I would argue, then, that Cuadro escrito is the manifesto of an the world, being something other than a thing among things. In order ing impossible,” his text implies. Yet by creating this work renouncing truth.” It was in this sense that Schendel, too, suspended the image,
unusual return to the origins of the Western visual tradition, where the for the image to circulate through its description, it has to stop being painting, Ferrari also unwittingly made not the last painting—as so many in favor of what remains of language when it is treated like a corpo-
contradictions of text and image—as well as their fatal attractions, their an image-as-thing and become an image-as-verb, the mentalization times in art history—but the first one. This is not the cave-dwelling figure real body: a calligraphic gesture that both connects and disconnects,
mutual desire for each other—are always simultaneously present. One of an image. And it was the Imagines that put this issue in play, for whom Maurice Merleau-Ponty imagined going to the farthest reach of a binding of language, a prelinguistic, constellated configuration of
might argue that the Western representational tradition (that is, the Philostratus, to write the book, invented the fiction of an image, or painting’s future,62 but rather the repetition, at the end of that future, of weightless, arbitrary alphabets and palimpsests, of unclaimed words
visual tradition founded in the Renaissance) began in writing, for beyond actually a series of images, that had never been things. His images Philostratus’s founding gesture: a written picture, a supposed image. and letters that have fallen out of orbit.67 The work of Ferrari and
the ruins and remnants of ancient painting, beyond the surviving frag- exist only within and through language, as if they constituted a distinct Cuadro escrito, however, should also be added to the class of Schendel, and particularly of Schendel, shows an empty, mute substra-
ments unraveled by time—bits of murals, pieces of floor, imagined cop- world of language that language itself had engendered—as if language “last paintings,” the interminable archive of painting’s end. Here that tum that the signs that remain in it may once again inhabit with their
ies of ancient masterpieces—what we are most of all left with is written could produce images and not the other way around. final work is once again reduced, as in Philostratus, to the description full power: paper, its expanses and deserts.
sources, including a foundational book by an uncertain author: the Ferrari made Cuadro escrito during one of painting’s recurring twi- and idea uttered by a whispering personal voice. According to Cuadro This is how we may appreciate Schendel’s two greatest bodies
Imagines attributed to Philostratus, and written around the third cen- lights, one of the many endings in its convoluted history of influences, escrito, though, this obsolescence of painting, besides being personal, is of paper works, the Droguinhas and Trenzinho. The former—a repertory
tury a.d. Throughout the history of visual art in Europe, Philostratus’s appropriations, and interpretations. The object quality of the work lies in also metaphysical; that is the irony of Ferrari’s text. An artist has missed of strings and ties, of links connecting only to each other—finds com-
book served as a guide, and all of the pictures he described were reat- the calligraphic materiality of its writing, the textual quality with which it his encounter with God. The end of painting is announced less as an plexity in the insignificant, and is an abyssal archaeology intimately
tempted many times, as if painting had set out to reinvent its birth. Yet describes the impossibility of painting, an impossibility phrased as both ending than as a nonbeginning, as something that never took place in concerned with writing, its mythic origins and essential rejections.
the book of course contained no real images, just verbal descriptions personal and radical. In place of the impossible painting Ferrari exhibits someone. Ferrari’s written picture contains a double image: the image Trenzinho, on the other hand, exposes its immaculate body of paper
of them—and hermeneutic analysis has established the fictiveness of his Churrigueresque description, his ekphrasis of a supposed image. Let of painting’s impossibility and the image of an impossible painting. This like stolen goods, a tabula rasa that once would have harbored the
these descriptions, which are all in the end verbal fantasies.59 It is a us be clear: the announcement of the end of painting is an age-old con- radical gesture transcends metaphysical impossibility by casting rep- marks of writing but now, instead, presents its own nudity, its own void,
paradox that this collection of fantasies facilitated the development stant. For Pliny, completing his Naturalis Historia around 77 a.d., painting resentation as the imitation of a divine gesture: I, as God, despite God, in the form of veils and shrouds.
of the ontological distinction between the image as a physical object was a “now expiring” art. It was threatened in Byzantium, in the Koran, make myself visible through the word. In his essay “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Derrida writes that
32 tangled alphabets

regression in dreams represents a “path back into the landscape of writ- Schendel actually titled some of her early works Bordados, or “embroi-
ing. But not a writing which simply transcribes, a stony echo of muted deries,” and Gego returned constantly, in sculpture and in drawing, to
words, but a lithography before words: metaphonetic, nonlinguistic, fabrics, nets, and weaves. Her work, though, is conjugated in terms
alogical.” One might say that Schendel’s Monotipias represent exactly
68
of deferral—of the center, of completion, of the border or edge. For
this “lithography before words.” If so, one of their poetic keys may be Schendel, on the other hand, the knot is literal, static, solid: it is the
found in her incised paintings of the early 1960s (plate 11), in which we word as a tie, a link, and it is also, in the Droguinhas, simply a knot
can imagine echoed the same originary motion of drawing or impressing formation, a knot knotted only with itself, connecting to nothing
that we have discussed in relation to Ferrari—a motion that the invented (fig. 30). In this sense the Droguinhas not only materialize language but
technique of the Monotipias transfers to the fragile surface of Japanese suspend it, producing silence—not the silence that precedes words
paper. The marks in these works—scrawls, lines, points, constellations of and voices but the silence they leave in their absence, once they have
vowels, thresholds, arrows, ellipses, words—are almost a magical image, already lived.
an acheiropoietos: an accumulation that emerges from the depths of the The idea that language is a transparent, utterly reliable tool of
paper and soaks through its thickness, like Christ’s blood or sweat on analysis, let alone of psychoanalysis, depends on innocent optimism.
the Shroud of Turin. The Droguinhas, to the contrary, suggest that some knots can never be
Sometime in 1965, Schendel called her young daughter, Ada, untied, that there is and always will be a definitive, primordial confusion
and some local children into her studio and asked them, under her impossible to reduce to transparency. In Brazilian argot, a droguinha is
instruction, to crumple and twist pieces of Japanese paper into ropes, an insignificant little thing, a trifle, but a better word than “insignificant”
which they then knotted and reknotted to make the three-dimensional in this case would be “senseless,” the senselessness of some soft yet
doodles that are the Droguinhas (plates 67, 69, 71, 73, 74). According to impenetrable matter—for the shapes of the Droguinhas resemble noth-
Pascal Quignard, in an essay on the second-century Roman grammar- ing identifiable, nothing that makes sense. It is interesting to note that
ian and rhetorician Marcus Cornelius Fronto, logos, language, is a kind droguinha, this affectionate name for something that merits no name,
of legein, a knot, tie, or link.69 In Homer, too, the word or sign, and the is the diminutive of the Portuguese droga, drug. This in turns leads us
song or voice, are related to the knot. Quignard elsewhere cites the back to the pharmakon (drug) of the Greek Sophists—the seductive,
scene in the Odyssey in which Odysseus has his men plug their ears to persuasive, potentially misleading power of language, to which Plato
protect them from the song of the sirens, which he himself risks hear- opposed logos. In the Phaedrus Plato is ambivalent about the word
ing as long as he is lashed to the mast with ropes at three places: his pharmakon, which posits writing as a drug, a remedy or medicine for the
hands, feet, and chest.70 Not only is the word Homer uses for “chest” memory; in fact the god of writing is also the god of medicine. But Plato
kithara, a kind of lyre, Quignard points out, but the Greek word for the is suspicious of writing, which he never presents as entirely benign,
way the ropes around him are tightened is the root of our “harmony.” associating it with magic and intoxication. “Writing—or, if you will, the
It is also notable that when Odysseus is untied from the mast, the word pharmakon,” in Derrida’s reading, “can only displace or even aggravate
used for “untie,” or “loosen,” is analusis. Quignard comments, “As it the ill. Such will be, in its logical outlines, the objection . . . to writing:
turns out, the word analysis appears for the first time in a Greek text.”71
under pretext of supplementing memory, writing makes one even more
I have elsewhere used this ancient story to discuss the work of forgetful; far from increasing knowledge, it diminishes it. Writing does
Gego,72 like Schendel a European immigrant to Latin America (in her not answer the needs of memory, it aims to the side, does not reinforce
case Venezuela), and an artist using ties and knots during the same the mnème (memory), but only hypomnèsis (remembrance).”73 As such,
period. Embroidery seems to have been in the mind of both artists; writing is the weapon of the sophist.

30. Mira Schendel

Untitled from the series Droguinhas (Little nothings). 1960s
Japanese paper, dimensions variable, c. 13 3/4" (35 cm) fully extended
Private collection
 pérez-oramas 35

For Derrida, pharmakon is a “a substance, with all that that word For Schendel, the only way to make transparency visible was to
can connote in terms of matter with occult virtues, cryptic depths work with its residual opacity. In 1969, the same year she first exhibited
refusing to submit their ambivalence to analysis, already paving the her Objetos gráficos (fig. 32), at the São Paulo and Venice biennials, she
way for alchemy—if we didn’t have eventually to come to recognize it wrote a note in a photograph album of a trip she had recently taken to
as antisubstance itself: that which resists any philosopheme, indefi- Nordkapp, Norway, the northernmost point in Europe, where she had
nitely exceeding its bounds as nonidentity, nonessence, nonsubstance; “Whichever word you speak—/you owe/to destruction.”75 In 1961, after a seen the midnight sun: “São Paulo Biennial, September 1969: this is
granting philosophy by that very fact the inexhaustible adversity of visit to Tübingen, where Friedrich Hölderlin endured his mental deterio- an attempt to show that the ‘other side’ of transparency is in its front
what funds it and the infinite absence of what founds it.”74 The inevi- ration into silence, the great Romanian poet wrote a celebrated poem and that the ‘other world’ is this one.”77 By now, “this world” was really
table ambiguity of language resides in its materialization, its material in which he used the eloquence of poetry to defy the muteness to where Schendel was anchored. She had given up most of her previ-
resonance, phoneme or sign, hieroglyph or trace. To claim mastery which, according to Theodor Adorno, the Nazis had condemned it: ously passionate Catholicism and was agnostic, believing only in pres-
through this ambiguity is to claim mastery through the writing of it, ent substance—the body of art, the body of the world, her own body, the
those piles of words, or, if you will, through writing as piles of words. Came, if there confused body of language. The “‘other side’ of transparency” suggests
The Droguinhas, thick knots of a uniform material capable of carrying came a man, a transparency that is, above all else, a body, another form of materiality.
signs and symbols, are a perfect image of that pile, that thickness—a came a man to the world, today, with It is something we can circumscribe, delimit, turn, caress, see from all
sophistic, literal, unexpected image. the patriarchs’ angles—and in a horizontal hierarchy of the senses, all those perspec- suddenly rushes forward, as Schendel says. Pictures yet not planes,
The opposite of the knotting of language in the Droguinhas—writing light-beard: he could, tives, all those points of view, are equal. There is no longer a preferred they hang like objects, exposed bodies around which we can walk,
in ties, voices in folds—would be Trenzinho (fig. 31). From a dangling if he spoke of this direction from which to interpret the world and its discourses. The only viewing their sides, seeing and feeling their thickness. They are written
cord—the string of a kithara, perhaps—hang transparent veils of paper, time, he transparency we have to embrace is dark, opaque, and confused—like sculptures as well as pictures, then, and also palimpsests, which, how-
repeated and impeccable, like shrouds expecting an image or sign, could the pool embraced by Narcissus in Leon Battista Alberti’s metaphor of ever, require no work to expose, for they already reveal, in one sublime
tongues of silence. Trenzinho too embodies the silent matter of lan- only babble and babble, the invention of painting, a story that, for Graziani, constitutes a visual yet laborious instant, the thickness of the time, the writing, the traces
guage, but this time not as suspension or desertion but as an awaiting, ever- ever- sophism. 78
and strokes, that constitute them.
an absolute availability. In this sense it is optimistic, yet also terrify- moremore. The Objetos gráficos, those composites of inscribed paper and
ing. Schendel never based work on personal pain; she detested the (“Pallaksch. Pallaksch.”)76 clear acrylic, are metaphors for—or perhaps accurate images of—this In November of 1976, to protect his family from the violent junta that
narcissism of suffering. But she lived through some of history’s dark- dark, confused transparency, in which language becomes “cosmic had seized power in Argentina that spring, Ferrari had to flee his native
est moments—persecution, refugee camps, the flight from the death With its veils, empty spaces, and transparencies that turn opaque, word dust.” Here Schendel was pursuing “the idea of doing away with
79
country for São Paulo, where he would stay for the next fifteen years,
camps—as if they were altogether typical. like the density of silence, Trenzinho is one of the few works of visual art back and front, before and after, a certain idea of more or less arguable joining the same artistic milieu as Schendel. (In fact the two artists
From its title Trenzinho sounds innocuous enough: a little that come close to Celan’s poem. Like “pallaksch,” the nonsense word simultaneity, the problem of temporality, etc., spatiotemporality, etc.”80 once exhibited together, in a late-1970s show of art made by Xerox
train—like a toy, or a well-known section of one of Heitor Villa-Lobos’s that Hölderlin repeated in his confinement at Tübingen—a word both Yet not only do these objects contain constellations of letters, signs, machine.) In Brazil, curiously, Ferrari soon resumed making the kind
Bachianas brasileiras. But the train’s destination is unknown, like that of resonant and mute, that is to say meaningless—Trenzinho comprises and liberated, deconstructed words, they are also theoretical objects of metal sculpture he had produced in the early 1960s. Some of these
the trains that passed through a burning Europe, their freight the living latent nonwords; remember that in the Monotipias, made on the same opening up a variety of often contradictory possibilities. Their texts are new works, based mainly on square plans and rectangular, elongated
dead. One cannot help but connect Trenzinho to the issue, at the time Japanese paper, the words and brushstrokes emerged from the semi- legible but unintelligible—in other words, purely visual, and as such volumes, were monumental in scale, made sounds, and were designed
quite potent, of whether art or poetry is possible after the Holocaust. If transparent thickness of the paper itself, as we may imagine a veronica, untranslatable. The works are also windows, as transparent and per- to be played in performance (fig. 33); they developed through a
silence could be elevated to the sublime, Trenzinho would manifest it. the vera ikon or face of Christ, emerging from a shroud. In this sense fectly squared off as any Alberti would have imagined at the moment logic of accumulation, repetition, and juxtaposition, manifesting den-
No one has more powerfully broken that silence, more pre- Trenzinho seems like a work of anticipation, the endless anticipation of of perspective’s first emergence, but their transparency—their plastic sity through strips of iron rather than signs or letters. Despite their
cisely named it in the full dimension of its tragedy, than Paul Celan: a voice. skin—leads to no view through, no vision of anything beyond them- abstraction, for Ferrari these sculptures were representations, tools for
selves. They lead, at most, to the “‘other side of transparency,” which visualizing impossible dwellings, cages, enclosures, labyrinths. Their

31. Mira Schendel

Trenzinho (Little train, detail; see plate 77). 1965. 32. Mira Schendel
Japanese paper and nylon, dimensions variable Untitled from the series Objetos gráficos (Graphic objects). 1967
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Richard Zeisler Oil transfer drawing and transfer type on thin Japanese
Bequest, gift of John Hay Whitney, and Marguerite K. Stone paper between transparent acrylic sheets, 33. Ferrari in performance, 14 Noites de Performance
Bequest (all by exchange) and gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros 39 3/8 x 39 3/8 x 3/8" (100 x 100 x 1 cm). (14 nights of performance), SESC Fábrica da Pompéia,
and Mimi Haas through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund Private collection São Paulo, 1981
36 tangled alphabets pérez-oramas 37

connection to the Letraset drawings (1979–80; plate 110) and, particu- little by little every day, without making models or drafts, just confusion of the truth, the possibility of ambiguity in language—the art-
larly, to the Heliografías (Heliographs, 1982–83; plates 97–99) is clear: add things, like a prism that grows slowly on every side, and not ists add postponement, errata, cancellation, erasure, duration, time.
the sculptures are models of absurdity, figures for how very crazy the take anything out, even if you are horrified by what you did two
world was and is. In this sense they may be seen as three-dimensional years or twenty years earlier. This way you have put together the The Wounded Voice In 1976, when Alicia and León Ferrari were forced
equivalents of the written pictures that Ferrari began late in 1979, this sensibilities of an entire life, the great discoveries as well as the to take their family into exile in Brazil, their son Ariel stayed behind. The
time as paintings on wood and, later, on high-impact acrylic laminate— inevitable disappointments. The best thing would be to do this in following year, his pregnant girlfriend returned from São Paulo to look
the same support that had lent both transparency and stiffness to a jail, but with a window to see the faces in the café across the for him. Neither the young couple nor the child survived Argentina’s
Schendel’s Objetos gráficos. street. Do nothing more than that. And die satisfied with this tan- “dirty war,” a crime run from the corridors of power and with the com-
In that Ferrari’s works on acrylic are connected to the idea of the gible confusion, which your children can carry on. Or else do it in plicity, and worse, of the spurious authorities and institutions of the
palimpsest, their tangled, bewildering superimpositions of signs and a big group, whether locked up or outside in a plaza, so that it is nation. Many years later it was revealed that Ariel had been murdered
writings also bear a conceptual resemblance to the Objetos gráficos eternally unfinished, like the cathedrals, like Rome.81 by the naval officer Alfredo Astiz, an infamous abductor and torturer in
(e.g. plate 86). If we can say that the principles of Ferrari’s written draw- Jorge Rafael Videla’s regime.
ings extend to Schendel’s Monotipias, as though his Cuadro escrito Like Torre de Babel (Tower of Babel, 1964; plate 72)—and like It is impossible to know another person’s pain. Not even Ferrari’s
could have been their theoretical model, we may likewise say that the Schendel’s Objetos gráficos—Ferrari’s sculptures and towers of the late angriest work can come close to bringing home to us such a loss.
works he began in the early 1980s are Objetos gráficos in every sense, 1970s correspond perfectly to a babelist aesthetic. Even when, on fin- Ferrari, like Schendel, refuses to fetishize pain or to exploit sorrow,
as though her works in turn could have been models for them. Indeed ishing Torre de Babel, he confessed that “babelism cannot be done but where she withdrew into herself, searching her own reserves of
all of these bodies of work materialize the idea of “babelism,” a kind of alone, because the confusion comes out orderly,” he was thinking of light, he instead has examined external miseries, denouncing political
scrambled opacity, which Ferrari identified in the early 1960s and which something deeper than the idea—which he more than once tried—of violence and the distant authors of crime: army officers, prelates, politi-
really sums up his entire poetic oeuvre: “To create something of three bringing a group of artists together to create a kind of monumental cians. Some of those closest to him believe that Ariel’s death pushed
dimensions that is enclosed within a simple shape, like a cylinder or cadavre exquis.82 Babelism requires not mere collective authorship but him toward gravitas, where previously he had been sarcastic and ironic
prism,” he wrote in late 1963, real confusion: “To create something un-unified, with different sensibil- about the totems of our supposed human order: God, pontiffs, heroes,
ities—it can’t be done in a short time, because sensibility (‘the truth’) heads of state, courts, the global bureaucracy, indifferent nations and
as one creates a drawing on a rectangular piece of paper. The is just one thing (in that period of time), which means that you have to silent governments.84
edges are unimportant but must be simple, straight, so that you wait a good while for that sensibility to change so that you can con- In a deeper sense, Ferrari came to see that the Argentine repres-
can put all sorts of things inside them, from all sorts of schools— tinue with a new one (with the risk of no longer liking the babelism and sion was not a political accident but a deliberate project of the state, By the early 1990s his art was outspokenly denouncing Christianity, its
as long as they are jumbled, and if any of these things has a abandoning the entire endeavor), or do it with a number of people.”83 and one in which the Catholic church was complicit. Toward the end representatives and accomplices, and ultimately God as the architects
shape of its own, it should be made more complicated by putting The kind of babelism described here explains a fair amount of Ferrari’s of his exile, as he immersed himself in readings on and of the Bible of crimes against humanity.
something on top, so that in the end nothing except the simple aesthetic evolution, the inventions that he drops and then picks up and the Church fathers while also researching newspaper archives on Seeing works of art incorporate Christian messages, Ferrari
outside surface is easily understood. Just like the thoughts and again later, at other times, with other sensibilities, so that the multi- mass crime and genocide in different places and times, what began to tore reproductions of them apart to be rearranged in collages (fig. 34).
sensations (opinions, passions, hatred, joys, fears) . . . that go in plicity that constitutes us as people is manifest as visible sediments. take shape was an ordinary father’s legitimate judgment on the repres- These powerful works drive toward clarity rather than confusion, which
there, intricately united, forming this skeleton, this humus, that Returning to a body of work one seems to have finished with, but treat- sion’s perpetrators, whose freedom at that point depended on charity—a is rare for him, yet like all the deepest, most human voices, their voice is
hides beneath the skin. [The idea is] to make objects that reveal ing it as something new—this habit, also practiced by Schendel, casts despicable amnesty entailing opportunistic deals, weak concessions, a wounded one that exposes its powerlessness. To become complete,
and then hide things about themselves, in any material as long babelism as a poetic vision not of repetition but of the superimposition and the sublimation of the truth. This mediocre justice was meted out by to touch us, it must use the mute devices of signing and pointing. So
as it reveals something of what it hides, as mixed up as the truth of diverse, mutable, diachronic, progressive sensibilities and elements, public authorities convinced that they were saving democracy. Ferrari’s angels use trumpets and spears to indicate piles of corpses (plates
and as the contradiction of this very intention. Or to do some- like strata that foreclose the possibility of attaining the desired result. beliefs (or disbeliefs) came to include a view of the sacred Judeo- 124, 126), and the cynical front pages of L’Osservatore Romano, the
thing your whole life, as meticulous as life itself, and add things To Babel as the collective noise of all the languages of the world—the Christian texts as perverse advocates of exclusion, torture, and crime.
34. León Ferrari
Torturas (Tortures). August 1, 2004
Cut-and-pasted printed paper (from the newspaper Página/12, June 13, 2004)
on printed paper (Jacobo Molay en el tormento [Jacobo Molay tortured],
from Alfonso Torres de Castilla, Historia de las Persecuciones
políticas y religiosas en Europa [Religious and political
persecutions in Europe, 1864]), 14 9/16 x 11" (37 x 28 cm)
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
38 tangled alphabets pérez-oramas 39

Vatican newspaper, are juxtaposed against both dark worldly events existent image entirely through language, though a language as mute structure, however, would be to simplify the work, which is above all a
and the eternal tortures announced in the Bible (plate 129). Meanwhile as an image. And he made this creation invoke a sensual gesture of political and theological manifesto on God’s silence, the inaudibility of
the angry divinities can do nothing to slow human sexuality, a never- physical touch, denouncing language’s limitations. The Datiloscritos, his word. Ondas paradas de probabilidade was accompanied by a bibli-
ending orgy, so that figures from art-historical Annunciations instead images made up of language, are similarly tactile in that their surfaces cal text, taken from I Kings chapter 19:
come to adore the phallus, symbol of reproduction (plate 128). In some are marked by the physical impression of the typewriter keys strik-
works these images are overprinted with texts in Braille (plates 134, ing the paper, inverting the raised dots of Braille. In both cases signs And a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in
135), the language of the blind, inviting us to touch them, to wear them become things, and things—shapes, figures, supports—become signs. pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the
out from touching them. In the end, this tactile gaze is posited as the In both cases the world falls silent, and makes us fall silent as well. In wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in
only, last device for understanding the labyrinth of human existence. the face of the world’s horrors and tragedies, and of certain kinds of the earthquake:
anguish or solitude, pointing may be the only remaining option. And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the
During Ferrari’s exile in São Paulo, Schendel was seeking relief from A wounded voice needs a body—by definition mute—to achieve fire: and after the fire a still small voice.
her own pain in the same city. Some of her densest works—for some its object. A wounded voice is a whisper that is aware of its power- And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his
viewers, the works of hers that most clearly manifest the impotence of lessness. In 1969, when Schendel showed in the Bienal de São Paulo, face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of
language and voice—come from the late 1970s: collages using Letraset many artists had condemned it for accepting sponsorship from Brazil’s the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said,
letters that fuse to become strange signs (plate 140). In other draw- authoritarian regime. Whatever her reasons—perhaps she felt she had What doest thou here, Elijah?”85
ings of the period Schendel offers a personal version of mathemati- already seen the worst—we may imagine that she took the long view
cal theory, equations suggesting babelian orgies, voices upon voices, and decided that the possibility of a voice, the possibility of saying Perhaps Schendel—though certainly not Ferrari—would agree
impenetrable mountains of words. The Datiloscritos (Typed writings; something, was more important than choosing silence as a protest. with Simone Weil’s remark that “total obedience to time obliges God to
fig. 35) involve obsessively repeated letters and signs in the style of The piece she showed at the Bienal, a crucial work, happened to be bestow eternity.”86 In any event, in the landscape of modern art in the
concrete poetry, particularly that of the British Benedictine monk Dom about the voice—the wounded voice, the whispering voice, of God. Americas, Ondas paradas de probabilidade is an exception: the work of
Sylvester Houédard, whom Schendel got to know in the late 1960s. Yet In Ondas paradas de probabilidade—Antigo Testamento, Livro dos a visual artist steeped in writing, an artist who agonizes over scripture,
as writings Schendel’s Datiloscritos are illegible. These are not poems Reis I, 19, a mass of nylon threads hung from the ceiling of the gallery, debating within it, with it, against it. An impossible transparency, mani-
but abstract drawings featuring careful geometric shapes. Repetition, shaping a geometric structure that was both opaque and transparent, festly opaque and stained—impure—is the only form Schendel seems
we know, was for the Minimalists the quintessential anticompositional like a rain shower. Light filtered through the nylon all the way to the to have found for depicting or suggesting the urgency of the issues
device; here, though, repetitive operations become thoughtful, delicate floor, where the threads, longer than the height of the ceiling, doubled carried here.
forms of composition. over like waves on the sand. The piece should of course be seen in the Formalists have had trouble with Schendel’s celebrated drawing
The Datiloscritos are also tactile works, a kind of blind writing. context of the constellation of “penetrables” made in Latin America series Homenagem a Deus—pai do ocidente (Homage to God—father
Schendel made them when she had insomnia—she would call friends between 1963 and 1969: Hélio Oiticica’s Núcleos (Nuclei, 1960–63), Gran of the West, 1975; plate 122). In this, one of the most gestural of all
in the middle of the night, waking both them and her neighbors (fig.. Núcleo (Great nucleus, 1966), Tropicália (1967), and Edén (Eden, 1969); Schendel’s works, thick brushstrokes revealing the physical quality of
36). Where Ferrari’s Braille works evoke the eloquence of the blind, a Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Cámaras de cromosaturación, installations of col- picture-making share space with typewritten Old Testament quota-
language that we physically caress like a body, Schendel’s Datiloscritos ored light begun in 1965; Jesús Soto’s Penetrables of 1967 (formally sim- tions, barely visible from a distance. Interpretations of the work as a
suggest the repetitive mechanical noise of a typewriter, percussive, ilar to Ondas paradas de probabilidade); Lygia Clark’s A casa é o corpo manifesto against phallocentric Western monotheism may be exces-
inarticulate, yet tactile and incisive at the same time. The bodies of (The house is the body, 1968); Gego’s Reticulárea (Reticularea, 1969), sive in their ascription of a feminist message. Rather, Homenagem a
work relate, however, in that both involve a desire to say what the voice to say nothing of works by Cildo Meireles, Antonio Dias, and Eugenio Deus evokes a moment of closure in Schendel’s religious art: after 1975,
or word can say no longer. In working with Braille, Ferrari brought the Espinoza. To consider Ondas paradas de probabilidade only from the she would return to color and painting, to matter and to the void, where
intellectual project of Cuadro escrito to a culmination, producing a non- formal or phenomenological perspective of its spectacular penetrable she, like the prophet Elijah, had always searched for a voice.

35. Mira Schendel

Untitled from the series Datiloscritos (Typed writings). 1974
Typewriting and ink on paper, 19 11/16 x 14 3/16" (50 x 36 cm)
Private collection

36. Schendel’s studio, São Paulo, early 1960s

 pérez-oramas 41

It is with the void that Schendel’s career ends, in the surprising operation of language and more with the act of language, with its radi- that, instead of naming what needs to be named, requires a mute, point the way—this, here, the world, look. In the end, human language
Sarrafos (Splints) series of the late 1980s (fig. 37). These white mono- cal effect on those who use it. indexical physical gesture: “That,” “That thing there,” “How beautiful,” must contain a sacramental dimension that we hope can transform
chromes include attached black bars, like useless, incomplete frames, One could argue that the entire expressive tradition since the “Look,” “Hoc est corpus meum” (This is my body). and be transforming through the radical particularity of its enuncia-
mute gestures that might redeem the silence of painting. If an empty, Renaissance may respond to this theoretical metaphor of the work The inexpressible, then, is less sublime than nameless, and tion. Ferrari and Schendel seem to have understood the two minimal
indifferent white painting is metaphorically mute, the surfaces of the of art as enunciation. Robert Klein, speaking of Giordano Bruno’s De as such is close to the “click,” the first spoken phoneme of indexical requirements for this: first, to push past language’s neutrality, embody-
Sarrafos are the height of silence. But they also include a “noise”: a vinculis in genere, explains this eloquently: demonstration. According to the Grammaire générale et raisonnée de ing language in the unrepeatable instance in which, along with what is
projecting black structure like Adam’s extra rib, built not into the side of Port-Royal, of 1660, “As men have recognized that it is occasionally being said, it says the “I”; and second, to face the inexpressible with
the painting but into the field. It is as though paintings, even the most Humanism had posed the problem of the relations between idea useless or in bad taste to speak of themselves . . . in order not to find the tools they have.93
silent ones, were destined to generate another body: “The other is born and form which expresses it in rhetoric, logic, poetry, and the themselves obliged to name that person to whom they are speaking . . .
from my side, by a sort of propagation by cuttings or subdivision,” visual arts; it endeavored to join the “what” to the “how,” to find or . . . to repeat the names of other people and other things that are Epilogue In 1964, Paulo Celso was ordained a Dominican friar.94 When
writes Merleau-Ponty, “as the first other, says Genesis, was made from for formal beauty a justification more profound than the need for being spoken of, pronouns were invented . . . among them exist some taking the habit, he adopted the name “Pablo,” a kind of personal pun:
a part of Adam’s body.”87 These elements interrupting the monochrome decoration. But, as far as it went, it never denied that in all these that point, like a finger, to the thing that is being spoken of.”91 And so, Pablo (Paul) is still Paulo (also Paul) but refers not to Paulo Celso but to
plane are like great shadows, or limbs that point to something. In this fields “what is expressed” must be present prior to its expression. inadvertently, toward the end of the century of Descartes, the gram- Paul of Tarsus. During his apostolate, Alain Badiou writes, Paul argued
sense they may be to the silence of painting what the indexical is to That is why, speaking simplistically, humanism came to an end in marians of Port-Royal introduced the complex matter of the neutral against both the written, interpretable ”sign” required by the Jews and
language: mute mechanisms for showing that indicate just what they the sciences just as the method of investigation became fruitful index. As Louis Marin writes, it was a question of establishing the model the thinkable, analyzable “wisdom” sought by the Greeks; when he
hide, like the pronouns of ordinary speech. by itself, and in art just as the execution—the maniera—became of a linguistic sign in which a neutral pronoun heralded a great mystery, spoke of “the foolishness of preaching” he had in mind what could not
These simultaneous functions of indication and occultation an autonomous value. When artistic consciousness reached such the transformation of one body into another: Hoc est corpus meum, be accommodated, was disproportionate, to both of these totalities.95
are fundamental for both Ferrari and Schendel, who practice a kind a stage, around 1600, it found no art theory that could account the phrase signaling the transubstantiation of the Host in the Catholic All that existed for Paul was the radical singularity of what happens, the
of embodied, personalized language—a “language body,” at once the for it. There was only the ancient natural magic—that is to say, mass. “The Eucharist,” Marin adds, happening, the event. And as Badiou says, “One of the phenomena by
language of the body and the body of language. Ferrari and Schendel a general aesthetic unaware of itself, which Bruno hastily devel- which one recognizes an event is that it is like a point of the real that
might have been working against Merleau-Ponty’s remark, “The won- oped in the magnificent essay he entitled De vinculis in genere.90 situates itself, in theoretical meta-language, at the base of the puts language into deadlock.”96
derful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion.” 88
In text and the drawing in “language-objects,” in the place where One day in 1964, Friar Pablo of Tarsus dropped in on Friar Chico, his
other words, the signs in this work do not lead us to forget their physi- Of course, all works of art within this historical and theoretical language, as the present-day spoken word, transforms and is prior at the Dominican convent in São Paulo. When Friar Chico opened
cal presence. On the contrary: they confront us with their opacity and framework—even the most impersonal and neutral Conceptual puns— transformed: it transforms the products of material consumption the door, Friar Pablo saw in his room a written picture by Schendel,
density, forcing us to remember them. Like Artaud, in Derrida’s read- are equivalent to acts of enunciation, insofar as they demonstrate into products of spiritual consumption, but it too is transformed an image of waving drawn lines that ran from one end of the sup-
ing of him, Schendel and Ferrari seem to struggle to restore letter to a personal use of language. The difference in the art of Ferrari and into the very subject of its enunciation, into consumable blood port to the other and contained a quotation from Homer: “They did not
speech, speech to breath, breath to body, body to gesture, gesture to Schendel—and surely of other artists whom one might look at from and body . . . and the problem, in every case, is that of recogniz- know the depth of the sea they were crossing.” Friar Pablo expressed
life.89 All of their works—even those in which language leaves room for this perspective—is that here the material made visible is precisely ing how a body can be a sign and a real sign at that, and how, on a desire to meet the artist. And so it happened that not long after his
visible drawing or painting—feature a breach, like a voice, impossible and primordially linguistic, and is manifest in the disruption that all the other hand, a sign can be a body and a true body. 92
first encounter with a work by Schendel, Friar Chico told him that she
to regulate, which disturbs the statement’s stability with the peculiar- enunciations, as personal and unrepeatable acts, effect on the body was having a party. Friar Chico himself was unable to attend and Friar
ity of an incarnating gesture. If the language operations of canonical of discourse. Paradoxically, the height of this disruption is muteness, We need not debate the Eucharistic transubstantiation here, Pablo was to go in his place.
Conceptual art are typically neutral, Ferrari and Schendel reveal the the form of silence that becomes visible when signs are illegible, when even as it relates to the furious, magnificent works in which Ferrari When Celso turned up at the party, no one greeted or recog-
disruptiveness and density rather than the clarity and transparency of the hand that draws them trembles. It is in muteness, though, that denies it. But the issue of language continues to be that of how to nized him. Trying to slip by unnoticed in the artsy crowd, he went to
language, the point where language appears as enunciation, becom- we sense we might find language’s origin, as in those lines of broken embody it—how to make it a body, how to make a body from it, how to the kitchen, where help was needed, and began distributing canapés,
ing the corporeal symptom of an accidental, untheorizable, singular, stones that lay out the plans of great but ruined buildings. And after all embody through it. With Ferrari and Schendel, this is a matter of written carrying trays piled with hors d’oeuvres and wine among the guests.
personal, subjective use. As such, their work has to do less with the language’s discursivity and excess, its high point may be the phrase paintings, eloquent mutenesses that we read with the skin, arrows that Suddenly a voice rang out, making everyone fall silent: “There is a

37. Mira Schendel

Untitled from the series Sarrafos (Splints). 1987
Synthetic polymer paint on wood,
35 7/16” x 8’ 7/8” x 4 5/16” (90 x 246 x 11 cm).
Museu de Arte Brasileira da FAAP, São Paulo
42 tangled alphabets pérez-oramas 43

Dominican among us,” announced Schendel. Celso stood frozen with Celso, she was hoping to find antimatter in matter that had exploded El-o-hi Shem; Mira-a-el, look at him, Mira a Elohi, look at Elohi. Look, if
his tray of wine glasses. Timidly he identified himself to the crowd, and or broken. But the thing about the story that interests me is the gesture you can, at what has no name. Perhaps the most radical form of touch-
to Schendel’s deep gaze, fortified by thick lenses encased in black of throwing a rock so as to touch and actually break something with it. ing what is named is to cover it with earthly matter until its pristine
frames. “That’s me,” he murmured. In the same loud voice, Schendel This is the kind of gesture that neither language, nor sign, nor wisdom, presence, the illusory form of its truth or threat, disappears—as Ferrari
inquired of Paulo: “What is a sacrament, to you?” nor knowledge can ever manage, for none of them ever touches any- covers images by Michelangelo and Giotto, images claiming to name
Celso said nothing. Instead, in silence, he took a wine glass and thing concretely, much less suddenly transforms it. To touch things— God, or the nameless figures of the Last Judgment, with base worldly
drank it down in a single gulp, a single gesture. Then he said, “This. This with language—seems to me one of the endeavors in the work of Ferrari stuff, the excrement of birds. Or as he molds shapes resembling human
is a sacrament to me.” Schendel may have burst out laughing; at any and Schendel. It is not a question of simply naming or repeating; it is a excrement and makes landscapes of them (plate 146). Or as he leaves
rate she seems to have said, before the party once again found noise question of using the word as a voice, a gesture, of inventing gestures our own bones exposed and mute (fig. 38), indecipherable signs of an
and voice, “I know you.” And they embraced. as words, touching words as stigmata of silence, indexing with the unsuspected language yet to come.
Celso and Schendel were friends until the early 1970s, when life mute body the thing that cannot be named.
took them down different paths. The military regime’s police raided the When Schendel heckled Celso at the party, asking this Dominican
São Paulo Dominican monastery in search of leftist leaders; the monks friar the meaning of the word “sacrament,” Friar Pablo of Tarsus
were jailed and tortured, and eventually Celso left the order to start a responded with an indexical statement: drinking every drop of wine in
family. Until then, though, the monk who sought redemption on earth his glass, he declared, “This. This is a sacrament.” When the Port-Royal
instead of in heaven, and the artist who sought transcendence in the theorists set out to define the sign, they made use of Christian theol-
present moment instead of in art, shared many days and evenings, ogy, specifically the indexical moment when the unspeakable becomes
each a constant pressure for the conversion of the other. flesh: “This is my body,” “This is my blood.” All names, all signs, want to
The interesting thing about this encounter between artist and name the way an index points: by touching. In fact none ever do this.
friar, though, is neither God nor theology, neither revolution nor conver- From here, perhaps, we may see “the foolishness of preaching” and
sion. It is ultimately “language in deadlock,” and the “foolishness of the dream of a language that might dilute the disciplinary boundaries
preaching.” between the visible and the legible, becoming a material, dense, infi-
When Schendel brought her drawing quoting Homer to the mon- nite, limitlessly malleable. Beyond a conceptualization of the enuncia-
astery to give to Friar Chico, he surprised her with tragic news: a dear tion, this would be the greatest contribution of Ferrari and Schendel:
friend of hers, Carlos Millán, and all of his family but for one son, had making us see the body of the voice in the mute body of language, in
just died when the car they were traveling in had plunged off a cliff into the indexical silence of signs that, while saying nothing, touch, so to
a river outside Rio de Janeiro. They did not know the depth of the sea speak, what they say.
they were crossing . . . . For Schendel the news was devastating. Not When Celso visited Schendel, seeing a new artwork, he would
only was Millán one of her closest friends, but she seems to have felt often say “Mira, que beleza!” (Mira, how beautiful!). He adds that the
a prophetic, ominous value in those words of Homer’s, which she had name “Mira,” in Portuguese as in Spanish, is a homonym of the word
written during an attack of insomnia at the same time that Millán and for “look,” a word both imperative and indexical, inviting us to look
his family were sinking in the water. It was in the realm of the premoni- at something that goes unnamed but that voice and body point out,
tion of death, then, that Celso and Schendel first met. and, as the Port-Royal logicians would remind us, also conceal: Mira
Celso remembers that late one night, despite the agoraphobia esto, mira aquello. Look at this, look at that. The name “Schendel,” on
from which she suffered, Schendel took him to a big empty field, where the other hand, in Celso’s Dominican hermeneutics, conceals the word
they smashed glass bottles by throwing rocks at them. According to “Elohi,” one of the biblical names for the unnamable God: Schen-d-el,

38. León Ferrari

Atado con alambre (Tied with wire). 2006
Polyurethane bones and wire, 39 3/8 x 19 11/16 x 19 11/16”
(100 x 50 x 50 cm)
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
44 tangled alphabets pérez-oramas 45

Endnotes “the humanistic model of artistic Vocabulaire européen des philosophies Cosac Naify, forthcoming in 2009), Schendel. Do espiritual à corporeidade, 52. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 62. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye Schendel, p. 15. See her text in the
1. See Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House composition in general,” Michael (Paris: Seuil, 2004), p. 366–67. Emile p. 72. p. 33. “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the and Mind,” trans. Carleton Dallery, present volume, p. 62.
of Language: A Critical Account of Baxandall argues, became the Benveniste distinguishes between 27. The issue of the limits and edges 41. Pope Paul VI, address to the Cardinal Aesthetic of Administration to the in James M. Edie, ed., The Primacy 81. León Ferrari, November 28, 1963,
Structuralism and Russian Formalism “period”—“the pattern of the grand the “énoncé”—the object or message of forms, as perceived through tone, Newman Academic Symposium, Critique of Institutions,” October 55 of Perception and Other Essays on Notebook 2.
(Princeton: at the University Press, neoclassical phrase.” See Baxandall, of a given text or utterance—and recurs in modern Brazilian art right Rome, 1975, online at www.vatican.va/ (Winter 1990):136–43. Phenomenological Psychology, the 82. Ibid., January 1, 1964.
1972), pp. v–vii, 3–39, 101–216. Giotto and the Orators: Humanist the “enunciation,” that text’s singular down to the present day, in the work holy_father/paul_vi/speeches/1975/ 53. The term “intentionality,” in the sense Philosophy of Art, History and Politics 83. Ibid.
2. See Geraldo Souza Dias, Mira Schendel Observers of Painting in Italy and the act of production. “Enunciation” of painters like Paulo Pasta and Paulo documents/hf_p-vi_spe_19750407_ of cognitive faculty (res sub specie (Evanston: Northwestern University 84. I owe this observation to a
(Paris: Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Discovery of Pictorial Composition concerns, then, the act of producing Monteiro. Naves has pointed out the symposium-newman_en.html. On intellectualis), has a medieval, Thomist Press, 1964), p. 190. conversation with the Argentine
Paume, 2001), p. 14. 1350–1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, text rather than the text produced. tremendous influence here of Giorgio the relationship between Schendel genealogy but has been revisited and 63. See Graziani, “‘La Verité en image,’” painter Luis Felipe Noé, a close friend
3. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual 1971), pp. 20–21, 100–101. For Benveniste, it is the singular act Morandi, which he believes was and Giovanni Battista Cardinal revised by such writers as Husserl p. 137. of León Ferrari’s. Buenos Aires, May
Art,” 1967, reprinted in Alexander 12. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: through which we take possession of transmitted through artists such as Montini, later Pope Paul VI, see Souza and more recently John R. Searle. See 64. Ibid., p. 139. 2008.
Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., An Essay on the Limits of Painting and our own linguistic capacity. It is the Schendel and Amilcar de Castro. See his Dias, Mira Schendel. Do Espiritual à Husserl, Logical Investigations (New 65. Philostrate, La Galerie de tableaux, 85. I Kings 19, 11–13.
Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology Poetry, 1766, Eng. trans. Edward Allen “individual conversion of language into essay in the present volume, and his A Corporeidade, p. 20. York: Routledge, 1970), 2:552–96 (esp. p. 9. 86. Simone Weil, La Connaissance
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), p. 12. McCormick (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, discourse.” See Benveniste, “L’Appareil forma dificil. Ensalos sobre arte brasileira 42. Schendel began the Droguinhas, first pp. 554, 558); Jacques Derrida, Speech 66. See Graziani, “‘La Verité en image,’” surnaturelle (Paris: Gallimard, 1959),
4. See Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The 1962). formel de l’énonciation,” Problèmes de (São Paulo: Atica, 2007), p. 252. titled Droguinhas Fenomenológicas, and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison pp. 140–42. p. 57.
Dematerialization of the Art Object 13. See Françoise Graziani, “‘La Vérité linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 28. Barthes, “Variations sur l’écriture,” pp. in 1965 and continued with them until (Evanston: Northwestern University 67. I have in mind here the poet Haroldo 87. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible
from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, en image’: L’Image sophistique,” in 1974), 2:79ff. Barthes stresses the 289–90. at least 1968. She also produced a Press, 1973), pp. 6, 52ff (esp. pp. 81–85); de Campos’s description of Schendel’s (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 86. Eng.
1973, reprint ed. Berkeley and Los Michel Costantini, Graziani, Stéphane importance of this distinction to the 29. Giunta has made acute connections handful of them in the 1980s. The best and Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in work as an “art of voids/where the trans. as The Visible and the Invisible,
Angeles: University of California Press, Rolet, et al., Le Défi de l’art. Philostrate, understanding of subjectivity as between Gagarín and newspaper source on the Droguinhas is Guy Brett, the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: at utmost redundancy begins to generate trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
1997). See also Frances Colpitt, “The Callistrate et l’image sophistique intertwined with language; see his pictures of the Russian astronaut Yuri who exchanged a series of letters the University Press, 1983), pp. 4–26, original information/an art of words Northwestern University Press, 1969),
Formalist Connection and Originary (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de “Pourquoi j’aime Benveniste,” Oeuvres Gagarin, who in 1961 became the first with the artist about them between 160–79. and quasi-words/where the graphic p. 59.
Myths of Conceptual Art,” in Michael Rennes, 2006), pp. 138–51. complètes, 4:513. man in space. In this light Gagarín November 1965 and April 1966. See 54. See note 11 above and Baxandall, form veils and unveils, seals and 88. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of
Corris, ed., Conceptual Art: Theory, 14. See, e.g., Bernard Blistène, Poésure 20. Alicia Ferrari, “História de becomes a kind of abstract portrait. Brett, Kinetic Art: The Language of Giotto and the Orators, pp. 130–131. unseals/sudden semantic values/ Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New
Myth, and Practice (Cambridge: at the et peintrie. D’un art, l’autre (Marseille: uma criança surda,” in Giunta, Giunta, emails to the author, 2008. See Movement (London and New York: 55. See the transcription of Cuadro an art of constellated alphabets/of York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962),
University Press, 2004), pp. 29–49. Musées de Marseille, Reunion des “Cronología,” in Giunta, ed., León also her essay in the present volume. Studio Vista/Reinholdt, 1968), p. 8ff. escrito in Giunta, ed., León Ferrari beelike letters swarming and solitary.” p. 401.
5. The entire text of Cuadro escrito Musées Nationaux, 1993). Ferrari Retrospectiva. Obras 1954–2004 30. León Ferrari, Notebook 1, 1962–63. 43. See, for example, Naves’s essay Retrospectiva. Obras 1954–2006, pp. De Campos, in Salzstein, ed., No vazio 89. See Derrida, “La Parole soufflée,”
appears in English translation in 15. See Jameson, A Singular Modernity, (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Collection of the artist. in the present volume. The same 434–35. do mundo, p. 260. Translated from the Writing and Difference, p. 179.
Andrea Giunta, ed., León Ferrari. p. 198. Recoleta, 2004), p. 73. 31. Ibid. essay includes a text by Schendel, a 56. Georges Didi-Huberman, La Peinture Portuguese by the author. 90. Robert Klein, “Form and Meaning,”
Retrospectiva. Obras 1954–2006 (São 16. See Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Tactics for 21. León Ferrari wrote Palabras ajenas 32. Rafael Alberti, “Sermón de la sangre,” statement to the Fundaçao Armando incarnée (Paris: Minuit, 1985), p. 133. 68. See Derrida, “Freud and the Scene 1970, in Form and Meaning : Essays on
Paulo: Cosac Naify/Imprensa Oficial, Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism at a time when he had abandoned in Alberti, Sobre los ángeles (Barcelona: Alvares Penteado, in which she 57. For this observation I must thank of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, the Renaissance and Modern Art, trans.
2006), pp. 434–35. in Latin America, 1960–1980,” and his artistic practice. It takes the form Editorial Seix Barral, 1977), p. 111. This explains the link in her mind between Michel Weemans, author of several trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: at the Madeleine Jay and Leon Wieseltier
6. LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Héctor Olea, “León Ferrari from of a play, featuring dialogues among trans. from Alberti, Selected Poems, her drawings and the monotype form. works on Flemish painting in the University Press, 1978), p. 207. (New York: The Viking Press, 1979), p.
Art,” p. 12. the Drawing of Texts to the Texture figures emblematic of power and, in trans. Ben Belitt (Berkeley: University 44. Guy Brett, email to the author, age of Erasmus. See his Paysages 69. See Pascal Quignard, Rhétorique 60.
7. See Colpitt, “The Formalist Connection of Poetry,” in Ramírez, Olea, et al., Ferrari’s view, of injustice: Pope Paul of California Press, 1966), p. 97. See June 2008. See also Brett, “Mira exégétiques et anthropomorphes de spéculative (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995), 91. Antoine Arnauld and Lancelot Claude,
and Originary Myths of Conceptual Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art VI, Hitler, and others. The book was G. W. Connell, “The End of a Quest: Schendel. Ativamente o vazio,” Brasil Henri Bles, Ph.D. thesis, Ecole des p. 12. Grammaire générale et raisonnée de
Art.” in Latin America (New Haven: Yale published in 1967 as the script for Alberti’s Sermones y Moradas and Experimental. Arte/Vida: Proposições Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 70. See Quignard, La Haine de la musique Port-Royal, 1660, quoted in Louis Marin,
8. See Jameson, A Singular Modernity: University Press, 2004), pp. 420, 425. a performance in which 120 actors Three Uncollected Poems,” Hispanic e paradoxos (Rio de Janeiro: Contra Paris, 2004, and Desiderius Erasmus, (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1996), pp. 182–83. La Critique du discours. Sur la logique
Essay on the Ontology of the Present 17. See Roland Barthes, “L’Esprit de la reading quotations from newspapers Review 33, no. 3 (July 1965): 290–309. Capa Livraria, 2005), pp. 173–83. Enchiridion militis christiani, I504, 71. Ibid., p. 193. de Port-Royal et les Pensées de Pascal
(London: Verso, 2002), pp. 161–79. lettre,” in L’Obvie et L’obtus. Essais and other sources would face 120 33. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 45. See Naves, “Pelas costas,” in French trans. Festugière (Paris: Vrin, 72. See Luis Peréz-Oramas: “Laocoonte, (Paris: Minuit, 1975), p. 177.
9. Recent studies have explored how critiques III (Paris: Editions du Seuil, spectators, each group being equally 1550 (reprint ed. New York: Penguin Salzstein, ed., No vazio do mundo, p. 1971), p. 89. las redes y la indecisión de las cosas,” 92. Ibid., p. 77.
some interpretations of foundational 1982). Eng. trans. as “The Spirit of the distributed facing each other in two Classics, 1987), p. 57. 64. 58. Cennino Cennini, Il libro dell’arte o in Gego. Obra Completa. 1955–1990 93. On the inexpressible in Schendel’s
works of modern art, such as Georges Letter” in Barthes, The Responsibility sets of 120 chairs. A version was 34. Ferrari, Notebook 1. 46. Walter Benjamin, “Painting, or Signs trattato della pittura, 1437 (reprint ed. (Caracas: Fundación Cisneros, 2003), work see Paulo Herkenhoff, Mira
Bataille’s reading of Manet, seem to of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (New performed in London in 1968. 35. Barthes, “Variations sur l’écriture,” and Marks,” in Walter Benjamin: Milan: Biblioteca Longanesi, 1984), pp. p. 296. Schendel and the Shaping of the
have ignored the deep connection York: Hill and Wang, 1985), p. 102. 22. See Souza Dias, Mira Schendel, p. 78. p. 267. Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, 29–30. 73. See Derrida, “La Pharmacie de Inexpressible (New York: The Drawing
between modern and historical 18. See Barthes, “Variations sur l’écriture,” 23. Ibid., p. 28. 36. Ferrari, conversation with the author, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. 59. See Nina V. Braginskaya and Dimitri N. Platon,” in La Dissémination (Paris: Center, 1995).
painting. See, for example, John Oeuvres complètes. 1972–1976, ed. Eric 24. Ibid., p. 24. São Paulo, May 2008. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass., and Leonov, “La Composition des images Seuil, 1972). Eng. trans. as “Plato’s 94. For the ideas and arguments in this
Elderfield, Manet and the Execution of Marty (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 4:267. 25. Ibid., p. 30. 37. Barthes, “Variations sur l’écriture,” pp. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard de Philostrate l’ancien,” in Costantini, Pharmacy” in Dissemination, trans. section of the essay I am indebted to
Maximilian (New York: The Museum of 19. The term epoché, or epokhê, was 26. On Schendel’s painting between 279–80. University Press, 1996), p. 84. Graziani, Rolet, et al., Le Défi de l’art, Barbara Johnson (Chicago: at the the generosity of Paulo Celso, formerly
Modern Art, 2006), pp. 123–35. used by Stoic philosophers such 1962 and 1965 see Sonia Salzstein, “No 38. Souza Dias, Mira Schendel. Do 47. Ibid. p. 25, and Elder Philostratus: Imagines, University Press, 1981), p. 102. a Dominican friar and a close friend
10. Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and as Sextus Empiricus to describe vazio do mundo,” in Salzstein, ed., No Espiritual à Corporeidade, p. 183. 48. Schendel, typewritten ms., n.d., in Younger Philostratus: Imagines, 74. Ibid., p. 70. of Schendel’s, with whom I talked in
the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, suspension or interruption. For vazio do mundo. Mira Schendel (São 39. Souza Dias attributes the quotation Naves, Mira Schendel, Continuum Callistratus: Descriptions, trans. Arthur 75. Paul Celan: “Whichever stone you lift,” São Paulo on May 23, 2008. I am also
Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003), p. 30. Edmund Husserl it referred to the Paulo: Editora Marca d’Agua, 1996), pp. to James Anthony Froude, author of amorfo, p. 19. Eng. trans. in Salzstein, Fairbanks (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb 1955, in Selected Poems and Prose of grateful to Naves for directing me to
11. Guided by Horace’s motto Ut pictura suspension of our prejudgments and 24–27. On relationships and influences a study of Homer and the brother of ed., No vazio do mundo, p. 257, and in Classical Library/Harvard University Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New Celso.
poesis (As is painting, so is poetry), beliefs about the objective world in among Italian and Brazilian painters Richard Hurrell Froude. Ibid., p. 184. Naves’s essay in the present volume. Press, 1931), p. xxvi. York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 71. 95. See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul. La
which originates, according to order to grasp its real meaning—a see Alberto Tassinari, “Mais ou menos See, however, Lyra Apostolica, 1836 49. See Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators. 60. See Philostratus, Imagines, third 76. Celan, “Tübingen, January,” in ibid., fondation de l’universalisme (Paris:
Plutarch, with Simonides, the Western suspension of the contingency of frutas,” in ibid., p. 270; Rodrigo Naves, (reprint ed. London: Rivingtons, 1879), 50. See Lessing, Laocoön, and Clement century a.d., French trans. as La Galerie p. 159. Collège International de Philosophie,
visual arts won acknowledgment objects, their external reality, in favor “Mira Schendel. El presente como p. xvi. Greenberg, “Towards a Newer de tableaux (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 77. Album, 1968. Mira Schendel Archive, Presses Universitaires de France,
as a “liberal art” by linking their of what they mean for us. See Rosa utopía,” in Naves, Mira Schendel. 40. Participating in a congress for Laocoon,” Partisan Review 7, no. 1991), pp. 10 and 121, note 7. See also São Paulo. 1998), p. 53. Eng. trans. as Saint
compositional devices to the Mignosi, Reawakening and Resistance: Continuum amorfo (Mexico City: Museo religious reform in 1948, Schendel met 4 (July/August 1940), reprinted in Elder Philostratus: Imagines, p. 7, which 78. See Graziani, “‘La Vérité en image,’” Paul: The Foundation of Universalism,
rhetorical rules governing the art of The Stoic Source of Husserlian Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, 2004), p. the theologian Ferdinando Tartaglia, Clement Greenberg: The Collected translates the distinction as “panel- p. 151. trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: at
oratory and speech in general. Thus Epochè, in Analecta Husserliana 11 13; and Souza Dias, Mira Schendel: Do with whom she would maintain a long Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian paintings” and “paintings.” 79. De Campos, in Salsztein, ed., No vazio the University Press, 2003). For the
(1981):311–19, and Barbara Cassin, espiritual à corporeidade (São Paulo: correspondence. See Souza Dias, Mira (Chicago: at the University Press, 1986), 61. See Gregory Battcock, “Painting do mundo, p. 260. quotations of Paul see 1 Corinthians
1:23–38. Is Obsolete,” 1969, in Alberro and 80. Schendel, quoted in Souza Dias, Mira 1:21–22.
51. See Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical 96. Badiou, Saint Paul, p. 49.
Adversity.” Anthology, p. 88.
andrea giunta león ferrari: a language rhapsody

Studio, Vicolo di Santa María in Capella 12, Rome, 1955. The photo- In investigating the communicative power of repetition and for-
graph shows the thirty-five-year-old artist looking out from a dense lux- mal excess, Ferrari invents languages and studies their mechanisms of
uriance of his work (fig. 1). Hanging on the walls are twenty-six drawings power. The present essay will focus on these articulating nuances of
of vessels, among them a picture by Picasso.1 On shelves, on the floor, Ferrari’s work in the crucial era of the 1960s, when he began to elabo-
on turning disks, hanging from the ceiling, are over forty ceramics—vol- rate ideas that he would explore throughout his later career. This is not
umetric prismatic forms, which fill the photograph and are sometimes to say, however, that we will be describing an evolution of themes and
taller than the artist himself. The ceramics are in different stages of forms. Ferrari’s art is not among those that begin as imperfect, then is
completion: polished, enameled, painted in bands, bare. Every part of purified and aestheticized; everything visible at the beginning remains
the workshop articulates excess and exuberance. Only the verticality present and active in his work today.
and horizontality of some of the works offer calm; other pieces stack Ferrari has molded clay, shaped cement, carved wood, and
up like fragile perforated eggs about to roll over. knotted, soldered, and twisted wires, mixing their thicknesses, colors,
The photograph documents both the period when Ferrari and degrees of shine, making them a world. Creating sculptures-cum-
became an artist and some of his work’s characteristics to this day: musical instruments out of metal poles, he has performed on them
the need to enlarge form, to fill space, to defy the limits of materials.2 in churches and public places. He has written on paper, on glass, on
Accumulations, rhythms, and repetitions suggest a code, a language. acrylic, on mannequins, and on photographs, and in ink, in Braille dots,
Arrayed in rows, forms repeat abstractly, linked together in a simulation even in bird excrement, which is splattered all over reproductions of
of writing, but Ferrari’s code condenses their meanings so that they the most auratic works in art history. He has accumulated bottles, fab-
become more than words.3 Indeed, his work constitutes a persistent, rics, wire, condoms, artificial flowers, model airplanes, saint and Christ
continuous investigation into the limits and powers of language.4 An statuary, and plastic and plaster mice, cats, and monkeys, and has set
archive of different ways of saying new things, or of saying the same them in imaginary dialogues, now funny and irreverent, now confronta-
thing in new ways, it deals with the necessity and urgency of commu- tional and watchful relationships of power. He has spilled polyurethane
nicating, of making understandable what is not accepted, understood, over knotted wire and encrusted dolls and toy trees in its creases. He
or easy to express. It explores how to refer to a subtle perception, a has used repetition and seriality to design impossible architectures
loving feeling, or a polemical idea through volume, cadence, or appar- that do away with the idea of a center.6 The coexistence of dissimilar
ent disorder. devices and materials in Ferrari’s work is initially disorienting; at the
Other meanings also emerge from the photograph. In the same time that they differ, his series cohere and repeat—instead of an
drawings on the wall to the right, each vessel holds a woman’s body, evolution we find a doubling, whether refined or baroque, in response
a generic shape encasing a representation of reality. The drawings to an insistent need to communicate, to speak through forms and
remind us of Mujer (Woman, c. 1960; plate 2), a ceramic in which femi- images. Between an exquisitely pure vessel and its urgent prolifera-
nine forms press outward from inside the piece, piercing it or creat- tion, as in the photograph, we see no progression.
ing reliefs on its exterior. An ambivalent abstraction is imposed on a This brief account will describe the magnetic unease that
curled-up body. Later, some of the wire sculptures of the 1970s would invades us when we are faced with this unclassifiable work. It will
reiterate this tension between the apparent and the hidden, pure explore the trajectory from Ferrari’s earliest work to his most recent,
image and representational account, the poetic and the political. In and will consider one of the enduring axes in his long career—over
this declassified zone, a zone of potential, mimesis acts on meaning fifty years—of artmaking: an investigation of the general capacity
and on form at the same time.5 of language, whether written or visual, to communicate, and of its

1. León Ferrari in his studio, Vicolo di Santa María in Capella 12,

Rome, 1955
48 león ferrari giunta 49

more specific capacity to make certain ideas understandable, even advance the country’s visual arts, music, theater, design, and media. History is embedded in these metal works. The circular outlines
inevitable. Ferrari both contributed to and was nourished by these programs, of Gagarín, for example, may replicate the orbits of a rocket around
but he also kept a critical distance from them: like other artists of Earth, or the appearance of the Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin in a
The 1960s were a time of intense change, of a configuration of new his generation, his aim in smashing art open was to take it out of its spacesuit. The work then captures a historical moment: the confron-
sensibilities. This was a crucial decade not just in Argentina but in the exclusive orbit and return it to society as a whole. Ferrari separated tation between two superpowers, mediated through the conquest of
world, solidifying postwar transformations and establishing the first his experiments with language and materials from the field of art space—a chapter in the Cold War. Ferrari’s delicate patterns of wires
outlines of a new world order. In Argentina these shifts translated into as strictly understood, and tried instead to integrate them with life. crossing in air are not just lines; they have titles like Gagarín, or A un
a discourse of hope, optimism, and growth, accompanied, however, He also developed an extreme form of institutional critique, subvert- largo lagarto verde (To a long green lizard), a quotation from the Cuban
by a disenchantment with a kind of progress that fed misery and vio- ing the institutional enthusiasm within Argentina’s 1960s avant-garde. poet Nicolás Guillén, expressing the hope represented by that island
lence, expelling a large part of the population from the countryside into And his work confronted the global order, addressing the space race, in the story of postwar colonialism. The titles help us to reimagine the
belts of concentrated poverty around the rich metropolis of Buenos the Cuban Revolution, the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in hidden contexts of the works’ shapes, the cultural issues to which
Aires. This was the world that Antonio Berni described in his paintings 1965–66, and the escalating war in Vietnam. Ferrari analyzed both the their swerving and turning lines refer. In 1961, for example, Ferrari met
and prints of the 1960s and ’70s about a barrio boy he named Juanito problems and the potential of the avant-garde era, taking on both at Rafael Alberti, the Madrilenian poet who had come to Buenos Aires in
Laguna, and that Ferrari examined in his works on the wars and miser- their most radical extremes. self-imposed exile after Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War. Sin
ies accompanying global progress. It was during the protean 1960s that Ferrari established the titulo (Sermón de la sangre) (Untitled [Sermon of the Blood], 1962; plate
Arturo Frondizi, the progressive president of Argentina from 1958 foundation of his work. Some of his many ideas during these years he 12), one of Ferrari’s most exquisite abstract drawings, was inspired by
to 1962, worked to maintain a democratic government and an economic set out in just one piece, or in notebook sketches that might remain as Alberti’s poem of the same title: between thin, tangled lines that cross
plan in a context of confrontations among military groups that ultimately their only trace or might spark a series years or decades later. Others the grisaille of a pen-on-paper rubbing, red marks are inserted like
paralyzed civil society and took over the political system. The consoli- became key works, condensing much of his art to come: Paloma (Dove, veins, or like ditches, in which flows the blood of life or death to which
dation of an artistic avant-garde based around Buenos Aires’s Instituto 1961, of which only a photograph survives; fig. 2), Gagarín (c. 1961; plate Alberti’s poem refers. The drawing is an intermediate territory in which
Torcuato Di Tella coincided with the emergence of a political avant-garde 26), Cuadro escrito (Written painting, 1964; plate 41), Cartas a un general the poem reverberates.
that would express itself in the Cordobazo, a popular uprising beginning (Letters to a general, 1963; plate 26), Torre de Babel (Tower of Babel, Ferrari began to make autonomous drawings in March of 1962,
in Córdoba in 1969, and in the formation of the Confederación General 1964; plate 72), La civilización occidental y cristiana (Western Christian at the suggestion of the poet and collector Arturo Schwarz, who vis-
del Trabajo (General confederation of labor). In many respects these aes- civilization, 1965; p. 24, fig. 21), the boxes of wire, the bottles of metals ited his show that year at the Galleria Pater, Milan, and invited him to
thetic and political avant-gardes overlapped, most notably in Tucumán and rags, the Manuscritos (Manuscripts, 1964– ; plate 72), and the tex- make a set of etchings. With the exception of one of the earliest, dated
Arde (Tucumán is burning, 1968), a collective action in which artists pro- tual collage Palabras ajenas (Words of others, 1967). March 11, 1962 (fig. 3),9 the drawings bear no relation to the sculptures,
tested an economic plan only masquerading as progress. Tucumán Arde After working in ceramic and cement between 1954 and 1961, for which they are neither studies nor sketches. From the beginning
marked the climax of an abandonment of art, as conventionally defined, and producing some carvings in wood, Ferrari began to use his skills they are tied to writing and to music, anticipating the musical instru-
by many artists. from his original training as an engineer, and from studies of metals ments that Ferrari would produce in the 1980s. The drawings are usu-
Ferrari participated in this entire cycle, through his aesthetic that he had conducted in 1955–57.7 In a dialogue between scientific ally based on the line of writing and the right angle. The line advances
experimentation and his political and institutional radicalization. and artistic experiment, he twisted thin rods of stainless steel, bronze, and retreats, narrows to near-invisibility, or forcefully emphasizes a
Despite his insider position, however, he was also marginal: he par- copper, silver, palladium, tantalum, and gold. He welded them to sil- mainly horizontal register.
ticipated in the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, and was friendly with key ver, he knotted them (as in Paloma), he mixed them in different thick-
8
Between 1962 and 1965, Ferrari experimented intensely with draw-
artists such as Pablo Suárez, Roberto Jacoby, Margarita Paksa, and nesses, and, as he had with his ceramics, he set them on pedestals or ing and with wire. His line loosened up, gained color, broadened, lay
Oscar Bony, but he also broke with the avant-garde. The institute hung them from the ceiling. Bundles of lines, resembling prickly pears, on the surface of reliefs made from paper and glue. The curves and
had been founded to foster Argentina’s cultural modernization—to plants, bugs, and stars or planets, floated in space. complexities of the drawn line reappear in the metal works, whose rods

3. León Ferrari
2. León Ferrari Untitled. 1962
Paloma. (Dove). 1961 Ink on paper, 13 3/8 x 9 7/16" (34 x 24 cm)
Wire, 11 13/16 x 15 3/4 x 7 7/8" Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
(30 x 40 x 20 cm) Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
50 león ferrari giunta 51

undulate like lines on paper, disrupting orthogonality. In Manos (Hands, Ferrari’s letters are not so much brave confrontations with mili- tograph, of the genitals of Michelangelo’s David—proposes a version
1964; plate 70) a tangle of ink and wire lines is laid out in a box along tary power as ways of speaking despite difficulty. The title “Carta a un of the story of the Flood in which Noah and the animals fail to survive;
with little photographs of hands cut from magazines. Metals broaden General” at the bottom, clearly and legibly written, shows their insub- everyone dies, in fact, except the women. Described as “the thousand
like belts or cut paper in the air, mix like inks on paper, entwine with fake ordinate meaning: although we cannot read what the letters say, they wise sinners the revolutionaries the women who do not believe in God
flowers and cloth, and move inside a series of bottles. 10
refer to a complex social and individual impossibility. What emerges the marvelous atheists those who could govern their bodies with their
This urgent experimentalism was part of the rhythm of Buenos from Cartas a un general, and from other works of the time, is a double, own free will,” the women inflate their breasts and buttocks and float
Aires’s 1960s avant-garde, a laboratory for testing the materials and unstable inscription, on the one hand of abstraction and on the other to land. Meanwhile Satan, “that old inventor in exile,” has cut off the
the limits of art. What shaped the city’s avant-garde circles was a gen- of the narrative dimension of writing. On the one hand, we see that the choice parts of the men’s bodies and grafted them onto an enormous
erational feeling of internal cohesion—the feeling of participating in a drawing has content; we are prompted to look for the text of a letter tree, an “impregnating tree,” on which the women throw themselves.
unified effort to create a local movement with international resonance, that Ferrari would like to write but cannot. On the other, the authority From above, God observes this strange giant plant on which the
to escape the derivative, the imitative, taking references instead from of the written word—an authority derived from both religion (ultimately, women thrust themselves “in a cloud of sweat,” but he cannot fight the
one’s contemporaries. Ferrari’s work was central to this dynamic. Active that is, from dogma) and literature—is undermined. life force. Women, whose forms shaped Ferrari’s first ceramics, are now
in experiments with materials, he also participated in the politicization can deny the rejuvenating effervescence of the time, which produced Ferrari began the Manuscritos series of 1964 by choosing words the revolutionary heroes who save humanity and fight God. The text fol-
of the avant-garde and fulfilled this exceptional generation’s mandate many strategies that would later have names, legitimacy, and interna- from the dictionary—“strange” words that had fallen into disuse, words lows the injunction of the eighteenth-century saint Alphonsus Liguori,
of ceaseless advance—even when, as a result, the artists saw that art tional currency. Bony’s installation La familia obrera (Blue-collar family, so rare as to seem new, words picked more for their sound than for who wrote, “Tell everything—not only consummated acts, but sensual
as they had understood it was dissolving, and that form, dematerial- 1968), for example, in which the artist had an actual working-class fam- their meaning. In the texts of the Manuscritos, these words follow the touchings, all impure gazes.”15 Ferrari’s interrogation of Western sexual
ized in aesthetic and political action, was losing its authority. The future ily sit on a pedestal, can be related not only to the conceptual devices order of syntax but do not describe; instead, they evoke—and, in narra- morality also involves an irrepressible comic humor, like the Rabelaisian
tense had an absolute value, which art sought to bring into existence. that inspired Ferrari’s Cuadro escrito but to the works of Santiago Sierra tives such as Barjuleta cabruñada (Sharpened knapsack), Cuando entré spirit theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin.16 We see this again in Relecturas de
In a notebook from 1964, Ferrari wrote of Torre de Babel—a colossal today, which similarly use living people. en la casa (When I came home), and Con un falconete (With a musket), la biblia (plates 123–26, 138, 139), in which Catholic angels, borrowed
tangle of mismatched and distressed metals, and his last metal sculp- At the same time that freedom of expression and the pace of they abound in erotic relations. The Argentine Church polices sexuality from Western art history, scrutinize the amorous interludes of Eastern
ture of the 1960s—that the work marked an ending: “Never again will I development were increasing, however, they were enmeshed in an closely, and Ferrari’s masquerade illustrates its control over thought, erotic figures.
do something like this.” Instead he imagined a future of collaborative unstable political system. Conflicts among military factions, and censor- speech, and the body. His writings, while hard to read, speak not of The Manuscritos series includes Cuadro escrito, a piece of writ-
projects carried out with other artists of the avant-garde.11 ship of magazines, films, and art, were an enduring threat to democracy.12 secrets but of that which must be said, recalling Michel Foucault’s ing—a conceptual operation—that describes the painting Ferrari would
While Ferrari was making sculpture, he was also systematically The tension is clear in Cartas a un general (fig. 4), a group of drawings argument about the Victorian era, when the control and domestication make “if I knew how to paint.”17 This is not, however, a cold list of por-
exploring the limits of writing, the word, vocabulary, language. In dis- that builds on the experiments with line that Ferrari had begun the previ- of the body, rather than suppressing sex, led to extremely detailed trait, landscape, or still life subjects to be described with the materials
rupting language he was entering a field of floating meaning—of mean- ous year, in 1962, but adds a new element: encrypted words. We do not speech on the forbidden: “The Christian pastoral prescribed as a fun- of painting (“marten hairs on the tip of a flexible stick of ash, drenched
ing that emerged from writing as visual form. The sense of a tension know what text is hidden in these drawings, even when we can identify damental duty the task of passing everything having to do with sex and submerged in crimson oil”); it is instead a motley gathering, fea-
between meaning and form, between verbal description and visual rep- some of the words (such as “general”). Years later, Ferrari discussed the through the endless mill of speech,” wrote Foucault. “Nothing was turing birds (the “codesera,” a “filthy Arctic bird that feeds its young to
resentation, the visual contraction of written language—all this related strengths and weaknesses of the letters: meant to elude this dictum, even if the words it employed had to be the seals it likes”), a horse, chamomile blossoms, and a woman called
to the feeling that both form and writing had to convey more. Where carefully neutralized.”14 In shrinking writing to the point where we have Alafia, who lends the writer her hair-curlers to make a paintbrush.18 As
Ferrari’s drawing had previously been abstract and joyful, a sense of It is difficult to write a “logical” letter to a general. A letter that says to transcribe it in order to read it, this is just what Ferrari did also. the artist who would produce this work, Ferrari imagines those who
connection with immediate realities was seeping in. things, that isn’t just insulting, that is “artistic.” The incomprehensi- On November 15, 1964, Ferrari completed El arca de Noé (Noah’s would study it in the future. He describes his feverish inspiration and
The 1960s hold a place in the Argentine imagination as a time bility of these letters is more than a protection from censorship, it ark; also called El árbol embarazador, The impregnating tree; plate 43), his desire to create
of almost unprecedented democracy and freedom. There is a relation reflects an inability to write a letter like that of Rodolfo Walsh. That a theme to which he would return in the collage series Relecturas de la
between this context and the avant-garde, understood as a kind of cre- is a letter. What I did was an imitation of a letter, or a hidden letter, Biblia (Rereadings of the Bible, 1983). The text in this drawing—written something absolutely new unknown the hidden heart of the entire
ative holiday in which artists transformed the art of Buenos Aires; nothing which might make one wonder, “Does this mean something or not?” 13 in a compact pattern that wraps like a sash around a collaged-in pho- work: forty square centimeters deliberately concealed in the work’s

4. León Ferrari
Carta a un general (Letter to a general). 1963
Ink on paper, 9 7/16 x 5 9/16" (24 x 14.2 cm)
Private collection
52 león ferrari giunta 53

various measures so that no one perceives its inaudible language, ing U.S. presence in Vietnam. Although addressed to this particular
reserving the satisfaction of it for a wise scholar after my death who situation, the piece has since achieved a kind of universality, seeming
will make everything clear and will anxiously seek out the bones in relevant to other violent events; exhibited in Buenos Aires in September
my coffin so as to make them into a kind of amulet to be exhibited 2001, for example, it was thought to refer to that month’s attacks on
in a museum before the prostrated parishioners praying for my soul the World Trade Center, New York. The title, “Western Christian civiliza-
which today is alive but hidden in Castelar.19 tion,” was a phrase used in the 1960s to rationalize American involve-
ment in Southeast Asia, and also by the Argentine military to justify
Forty-two years later, in the Atados con alambre (Tied with wire) and its overthrow of the country’s democratic government in 1966.20 For
Poliuretanos (Polyurethanes) series (plates 144, 146), Ferrari was mixing decades to come, violence and censorship would be forcibly installed
bones and polyurethane and hanging them from the ceiling of a museum. in Argentine civil life and culture.
Cuadro escrito describes a painting that itself tells a story. Before the opening of Ferrari’s exhibition at the Instituto Torcuato
According to that story, the painting is not realized because the artist Di Tella, Romero Brest asked him to withdraw La civilización occidental
thinks it better described than painted, and also because it depends y cristiana because it would offend the religious feelings of the staff.
on the will of God, who, when the artist extends his hand, as if to ask for Instead Ferrari decided to show other works, smaller but on the same
charity, will not touch him—not out of a refusal to do so, but because theme, as a way of denouncing this institution that claimed to promote
“His hand was enjoying itself making the mounds, valleys, buttocks of the avant-garde. To one critic who questioned the work’s value Ferrari
Alafia.” Ferrari, then, describes a temptable God. Again, humor mixes resoundingly replied,
with the essence and visual character of writing, in a text that looks like
a pastel rubbing, a wordless pattern. Historia de mi muerte (Story of my I do not know the artistic value of these pieces. The only thing I
death), from January 1965, and Milagro en la OEA (Miracle in the OAS ask of art is that it help me, as clearly as possible, to devise visual
[Organization of American States]; plate 53), from September 5, 1965, and critical signs that will allow me to condemn Western barba-
bring to a close a phase to which he would return ten years later, when rism in the most efficient way. It is possible that someone may
he began to draw again. show me that this is not art. I would have no problem, I would not
The other crucial work of this crucial moment is La civilización change my course, I would only change its name: I would cross
occidental y cristiana (fig. 5), an assemblage of an altar-scale Christ figure out art and call it politics, corrosive criticism, whatever. 21
crucified on a model of an American fighter jet. In 1965, Jorge Romero
Brest, the director of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, invited Ferrari to After 1965, Ferrari abandoned traditional exhibitions for over
exhibit there for the first time. Romero Brest probably imagined a show ten years. He participated in political group shows,22 wrote the book
of wire sculpture or drawings, but Ferrari instead took the opportunity to Palabras ajenas,23 and worked in the group that developed the Tucumán
show a strongly political work, with the politics international as much as Arde exhibition. Like a number of artists of his generation, Ferrari had
local. The work also made use of materials external to art; unlike Ferrari’s essentially left art. The avant-garde, he felt, could no longer be estab-
wires, or his lines on paper, these objects had clearly had a previous life. lished with traditional materials or in traditional institutions; it had to
Rather than being integrated into a composition, becoming its material, be created in the streets and united with life. It had to change the
the real world erupted with force. world—in other words, it had to fulfill its own highest aspirations.
La civilización occidental y cristiana took aim at the West’s moral In 1975, Ferrari began to draw again, and he has never stopped
double standard, and at an issue then flooding the press: the escalat- since. His curved, controlled line, now often combined in parallels,

5. León Ferrari
La civilización occidental y cristiana.
(Western Christian civilization). 1965
Plastic, oil, and plaster, 6' 6 3/4" x 47 1/4" x 23 5/8"
(200 x 120 x 60 cm)
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
 giunta 55

Ferrari made this series in exile, and at a time of bad news from unique art object. Their hypnotic power traps us in the internal events of
home. Meanwhile, though, he was a full member of Brazil’s experimen- the plane; in the texture of intermediate values achieved by their bluish
tal art world and was enjoying one of the most creative periods of his color, etched with light; in the creases remaining from the maps’ unfolding,
career. This was the period of his Heliografias, which he copied and and from marks left on them by their travels through the mail.
sent, folded in envelopes, to friends in Buenos Aires and the rest of In 1982, in an interview in Mexico City, Ferrari said that he might
the world. In an alliance between mail art and mural art, these sheets have made these maps because he could find no way to represent
unfolded into enormous maps, though maps drawn by crazed archi- the anguished reality of what was happening at home: “I feel the need
broadened and narrowed as if at the will of his pen. On March 24, 1976, approaching, crossing, vibrating together. The drawings suggest both sys- tects: panopticons of modern life, of cities traversed by highways, to be able to express all the terrible things that were and are,” but “I
another military junta staged a coup in Argentina. Between May 3 and tems of writing—each work in the first group, in fact, is titled Vocabulario automobiles, and crowds—the electrifying city of São Paulo. don’t know anything in the expressive plane with the strength of the
November 7 of that year, Ferrari clipped news articles about bullet- (Vocabulary; fig. 6)—and romantically intertwining relationships; later draw- Together the Heliografias constitute a dazzling allegory of the repression in Argentina.”29 A year later, Ferrari began his series on the
riddled, burned, and bound corpses turning up in different parts of ings are titled Kama Sutra. The second group begins with two drawings tension between discipline and rule-breaking. Small printed figures— Bible, hundred of collages linking Catholic saints to Eastern erotic fig-
the city, the country, or on the Uruguayan coast.24 He glued this hor- that establish equivalencies between short parallel lines and letters of the little men—appear in straight rows, looking at each other or superim- ures and to contemporary events—works investigating the behavior
rible evidence onto sheets of legal paper, which he then juxtaposed alphabet, Arabic numerals, even animals, with little images of a wooden posed within a frame; automobiles stand equidistantly, on highways of the God of the Bible and the consequences of the violence of Holy
with drawings in pen or pencil. Each drawing was done on the same horse, a fox, a porcupine, a bird, a squirrel, mixed in between the lines and that begin and end in the same place; lines arbitrarily divide space; Scripture in Western history.
day as the appearance of the news article. Amid daily violence, Ferrari letters. In fact these images and letters come from the Letraset system. doors and stairways offer no way out of a terrible trap. There is dis- The issue was representing the unrepresentable, describing vio-
cut, glued, and drew, setting horror beside lyricism. These series of The Códigos deconstruct language, mixing its lines with signs obedience here as well as order, as when the white king sleeps with lence in visual terms. For this Ferrari returned to assemblage, or to its
collages and drawings is a startling demonstration of the particular that have a gamelike quality. We are reminded of Walter Benjamin’s the black woman (Adulterio [Adultery], 1984) or when little men escape planar equivalent, collage—the road he had started on with La civili-
condition of artistic creation. sense of the importance of games in the revision of history and in through a corridor opening onto the unknown area beyond the edge zación occidental y cristiana, and which he had left hanging in 1965.
On November 11, 1976, Ferrari and his family left Argentina for learning processes.26 In that these images are historicized, evoking the of the plane—beyond our gaze anything is possible. Within it, though, Now he again took up images of war, of the violence preached in the
Brazil, beginning an exile that would last fifteen years.25 At a small table formal order of the Gothic, it is as if they had an authority predating space is controlled. People talk to toilets, and beds are perverse Old and New Testaments. He also addressed the differences between
in a hotel room on the beach in São Vicente, he once again set to the linguistic lines’ flow, which is itself unorthodox, moving around as if in character: they fill space up to a certain point, but are so closely Western sexuality and that of other cultures. Ferrari’s collages reveal
work welding wire. Shortly afterward he moved to São Paulo, where he trying to escape from the picture (fig. 7). The Códigos recall those texts observed by Ferrari’s repeated, anonymous characters that they hardly a battle between image and culture, the permitted and the forbidden,
would make sculptures, etchings, drawings, collages of pictures and in which naturalists classify animals and plants—little world orders, in make us think of either lovemaking or rest. Embedded in the society punishment and justice. How to empower pictures to condemn Western
bird excrement, and berimbau (sound-making sculptures). In welded which are sketched, precisely to the last detail, images of the new, the that Ferrari reprograms is an exaggerated system of the observation morality with the same force with which the West had preached it?
sculpture he achieved new heights between 1978 and 1979, producing unknown, the as yet unnamed. Before the computer came into common and control of space. Endless walls, doors, beds, people, toilets, and Ferrari turned to auratic, high-culture images, such as Michelangelo’s
not only Planeta (Planet; plate 94), a ball of wire so large that the front use, engineers, architects, and other practical scientists often used vegetation seal off space and make it unusable. Last Judgment. Above reproductions of them he set a cage of pigeons,
door of a gallery where it was to be shown had to be broken to get it Letraset in their drawings. Ferrari, then, a trained engineer and the son No one would want to live here, but the pictures’ humor creates whose excrement he allowed to fall onto them—birds, painter, and con-
inside, but a series based on the idea of the inverted pendulum, with of an architect, was incorporating in art a field of technical expertise a fissure that lets us enjoy looking at these uninhabitable environments. temporary artist in an impromptu collaboration (fig. 9). At the same
groups of steel rods standing vertically in a base, and murmuring as and its visual devices, but associating that field with playfulness and We can see the architecture of the Heliografias as an amplification of time that Ferrari brought out the impiety of these celebrated paintings,
they moved. From here Ferrari developed a new vocabulary that would the reorganization of meaning. Nature and life intermix with drawing; the oppressive social machine, but also as the disorder that precedes he used their force, their power, their place in the Western cultural
generate the series Códigos (Codes, 1979; plates 113–15, 117, 118), Xadrez the letters fit like cocoons. In the lines between them slither a young a new form of organization, as an intermediate space whose excessive tradition, to condemn its promises of terror and torment. An organic
(Chess, 1974; plate 107), Baños (Bathtubs, c. 1981–84), Plantas (Plants, c. woman and an undulating serpent (plate 118), a reference to the biblical overdetermination ends up as disorder, opening the possibility of a new form of writing, the textured bird excrement expresses the desire for
1980–84) and the Heliografias (Heliographs, 1980–84; plates 97–99). tale. In the penultimate picture in the series, Ferrari links drawing to his game. The Heliografias suggest a zone tensed between the oppres- an end to the Bible’s promises of tortures for sinners in the afterlife. In
The Códigos is a series of twelve drawings in which lines aban- musical instruments, including a photograph of the moving rods of the sive metropolis of the Argentine dictatorship and the liberty that Ferrari 1997 Ferrari wrote to the Pope, asking him to abolish Judgment Day; in
don their earlier parallel order for a different, intense kind of dialogue, berimbau and, in parallel, a set of his undulating lines (fig. 8).27 sensed in Brazil.28 Being open to endless reproduction—Ferrari numbered 2000 he wrote again, requesting the abolition of Hell. Both letters were
his editions of these prints “x/oo”—they completely discard the aura of the signed by hundreds of intellectuals, and both still await a response.

6. León Ferrari 7. León Ferrari 8. León Ferrari

Vocabulario (Vocabulary) from the series Códigos Diccionario (Dictionary) from the series Códigos Traduções (Translations) from the series Códigos
(Codes) and the book Imagens (Images). 1979 (Codes) and the book Imagens (Images). 1979 (Codes) and the book Imagens (Images). 1979
Ink on paper, 12 3/16 x 8 7/16" (31 x 21.5 cm) Ink and transfer type on paper, 12 3/16 x 8 7/16" Cut-and-pasted gelatin silver photographs and
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. (31 x 21.5 cm) ink on paper, 12 3/16 x 8 7/16" (31 x 21.5 cm)
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
56 a language rhapsody giunta 57

Endnotes 6. See Roberto Jacoby, “Las herejías de pierced the museum’s walls. Romero Aires, 1967); Malvenido Rockefeller
1. The drawing is La Paix (Peace), used León Ferrari,” Crisis (Buenos Aires), Brest, Boletín del Museo Nacional de (Rockefeller go home, Sociedad
in a poster to promote Picasso’s 1953 January 1987, pp. 71–72. Bellas Artes no. 1 (June 1956): n.p. In Argentina de Artistas Plásticos,
show in Rome’s Galleria Nazionale 7. Ferrari experimented with colors for several texts Ferrari has questioned Buenos Aires, 1969); Contrabienal
d’Arte Moderna. ceramics and with chemical com- the value of “freedom” used for politi- micla [Movimiento de Independencia
2. Having grown up in Buenos Aires, pounds of tungsten, tantalum, and cal ends. See, e.g., the manuscript Cultural Latinoamericano] (Counter-
León Ferrari spent the years 1952–54 niobium, used in metallurgy to harden “Milagro en la OEA,” May 9, 1965, col- biennial micla [Latin American Cultural
in Italy, having moved there with his metal. He started a family business to lection Alicia and León Ferrari. Independence Movement], New York,
wife, Alicia, and his daughter, Marialí. produce these compounds. 13. Ferrari, in The Architecture of Madness, 1971); a group show in Santiago, Chile,
(He also returned there for a relatively 8. Knotted wire, like that in Gego’s draw- a video made by Gabriela Salgado in solidarity with Salvador Allende
brief period in 1955.) In 1954 he began ings without paper, was one of the and Ricardo Pons in conjunction (1972); and a group show in Havana,
to make ceramics with the Sicilian many devices that Ferrari used in with Ferrari’s exhibition of the same Cuba (1973).
artisan Salvatore Meli. The rented working with little metal rods. Forty name, organized by Salgado, at the 23. Palabras ajenas is an imaginary con-
Rome studio in the photograph was years later he would return to this University of Essex in 2002. Rodolfo versation among God, Hitler, Jesus,
a former flowerpot factory, its walls early solution in his experiments with Walsh was an Argentine writer killed and Goebbels, a literary collage of
blackened by the drying process for polyurethane. by a military death squad in 1977 after 120 characters that condenses the
the clay. It had an oven large enough 9. Ferrari’s first dated drawing is from writing an open letter to the junta. history of Western violence from
The doubled stakes of converting image into word and word into image to fit sculptures over six feet tall. March 6, 1962. 14. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: the Old Testament to Nazi Germany
3. For Noé Jitrik, Ferrari’s main theme is 10. In July of 1964, Ferrari wrote several An Introduction (New York: Random and on to the present. See Ferrari,
are among Ferrari’s most persistent concerns. Writing moves into col-
the letter, the grapheme, the act of ideas for bottles in his notebook. House, 1990), p. 21. Palabras ajenas (Buenos Aires: Falbo,
lage, collage into Braille, writing intended to be touched. The script in 1967).
writing, all explored with ink, pen, and Apart from the large, untitled bottle 15. A. de Liguori, Préceptes sur le sixième
Braille—biblical texts, and poems written by the blind Jorge Luis Borges paintbrush. See Jitrik, “Vida, muerte y of 1964, ten more survive from that commandement (trans. 1835), p. 5, 24. Such was the state of terror and
to young women he could not see—is imprinted on photographs of resurrección del signo,” in Escrituras year. As he has done many times with quoted in ibid. insecurity that Ferrari rented a small
beautiful women, representations of Hell, images of Nazism: poems to 1962–1998, exh. cat. (Buenos Aires: La other subjects and motifs, Ferrari 16. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His apartment to make this series, fearing
Voz del Bajo, 1998). returned to bottles many years later, World, trans. Hélene Iswolsky that he would endanger his family by
read with the hands (fig. 10). Where does Ferrari’s work begin, in images
4. Far from being limited to Ferrari’s in 1992, in a series on the conquest (Bloomington: Indiana University working on it at home. Interview with
or in writing? In drawings with lines, wires, branches, excrement, Braille?
drawings in ink on paper, the concept of the Americas and in another on Press, 1984). the author, July 10, 2008.
The latest chapter is in polyurethane on knotted wire—porous masses of writing extends to his manne- condoms, whose free distribution 17. The bibliography on this work is exten- 25. Ferrari did visit Buenos Aires while
populated with little men, trees, eyes, and plastic mice (plate 146). This quins, his works in wire and in Braille in aids-prevention campaigns was sive. See, e.g., Mari Carmen Ramírez, he was living in Brazil, first in 1982, for
always protean body of work constitutes a thinking about the world dots, the “living” drawings he made and is actively fought by the Catholic “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: an exhibition in 1984, and on several
through images, writing, and texture, all in a perpetual flow. with earthworms (seen in the video Church in Argentina. Conceptualism in Latin America, other occasions. He returned there to
Lombrices [Worms] of 2004), and his 11. Ferrari called this imaginary project 1960–1980,” in Luis Camnitzer, Jane live in 1991.
At a round table in Buenos Aires in July of 1994, Ferrari said
first ceramic pieces. See Escrito en “babelismo”: “To make something Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds., Global 26. See Walter Benjamín, “Children’s
that what he wanted to say had neither beginning nor end, and that Literature,” in Walter Benjamin:
el aire, exh. cat. (Neuquén: Museo without unity, with different sensi- Conceptualism: Points of Origin,
he repeated it in a thousand different ways in order to be understood. Nacional de Bellas Artes de Neuquén, bilities . . . or to do it among several 1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934
Then he took out a watch with an alarm and explained that his talk 2005). people. To build a tower of Babel Museum of Art, 1999), and Camnitzer, (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap
would end in ten minutes—the time he had been assigned—without 5. Ferrari uses the term “mimetismo” and add others’ things to it: [Alberto] Conceptualism in Latin American Press of Harvard University Press,
to describe a series that he began Heredia, Marta Minujín, [Luis] Wells, Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: 1999).
any formal conclusion; he would say what he wanted to say, repeating it
in 1986 and continued into the 1990s, [Rubén] Santantonín, [Libero] Badii, University of Texas Press, 2007). 27. Ferrari defined his instruments, which
in images and words, until he was understood—or, in other words, until
in which Christ is painted against a [Julián] Althabe, [Osvaldo] Stimm, 18. Alafia reappears in a series of Ferrari’s he called berimbau or percantas,
the world changed. Each drawing, blueprint, or polyurethane work is an backdrop of camouflage or flowers. everything mixed together, every- drawings from 2004. as instruments with which to draw
observatory for an insubordinate time. Camouflage, a tool of war, is also, thing Babelesque, or even better, to 19. Ferrari, Cuadro escrito, December 17, sound. (The berimbau is an actual
as Jacques Lacan noted, a strategy build it together, with everything on 1964. Castelar is the town in which Brazilian folk instrument, which
of colonial discourse. Homi Bhabha top of everything else, crossing out Ferrari and his family were living at Ferrari’s berimbau do not, however,
writes, “The epic intention of the everything else.” Ferrari, Notebook 2, the time. resemble.) He constructed a series
civilizing mission . . . often produces January 1, 1964, pp. 15–16. Collection 20. Juan Carlos Onganía, the leader of of these objects, of different sizes
a text rich in the traditions of trompe- of the artist. the 1966 coup and Argentina’s sub- and shapes, and often performed on
l’oeil, irony, mimicry and repetition. . . . 12. The word “libertad” (freedom) has sequent military dictator, said that he them.
mimicry emerges as one of the most complex meanings in Argentine was toppling a democratic govern- 28. Brazil, like Argentina, was ruled by
elusive and effective strategies of culture. The military coup of 1955, ment “in defense of Western Christian a military dictatorship during these
colonial power and knowledge.” This for example, which ousted the civilization.” years, but for Argentines the nation
device appears in Ferrari’s earliest democratically elected government of 21. Ferrari, “La respuesta del artista,” and its music represented a site and
9. León Ferrari works, implacably unmasking the Juan Domingo Perón, was called the Propósitos (Buenos Aires), October a feeling of freedom. Brazil became
Juicio Final (Last Judgment). 1985 mechanisms of power. See Lacan, “Revolución Libertadora,” and marked 7, 1965. a summer destination for the young
Printed paper (reproduction of Michelangelo’s “The Line and the Light,” quoted the concept of “freedom” with bullets. 22. These exhibitions included Homenaje and for intellectuals, to whom the
Last Judgment) with bird excrement, in Bhabha, The Location of Culture According to Jorge Romero Brest, al Viet-nam (Homage to Vietnam, music of Caetano Veloso, Chico
20 7/8 x 13" (53 x 33 cm) (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 85. who that year became the director Galería Van Riel, Buenos Aires, 1966); Buarque, Maria Bethânia, Gilberto Gil,
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. The idea of a third zone is explored of Buenos Aires’s Museo Nacional de Homenaje a Latinoamérica (Homage and Gal Costa offered a happiness
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires in my essay “Perturbadora belleza,” Bellas Artes, those bullets actually to Latin America, Sociedad Argentina and optimism that reality could not
in Andrea Giunta, ed., León Ferrari de Artistas Plásticos, Buenos provide.
Retrospectiva. Obras 1954–2004 29. Ferrari, in an interview with Adriana
10. León Ferrari
(Buenos Aires: CCR-malba, 2004), Malvido, unomásuno (Mexico City),
El ciego (The blind man). 1997
pp. 17–29. April 7, 1982.
Ink and Braille (surface embossing)
on paper, 14 5/16 x 9 3/4" (36.3 x 24.7 cm)
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
 rodrigo naves mira schendel: the world as generosity

The wooden surfaces of one of Mira Schendel’s last series, the Today, when the notion of form is often thought to get in the way
Monocromáticos (Monochromatics) of 1986–87 (fig. 1), are coated with of art’s meaning and vitality, it is important to recall the generosity with
gently modulated plaster and painted in white or black tempera. The which the great modern artists approached the world. Schendel’s dis-
subtle relief of the surfaces throws soft shadows, optical lines that creet interventions reflect an attempt to reveal the interdependence of
delicately differentiate themselves from other lines traced in oilstick. phenomena, their reciprocity and equality of status. Only someone who
One of Schendel’s assistants at the time, the artist Fernando Bento, has turned away from the world—away from, say, the blue sky—and
remembers that to illustrate the relationship that she wanted between who can only find meaning in realities that have lost their ambiguity
the surfaces and the two kinds of line that run across them, she would and become purely instrumental, univocal in meaning, could see such
point to the white lines left in the sky by passing airplanes.
1
subtle works as insignificant.
For me this story constitutes a precise, lyrical revelation of the Nothing in Schendel’s art attempts either to order reality vio-
concept of form in Schendel’s art, and of the associations she looked lently or to impose meaning on it, actions that are two sides of the
for among her work’s various elements. The lines made when the hot same coin. To the end, this woman—who came from Jewish parentage
air from an airplane’s jets meets the cold air of the upper atmosphere but survived the Europe of the 1930s and ’40s, was several times forced
are not a way of containing the blue of the sky, or of turning it into to change countries and languages, had a difficult family life, and was
mere background, as the colored smoke used by aerobatic squad- recognized as an important artist only in her later years—examined
rons does. Rather, these tenuous lines help to reveal the sky, heighten- the possibilities of our presence in the world, an investigation involv-
ing the opposition between the regular trajectory of the airplane and ing a recognition both of our limitations and of the achievements to
undefined space. Both lines and sky are ambiguous—just vapor, layers which they might lead. The drawings on thin Japanese paper from the
of air—making it impossible to see them as static elements peacefully 1960s—over two thousand of them, usually called Monotipias (mono-
superimposed on each other. types), in my view mistakenly—are among the works that most clearly
The Monocromáticos, of course, differ physically from natural reveal these concerns (fig. 2). To make them, Schendel would apply
space and its phenomena, but, within limits, they try to make similar paint to a glass laminate, sprinkle a light layer of talcum powder over
connections. The unlike quality of the two kinds of line raises doubts it to prevent the paper from picking it up immediately on contact, then
about the position of the surface, the depth of which cannot be accu- lay the paper on the glass and draw on it, using her fingernails or
rately fixed unless one focuses on a single line. In doing so, however, some pointed instrument to press the paper into the paint. The tech-
one rejects the works’ challenge. The directions of the lines—here more nique itself expresses her desire not to act on the paper from outside
vertical, there more horizontal—create distinct experiences of spaces it, on its surface; instead, the drawings seem to emerge from within
otherwise almost identical, because they act differently upon the fields the paper, to be indistinguishable from its porosity and texture, like
on which they are drawn. The oilstick lines never touch the edges of something organic, a fungus perhaps. Rarely has an artist’s touch been
the work, and one end is always sharper than the other, reflecting the simultaneously so fragile and so intense.
gesture that created them; this captured movement further heightens
the works’ uncertainty.

1. Mira Schendel
Monocromático (Monochromatic). 1986
Synthetic polymer paint and oilstick on
wood, 35 7/16 x 70 7/8" (90 x 180 cm)
Location unknown
60 mira schendel naves 61

Mira Schendel:

The [Monotipias] are the result of a hitherto frustrated attempt to capture discourse at its
moment of origin. What concerns me is capturing the passage of immediate experience,
in all its empirical force, into the symbol, with its memorability and relative immortality.
I know that deep down it is a matter of the following problem. Immediate life,
the kind I suffer and within which I act, is mine alone, incommunicable and therefore
devoid of meaning or purpose. The realm of symbols, which seeks to capture that life
(and which is also the realm of language), on the other hand, is antilife, in the sense of being
intersubjective, shared, emptied of emotion and suffering. If I could bring these two realms
together, I would have united the richness of experience with the relative permanence of the
symbol. To put it another way, my work is an attempt to immortalize the fleeting and to give
meaning to the ephemeral. To do this, obviously, I have to freeze the instant itself, in
which the experience melts into the symbol—in this case, into the word.

At first I thought that it would be enough for me to catch within myself experience’s need to
be articulated—enough, that is, to sit down and wait for the letters to form, to take shape
on the page and connect to one another in a text predating the literal and logical. But from
the outset I felt this could only work if the paper were transparent. Now I am
better able to evaluate why I had this impression back then: the word, in taking form,
The sense that these lines are part of the paper support, rather than colors, lines, and surfaces. She seems always to have been driven to
must show the greatest possible number of its faces in order to be itself.
being imposed on it, results from their accentuation of its presence explore new arenas and situations, so that the elements of her work
A second problem arose, however: a sequence of letters on paper simulates and qualities—an unusual goal in the drawing tradition. A technique are always dealing with different conditions and are therefore differ-
time without actually being able to represent it. They simulate the experience of time, that minimizes and limits the artist’s gesture has as compensation an ently experienced.
but do not capture the unrecoverable experience that characterizes that time. The unexpected heightening of its context. During this period Schendel The lines of Schendel’s drawings seem driven toward writing. The
texts that I drew on paper can be read and reread, which isn’t true of time. They make was in practical terms working only for herself and a small group of inscriptions through which she searches for meaning are highly precise;
the fluidity of time fast without immortalizing it. So I abandoned the attempt. friends; 3 the courage to create hundreds of these drawings to virtu- clearly these graphic signs are linked to letters and words, and the sin-
ally no public response will undoubtedly stand as an example of mod- gular gesture of her individual hand on paper is linked to more general
I abandoned it because I discovered acrylic laminate, which offers the following
ernist ethical behavior. (In 1989, after her death, the drawings were meanings. Schendel’s path led naturally to the universality of language,
possibilities: a) it shows the plane’s other side, denying that the plane is flat;
still being sold for $100 each.) But for Schendel, the quantity of these as though expression and literary meaning had gradually converged.
b) it shows the text’s reverse, transforming text into antitext; c) it allows a circular reading,
works served a structural function. Where Joseph Beuys’s thousands As words gained autonomy in Schendel’s work, however—as
with the text as the unmovable center and the reader in motion, thus transferring time
of drawings witnessed the multiple states of consciousness subsumed line lost its association with the movement of the hand and acquired
from the work to the reader, so that time springs from symbol into life; d) the transparency
in an art in progress, Schendel’s drawings point almost in the opposite the generality of concepts—she continued to place them in ambigu-
of acrylic is the false transparency of the explained meaning. It is not the clear,
direction: for her, each work confirmed the richness of an idea of draw- ous situations. In the Objetos gráficos (Graphic objects), for example,
flat transparency of glass but the mysterious transparency of explication, of problems.
ing in which the beauty of a line lies not within it but around it, in its from the later 1960s, graphic signs and letters traced on or applied
I’m not satisfied. I don’t think acrylic is the philosopher’s stone; I began, simultaneously, activation of the place from which it has emerged. This was why she to Japanese paper were pressed between sheets of acrylic laminate
to experiment with film. But if the work shown has any value, it is this: to point to a station needed so many drawings. and displayed in space (fig. 4). The overlaps among these semitrans-
on one of the many possible roads leading to an articulation of the value and goal of life. In a certain way, Paul Klee, whose work Schendel knew well, was parent elements reintroduced the thickness that the clarity of words
—n.d. 2
the modern artist whose concerns lay closest to her own (fig. 3).4 Her had removed. Superimposition, transparency, and space were all parts
work, like his, leans toward a modesty of dimensions, a discretion of of these works, and the galaxies and constellations of their arrange-
presence, an economy of means, and a concern with wise relation- ments reinstated the tension between gesture and meaning in a wider,
ships that bring divergent elements serenely together. But Schendel’s perhaps even cosmic setting, transposing to a superhuman scale the
work is more conflicted than Klee’s precise yet lyrical associations of interplay of chaos and meaning.

2. Mira Schendel 3. Paul Klee

Untitled from the series Escritas (Written). 1965 Glockentönin Bim (Lady Bell-Tone Bim). 1922
Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper, Ink on paper on board, 13 1/2 x 19 5/8" (34.3 x 49.8 cm)
18 1/2 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Courtesy Galeria Milan, São Paulo Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest
62 mira schendel

Mira Schendel:

I’m not going to define “object” because I don’t really know what it means—in other words,
I wouldn’t know how to theoretically distinguish an aesthetic object from a utilitarian
one, because a utilitarian object can also be an aesthetic object. So I dodge the issue because
I think talking about it is tough. I consider myself incompetent.

I’m just going to give an idea of how the objects I made came about—in a way,
out of chance and curiosity. I was once given a large amount of delicate Japanese paper.
I stored it, not knowing what to do with it. I had no plans. It was given to me.
“Do you want it?“ “Yes.” Some time later, about a year, I started to work with that paper,
but it tore, it couldn’t stand water, couldn’t stand anything. It was very delicate.
Then I met a woman who did monotype and I thought that if I used the monotype
technique, not with monotypes as an end but simply for the practical reason of
not wanting to tear the paper every time I handled it, I could draw on it. I did several
experiments and succeeded, which led to the whole series of drawings on that paper. . . .
After that, in my wandering about the neighborhood here, on my afternoon walks—
any small factory attracts me, whether it’s metal, glass—any kind of material
attracts me, manual labor attracts me, I’ll put it that way, anything that people do with
their hands—and I discovered a factory where they make lighting materials. . . .
I went inside, asked permission, said I was an artist, my only way of being able to start
working with [this material] was if they would let me look at the rejects. And they
did. “Let the crazy old lady do whatever she wants. She’s not bothering anybody.” . . .
Looking at all that, the idea came to me of mixing that very transparent paper
with equally transparent acrylic laminate—white, obviously. That’s where the large
plates came from, the so-called Objetos gráficos [Graphic objects], which were
an attempt to bring about drawing through transparency—in other words, to avoid
back and front. There was a problem, including a philosophical problem, Schendel would rarely end her experiments until she was convinced
behind all that. But the material gave me a possibility: with glass I wouldn’t have that she had exhausted them. After revealing the material quality of
been able to join the sheets, I would have had to frame them—and acrylic Japanese paper so surprisingly in the Monotipias—in other words,
laminate really gave me a fantastic opportunity . . . to concretize an idea, the idea after removing that material from the world of everyday stuff—she
of doing away with back and front, before and after, a certain idea of more then began to use it as an autonomous medium in itself. The results
or less arguable simultaneity, the problem of temporality,etc., spatiotemporality, etc. . . . were the Droguinhas (Little nothings; fig. 5), begun in the mid-1960s,
This is how the so-called Objetos gráficos came about. . . . and then Trenzinho (Little train; plate 77). For the Droguinhas Schendel
twisted, rolled, and knotted Japanese paper, traditionally just a sup-
—1977 5
port, to make three-dimensional objects, strange in that they both
communicate generously with the space around them and refuse to
show themselves as a simple continuous movement, instead turning
back on themselves, curling, complicating any easy trajectory from line
to surface and from surface to volume—like the Möbius strip, so dear
to the late Constructivists.

4. Mira Schendel 5. Mira Schendel

Untitled from the series Objetos gráficos (Graphic objects). 1967 Untitled from the series Droguinhas
Oil transfer drawing and transfer type on thin Japanese paper (Little nothings). 1986
between painted transparent acrylic sheets with transfer type, Japanese paper, variable dimensions, 17 11/16"
39 /8 x 39 /8 x /8" (100 x 100 x 1 cm)
3 3 3
(45 cm) fully extended
Collection Marta and Paula Kuczynski, São Paulo Collection Rodrigo Naves
64 mira schendel naves 65

Mira Schendel:

Before the acrylic phase, though, in the phase of that pile of very thin paper
that I was given, there was another type of object with a different
intention (a very dangerous word, but let’s use it). I wanted, in a way, to Except for the Monocromáticos, all the works discussed so far were made
concretize something different: the entire temporal problematic of in the same decade (the 1960s) and in the same material (Japanese
transitoriness, shall we say. This was a transitory object; it could be made paper). While this selection is narrower than Schendel’s ultimate range,
by anyone, twisting the paper into knots like that, and my daughter, it does show clearly how she advanced as much through the difficulties
who was around ten at the time, called it droguinha [little nothing]. . . . in her work as through its logical unfolding. This characteristic, synthe-
It was really an attempt at an ephemeral form of art (which after all sized in the Droguinhas, helps us to see how she both looked at Brazilian
is no novelty, because dance is also an ephemeral art, like music, and so on). Constructivism and took a different path.
There were other efforts at ephemeral art in the so-called visual arts, Beginning in World War II, when global conflict restricted inter-
the so-called plastic arts, let’s use that term . . . I didn’t invent it; it was a national trade, Brazil underwent a period of rapid industrialization as
general problem that touched people, either it touched them or they it attempted to replace imports with homegrown production. This
touched it—it was in the air. We were living in a shared world, after all, and process advanced with the government of Juscelino Kubitschek,
I feel that this was one of a few attempts at ephemeral art in the so-called from 1956 to 1961, when investment in heavy industry—steel, automo-
plastic arts. Later there were other forms such as happenings, biles, and others—allowed Brazil to produce goods it had previously
other things. But in the ephemeral object, an object exposed in a way to imported. As a result, the country changed in nature: in 1940, 68.7 per-
transitoriness, just as in life—I think that was a very interesting attempt, cent of the population was rural; by 1970, this number had dropped to
a very interesting experiment, which I never tried much to put into 44.08 percent, with the majority of Brazilians now urban. It is within this
theory because . . . for me aesthetics is a bear, the whole problem of art is context that we should see the emergence in Brazil of artistic trends
a terrible complexity, so as much as possible I avoid talking about it. But that identified with late European Constructivism, and above all with the
was an experiment, the Droguinha . . . a transitory object, an ephemeral ideas of Max Bill and the artists of the Ulm school, who thought that
object, something exposed to the world, to the elements, to dust, like our own lives. art should be clearly and demonstrably rational (fig. 6).7 That influence
appears as early as 1952, with the Manifesto Ruptura, the first manifesto
Now I never addressed sculpture as sculpture, nor the object as object. . . .
of the Brazilian Constructivists, who called themselves Concretistas.
That work came about as part of the problem of transparency, not of the object. . . .
The manifesto advocated an “artistic intuition based on clear and intel-
it was the theme of transparency that led me to the object, that’s what I mean.
ligent principles,” described art as “a means of knowledge that can 1964/1965), her forms are didactic in conception, made more relative only
In my case it was really that. It was acrylic—not that I consider acrylic a pretty medium
be deduced from concepts,” and attacked “nonfigurative hedonism, a by their intense material presence. For Schendel, on the other hand, the
or a modern material, but that it’s the only material. The technology allows
product of random aesthetics.”8 meaning of an artwork came above all from its power to resist the kind
a certain handling that glass wouldn’t, which affords me the possibility of broadening
In 1959, with the publication of the Manifesto Neoconcreto, a num- of single, self-evident reading that requires reducing things—whether
research in the field of transparency. To me this was really the form through
ber of artists who had been part of the Concretist movement rejected drawings, words, or bricks—to a well-functioning dynamic of clarity. At
which the object came into being. I never actually intended to address the object.
its rationalist principles in favor of an art that gave more importance the same time, she had no interest in obscurantism, in the cult of art as
—19776
to the experiential, the sensual, and the subjective. Even while moving the guardian of indecipherable mysteries. Such cumbersome concepts
away from Bill’s dogmatism, though, some of the Neoconcretist artists could never sustain her fragile, simple works.
continued to be guided by the idea of an art based on logical, clearly The Droguinhas well demonstrate the kinds of relationships that
defined principles. Lygia Clark, for example, one of the artists who ben- Schendel sought between experience and meaning. She had already
efited most from the rupture of Neoconcretism, would long explore made writing a quasi-object in the Monotipias; she would later trans-
the possibilities of the Möbius strip; from Caminhando (Walking, 1963; pose it into space in the Objetos gráficos. Now, revealing the double
fig. 7) to Abrigos poéticos (Poetic shelters, 1964) and Trepantes (Creepers, meaning of the word “text” as both “writing” and “something woven,”

6. Max Bill
Unidade Tripartida (Tripartite unity). 1948/49
Stainless steel, 45 1/4 x 34 3/4 x 38 11/16" (115 x 88.3 x 98.2 cm)
Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo

7. Lygia Clark
Caminhando (Walking). 1963. Performance
66 mira schendel naves 67

a “textile,” 9 the Droguinhas waver between threads of meaning and lutionary upheavals to the search for fraternity, for warm, affectionate
a more opaque material dimension implicit in the physical aspect of social interaction, many traits of Brazilian life reflect a faith in personal
the work, its succession of knots and extensions. And they preserve a relationships as a defense against universalizing norms and impersonal
relationship of simultaneous openness and containment with the sur- institutions, which have contributed to a historical cementing of inequali-
rounding space. ties and privileges.13 In many ways, Brazilian culture has tried to over-
Interpretations of Schendel’s work often mention an almost para- come the violence of its social life with a subtlety of sensibility that might
doxical opposition,10 an unresolved interplay between gentleness and serve as the basis for affectionate, enduring relationships, removed from
force. This quality, I believe, results from her singular approach to reality: the harshness of exchanges based on profit, individual advantage, or
her materials attained intensity through very gentle interventions. The institutional rules. One need only think of one of our greatest writers,
work’s meaning depends on preserving this tension. Guimarães Rosa, in whose work a discontinuous modern diction stands
Schendel came to Brazil in August of 1949, at the age of thirty. almost without rupture alongside a colloquial kind of speech that relies
Although her professional production began there, the foundations of heavily on the informality of Brazil’s rural dialects.
her complex intellect and personality had been established before her The magnitude, and the limits, of Morandi’s legacy in Brazil
arrival,11 not only through her harsh experience in Europe during the are beyond the scope of this essay, but it is worth exploring why
war but through the cultural milieu in which she grew up. Many of the Schendel’s work moved progressively away from an aesthetic that so
paintings she now began to make are characterized by their tonal prox- interested her early on (fig. 10). Morandi’s tonal paintings explore inti-
imity. This is true not only of her art of the 1950s and early 1960s but mate sympathetic connections among disparate things, a central focus
also of later works, such as the twelve “I Ching” temperas shown at the for Schendel. Even in her works of the 1950s and ’60s, in which the
Bienal de São Paulo of 1981 and the tempera works using stenciled let- contrasts are more pronounced (and which often recall the heterodox
ters and numbers from the same year. Constructivism of Milton Dacosta), she seems to have wanted to show
Discussion of the “nationality” of Schendel’s work—of whether to that similar treatments of different colors, combined with an accen-
call it “Brazilian”—can easily become circular, since “Brazilian” must be tuated material facture, might approximate distinct qualities of light.
defined in advance, a denial of art’s ability to break down set identities. Although she would return to even tonality after the 1960s, the unity it
The comparison of Schendel’s first paintings with those of other Brazilian established, and the limits it imposed, also led her in other directions.
artists is nevertheless instructive, as is both her embrace of and her To integrate a painting by the use of tonal proximity almost negated
distance from Brazilian Constructivism. the reciprocal affirmation of elements that was ultimately revealed as
Schendel knew the work of Giorgio Morandi while she was still in one of her fundamental concerns. If the Constructivist tendencies of
Italy (fig. 8). She also saw it in Brazil, especially in the São Paulo bien- Brazilian art emphasized clear articulation of the elements of an art-
nials. I doubt that the artists of any other country, even perhaps Italy,
12
work, even tonality tended to accentuate soft transitions among them.
were as deeply influenced by Morandi as those in Brazil. Few important Schendel was interested in both, but since her aesthetic required rela-
Brazilian artists have failed to find something personal and relevant in tionships among elements in which each both reinforced and limited
his work, from Alfredo Volpi to Iberê Camargo, Milton Dacosta, Francisco the others, she needed to move away from both.
Rebolo, Amílcar de Castro, Eduardo Sued, and even contemporary art- I do not believe that Schendel would have produced this work
ists like Paulo Pasta (fig. 9). The roots of this interest are hard to identify, in another country, particularly a developed country. The greater aes-
but one can make a connection between Morandi’s tonal wisdom and 8. Giorgio Morandi thetic density of an established art culture would have led her to less
certain defining aspects of Brazilian culture. From the absence of revo- Still Life. 1949. temperate solutions, especially after the 1970s, and the institutional
Oil on canvas, 14 1/4x 17 1/4" (36 x 43.7 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
James Thrall Soby Bequest

9. Paulo Pasta 10. Mira Schendel

Aquém. (On this side). 1963 Untitled. Mid-1960s
Oil on canvas, 7' 10 1/2" x 9' x 10 1/8" (240 x 300 cm.) Tempera on burlap, 23 5/8 x 19 11/16" (60 x 50 cm)
Courtesy Galleria Millan, São Paulo Private collection, Brazil
68 mira schendel naves 69

Endnotes 5. Schendel, statement to the 9. See Guy Brett, “Ativamente o vazio,” 11. See Geraldo Souza Dias, Mira
1. See Raquel Arnaud e o olhar Departamento de Pesquisa e in Salzstein, ed., No vazio do mundo. Schendel: Kunst zwischen Metaphysik
contemporâneo (São Paulo: Cosac Documentação de Arte Brasileira Mira Schendel (São Paulo: Marca und Leiblichkeit (Glienicke and
Naify, 2005), p. 54. da Fundação Armando Alvares d’Agua, 1996), p. 55. This book is a rich Berlin: Galda + Wilch Verlag, 2000).
2. Mira Schendel, typed ms., unsigned Penteado (Department of research source of material on Schendel. A synopsis appears in Mira Schendel
and undated. Courtesy Arquivo Mira and documentation, Armando Alvares 10. Brett, for example, remarks on (Paris: Galerie Nationale du Jeu de
Schendel, São Paulo. Penteado foundation), São Paulo, the “fragility and energy” of the Paume, 2001).
3. This circle included the physicist August 19, 1977. Courtesy Arquivo Mira Droguinhas. Alberto Tassinari, 12. Giorgio Morandi won the prize for
and critic Mário Schenberg, the Schendel, São Paulo. discussing the Mais ou menos frutas etching at the second Bienal de São
psychoanalyst and critic Theon 6. Ibid. (More or less fruit) series, mentions Paulo, in 1953–54, which included
Spanudis, the philosopher and 7. Max Bill, born in Switzerland in 1908, their “communication between twenty-three of his prints. At the
essayist Vilém Flusser, and the artist had a deep influence on Brazilian art. intimacy and immensity.” Ronaldo fourth Bienal de São Paulo, in 1957, he
Amélia Toledo. His work Unidade tripartida (Tripartite Brito sees the Sarrafos (Splints) as won the grand prize.
4. A number of writers have mentioned unity, 1948) won the sculpture prize objects both “aesthetic and intense, 13. The bibliography on this subject is
this connection. See, for example, at the first Bienal de São Paulo, in almost anonymous but also unique.” both large and contradictory, but two
Paulo Venancio Filho, “A transparência 1951; he visited Brazil in 1953, when All in ibid., pp. 268, 270, and 274. studies are fundamental: Gilberto
framework of a more structured society might have identified her work, Schendel’s difficulty in being “aggressive”—even the Sarrafos can misteriosa da explicação,” in Sonia he argued harshly with modernist For Salzstein, Schendel’s work Freyre’s Casa Grande e Senzala
even if falsely, with an intimacy that was far from her concerns. While only be considered so in the context of her own work—helps to explain Salzstein, Mira Schendel. A forma Brazilian architects, and in January of involves “sophisticated conceptual (1933), Eng. trans. most recently as
volátil (Rio de Janeiro: Centro de 1954, as a juror at the second Bienal maneuvers” and “disconcerting The Masters and the Slaves (New York:
it is possible, for example, to find connections between Schendel and her dilemmas and aspirations. Even in the first paintings in tempera and
Arte Hélio Oiticica, and São Paulo: de São Paulo. He also helped to bring adhesion to quotidian matters.” See Random House, 2000), and Sérgio
Agnes Martin—at least in the subtlety of their work—it is also neces- gold leaf, from the mid-1980s—just before the Monocromáticos and the
Marca d’Agua, 1997), p. 29, and Maria word of Brazilian Constructivism to Mira Schendel. A forma volátil, p. 17. Buarque de Holanda’s Raízes do Brasil
sary to identify their differences. Martin’s subtlety arose from repeated Sarrafos—she was already searching for a more potent expressiveness, Eduarda Marques, Mira Schendel Europe, and in 1960 he wrote for the The Venezuelan critic Rina Carvajal (1936).
gestures that hesitated to claim uniqueness (a characteristic recalling in both the work’s format and the articulation of its elements. But the (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, Coleção catalogue of the exhibition of São writes that “in its apparent fragility, 14. See Iole de Freitas, “Os Sarrafos,”
the Minimalists), while Schendel’s came from a unique intervention that spaces of these paintings, ample in relation to her earlier work, raised Espaços da Arte Brasileira, 2001), Paulo Concretists at the Museu de simplicity, and lightness, the work of in Salzstein, ed., No vazio do
p. 29. On these aspects of Klee’s work Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro. Mira Schendel displays a powerful mundo, p. 226. Beginning in the
hesitated to affirm itself unilaterally. uncomfortable issues: how to prevent these slightly larger dimensions
see Robert Kudielka’s remarkable 8. The Grupo Ruptura (Rupture group) energy.” In Carvajal, Suely Rolnik, late 1970s, Schendel began to seek
I also think that easy connections between Schendel’s work from imposing themselves on the delicate relationships within them?
essay “Paul Klee and the ‘Saga of was led by Waldemar Cordeiro. The Alma Ruiz, et al., The Experimental out younger artists, an indication
and Brazilian art history can lead to errors. An art history as sparse as The answers reveal some hesitation. The contrast between the sparkle Infantilism,’” in Paul Klee. La infancia Manifesto Ruptura is republished in Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, of her continuous search for new
Brazil’s must calmly accept solitary paths, whose origins and itinerar- and contained geometry of the gold-leaf areas and the opacity and en la edad adulta (Las Palmas de Ana Maria Belluzzo, Aracy A. Amaral, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, challenges.
ies are not easily identified: Camargo, Miguel Bakun, Oswaldo Goeldi, indeterminacy of the monochromatic tempera surfaces establishes the Gran Canária: Centro Atlántico de Pierre Restany, et al., Waldemar and Mira Schendel (Los Angeles: The
Alberto da Veiga Guignard, and so many others. Also, we have only unresolved interplay that had always interested her. For these tensions Arte Moderno, 2007). Cordeiro, uma aventura da razão (São Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999),
Paulo: Museu de Arte Contemporânea p. 45.
recently been able to see the complete oeuvres of these various soli- to be effective, though, the golden areas had to be discrete, which to
da Universidade de São Paulo, 1986),
taries. Hurried conclusions might help in construing a more or less some extent limited their aesthetic and visual power.
p. 59.
cohesive narrative of our history, but to the detriment of their real Apparently Schendel could only be aggressive once. A second
achievements and singularity. time might compromise all she had believed in over the course of her
career. Life allows detours for those who wish to live a just life; these
Although Schendel revisited even tonality, continuing to search for trials may have an almost mythical, religious component, and high-
a softer reciprocity among beings and things, I believe that other light the rightness of the previous course. In 1987, after making the
criteria guided her work from the second half of the 1960s on. The Monocromáticos and the Sarrafos, Schendel began to work with brick
Sarrafos (Splints; plates 141, 142) of the late 1980s, which along with the dust and glue on the Tijolos (Brick; plate 145), in a scale like that of her
Monocromáticos are among her last works, recall her drawings of the earlier work. Again she returned to light tonal passages and to areas
1960s in their black lines on white, their ambiguities between plane of rough texture. If, in the Sarrafos, Schendel had been excessive, as if
and surface, and a certain difficulty in distinguishing their visual ele- swept by temptation, these works are correspondingly contained, as if
ments. Also like the Monocromáticos, they are relatively large scale. to atone for a lapse.
Here Schendel was bearing witness: those were turbulent years in Although Schendel was an agnostic, she had a theologian’s
Brazil—protests against the military dictatorship were accelerating, interest in religion. She studied the ideas of the German phenomenolo-
and a national space for public discourse was emerging. The possibil- gist Hermann Schmitz as if she might find in them the solutions to
ity of people coming closer without violence demanded a more power- her existential dilemmas. She was aware of the dissonance between
ful configuration of individualities. In fact the Sarrafos are Schendel’s art and life, between theory and praxis, but she never abandoned the
most assertive works. If, on the one hand, they echo the subtlety of the attempt to glimpse, through the artist’s experience, the contours of a
1960s work, on the other they establish more conflictual relationships, less fractured life: an existence in which people and the world, nature
in which the presence of angles and contrasts points to new directions. and culture, like lines and surfaces, gained strength precisely from
“I am finally able to be aggressive,” Schendel told the artist Iole de their ability to affirm what had seemed to be their opposite.
Freitas in the 1980s.14
70 71

1. Mira Schendel
Untitled. 1954
Tempera on wood, 20 1/8 x 26" (51.1 x 66 cm)
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 2. León Ferrari
The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Mujer (Woman). c. 1960
Constructive Art, museum purchase with Ceramic, 29 1/2 x 13 3/4 x 7 1/16" (75 x 35 x 18 cm)
funds provided by the Caroline Wiess Law Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
Accessions Endowment Fund Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
72 73

3. Mira Schendel 4. León Ferrari 5. León Ferrari

Untitled. 1953 Untitled. 1961 Mujer preocupada (Worried woman). 1960/1961
Oil on canvas, 25 1/2 x 21 1/8" (64.8 x 53.7 cm) Ceramic, 6 11/16 x 2 5/8 x 2 1/8" (17 x 6.6 x 5.4 cm) Ceramic, 17 5/16 x 7 7/8 x 5 1/8" (44 x 20 x 13 cm)
Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
74 75

7. León Ferrari 8. León Ferrari

Untitled. 1960/1961 Untitled. 1960
6. Mira Schendel Ceramic, Ceramic,
Untitled. 1954 8 11/16 x 1 15/16 x 1 15/16" (22 x 5 x 5 cm) 16 1/8 x 4 15/16 x 4 3/4" (41 x 12.5 x 12 cm)
Oil on canvas, 19 11/16 x 25 9/16" (50 x 65 cm) Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
Collection Andrea and José Olympio Pereira Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
76 77

9. Mira Schendel 10. Mira Schendel

Untitled. 1964 Untitled. 1963–64
Gouache on paper, 18 7/8 x 26" (48 x 66 cm) Tempera on canvas,
Collection Socorro de Andrade Lima 29 1/2 x 29 1/2" (75 x 75 cm)
Private collection
78 79

11. Mira Schendel 12. León Ferrari

Untitled. 1963 Sin titulo (Sermón de la sangre)
Incised tempera on wood, (Untitled [Sermon of the blood]). 1962
47 5/8 x 23 5/8" (121 x 60 cm) Ink and colored ink on paper,
Collection Antonio Hermann D. M. De Azevedo 39 3/8 x 26 5/8" (100 x 67.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Purchase
80 81

13. León Ferrari 14. Mira Schendel 15. Mira Schendel

Untitled. November 21, 1962 Untitled. 1960s Untitled. 1960s
Ink and colored pencil on paper, Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper, Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper,
39 3/4 x 27 3/16" (101 x 69 cm) 18 11/16 x 9" (47.5 x 22.9 cm) 18 11/16 x 9" (47.5 x 22.9 cm)
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Purchase Purchase
82 83

16. León Ferrari 17. León Ferrari 18. Mira Schendel 19. Mira Schendel
Untitled. March 1962 Música (Music). May 2, 1962 Untitled. 1964 Untitled from the series Escritas (Written). 1965
Ink on paper, 41 5/16 x 27 1/16" (105 x 68.8 cm) Ink on paper, 17 11/16 x 12 3/16" (45 x 31 cm) Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper, Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper,
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires 18 1/2 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm) 18 1/2 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm)
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo
84 85

20. León Ferrari 21. Mira Schendel 22. Mira Schendel 23. Mira Schendel
Untitled. April 26, 1962 Untitled from the series Letras (Letters). 1965 Untitled from the series Letras (Letters). 1965 Untitled from the series Letras (Letters). 1964
Ink on paper, 30 11/16 x 22 7/16" (78 x 57 cm) Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper, Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper, Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper,
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. 18 1/2 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm) 18 1/2 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm) 18 1/2 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm)
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo
86 87

24. León Ferrari 25. Mira Schendel

Untitled. 1964 Untitled. 1964
Ink on paper, 18 5/8 x 12 1/4" (47.3 x 31.1 cm) Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper,
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 18 1/2 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm)
Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in honor Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo
of Jennifer Russell
 89

27. Mira Schendel

A trama (A fabric net). 1960s
Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper,
26. León Ferrari 17 3/4 x 24 1/2" (45.1 x 62.2 cm)
Gagarín (Gagarin). c. 1961 The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Stainless steel, diam.: 20 1/2" (52 cm) Gift of Ada Schendel and the Latin American
Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires and Caribbean Fund
90 91

28. León Ferrari 29. León Ferrari 30. Mira Schendel 31. Mira Schendel
Untitled. 1964 Untitled. c. 1964 Untitled. 1964 Untitled. 1965
Ink on paper, 18 7/8 x 11 13/16" (48 x 30 cm) Ink on paper, 18 7/8 x 12 3/16" (48 x 31 cm) Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper, Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper,
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. 18 1/8 x 9 1/16" (46 x 23 cm) 18 1/8 x 9 1/4" (46 x 23.5 cm)
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Collection Cesare Rivetti Collection Adherbal Teixeira
92 93

32. León Ferrari 33. Mira Schendel

Untitled. October 24, 1962 Untitled. Mid-1960s
Cut-and-pasted painted paper Tempera on burlap,
on painted paper on wood, 19 7/8 x 19 7/8" (50.5 x 50.5 cm)
18 7/8 x 11 13/16" (48 x 30 cm) Private collection
Collection Maria Cristina and Pablo Henning,
Houston
94 95

34. León Ferrari 35. Mira Schendel 36. Mira Schendel

Untitled. 1962 Untitled from the series Escritas (Written). 1965 Untitled from the series Escritas (Written). 1965
Ink on gessoed wood, Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper, Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper,
29 1/8 x 17 5/8" (74 x 44.8 cm) 18 1/2 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm) 18 1/2 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm)
GC Estudio de Arte, Buenos Aires Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo
96 97

37. León Ferrari

Carta a un general (Letter to a general). 38. Mira Schendel 39. Mira Schendel 40. Mira Schendel
June 18, 1963 Untitled from the series Escritas (Written). 1965 Untitled from the series Escritas (Written). 1965 Untitled from the series Escritas (Written). 1965
Ink on paper, 13 3/8 x 6 7/8" (34 x 17.5 cm) Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper, Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper, Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper,
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. 18 1/8 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm) 18 1/8 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm) 18 1/8 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm)
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo
98 99

41. León Ferrari 42. Mira Schendel

Cuadro escrito (Written painting). Sem titulo (Achilles) (Untitled [Achilles]). 1960s
December 17, 1964 Oil on canvas, 36 5/8 x 51 15/16 x 1 3/8"
Ink on paper, 26 x 18 7/8" (66 x 48 cm) (93 x 132 x 3.5 cm)
Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires Private collection, São Paulo
100 101

43. León Ferrari 44–51. Mira Schendel

El árbol embarazador Eight untitled works from the series
(The impregnating tree). 1964 Alleluia (Hallelujah). 1973
Ink and cut-and-pasted printed paper Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper,
on paper, 16 9/16 x 12 5/8" (42 x 32 cm) each: 18 1/2 x 9 1/4" (47 x 23.5 cm)
Collection Ignacio Liprandi, Buenos Aires Private collection
102 103

52. León Ferrari 53. León Ferrari

Quisiera hacer una estatua Milagro en la OEA (Miracle in the OAS)
(I would like to make a statue). c. 1964 from the series Manuscritos (Manuscripts). 54. Mira Schendel 55. Mira Schendel 56. Mira Schendel
Ink on paper, 39 1/4 x 27 7/8" (99.7 x 70.8 cm) May 9, 1965 Untitled from the series Escritas (Written). 1965 Untitled from the series Escritas (Written). 1965 Untitled from the series Escritas (Written). 1965
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Ink on paper, 19 11/16 x 13 3/4" (50 x 35 cm) Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper, Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper, Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper,
Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in honor of Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. 18 1/2 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm) 18 1/2 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm) 18 1/2 x 9 1/16" (47 x 23 cm)
Connie Butler Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo
104

57. León Ferrari 58. León Ferrari 59–63. Mira Schendel

El día que amanecí muerto La batalia estaba en su momentos Five untitled works from the series
(The day that I dawned dead) from definitorios (The battle was in its Segno dei segni (Sign of signs). 1964–65
the series Manuscritos (Manuscripts). 1964 defining moments). 1964 Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper,
Ink and cut-and-pasted printed paper on Ink and cut-and-pasted printed paper five sheets, each: 18 1/8 x 9 1/16" (46 x 23 cm),
paper, 11 13/16 x 9 1/16" (30 x 23 cm) on paper, 12 x 9 3/8" (30.5 x 23.8 cm) overall: c. 24 x 6' 1 5/8" (61 x 187 cm)
Collection Mauro and Luz Herlitzka The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in Latin American and Caribbean Fund
honor of Howard Gardner
106 107

64. León Ferrari 65. León Ferrari

Sin titulo (Castelar) (Untitled [Castelar]). 1962 Hombre (Maguete) (Man [maquette]). 1962
Ink on paper, 40 3/16 x 27 9/16" (102 x 70 cm) Stainless steel, 27 9/16 x 13 3/4 x 13 3/4"
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Museum (70 x 35 x 35 cm)
purchase with funds provided by the Latin Maecenas Collection Alicia y León Ferrari
108

67. Mira Schendel

66. León Ferrari Untitled from the series
Untitled. 1962 Droguinhas (Little nothings). c. 1966
Ink on paper, 40 x 28 5/8" (101.6 x 72.7 cm) Japanese paper, dimensions variable,
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 26" (66 cm) fully extended
Purchase Collection Diane and Bruce Halle
110 111

68. León Ferrari 69. Mira Schendel

Reflexiones (Reflections). 1963 Untitled from the series
Ink on gessoed wood, copper wire, and Droguinhas (Little nothings). 1965
ink on glass, in artist's painted wood frame, Japanese paper, diam.: 7 7/8" (20 cm)
34 1/8 x 28 x 2" (86.7 x 71.1 x 5.1 cm) Private collection, London
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Latin American and Caribbean Fund
112 113

70. León Ferrari 71. Mira Schendel

Manos (Hands). 1964 Untitled from the series Droguinhas
Ink on gessoed wool, stainless steel and copper wire (Little nothings). 1966
with cut-out photographs, and ink on glass in artist's Japanese paper, dimensions variable,
wood frame, 46 7/8 x 28 15/16 x 3 9/16" (119 x 73.5 x 9 cm) 26 1/4" (66.6 cm) fully extended
Malba-Fundación Costantini, Buenos Aires Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
114 115

72. León Ferrari 73. Mira Schendel

Torre de Babel (Tower of Babel). 1964 Untitled from the series Droguinhas
Stainless steel, bronze, and copper, (Little nothings). c. 1964–66
6' 6 3/4" x 31 1/2" (200 x 80 cm) Japanese paper, dimensions variable,
Lent by the American Fund for the 35 1/2" (90 cm) fully extended
Tate Gallery 2008 The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Scott Burton Fund, 2005
116 117

74. Mira Schendel 75. Mira Schendel 76. Mira Schendel

Untitled from the series Untitled. 1965 Untitled. 1965
Droguinhas (Little nothings). 1966 Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper, Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper,
Japanese paper, dimensions variable 18 1/8 x 9 1/16" (46 x 23 cm) 18 1/8 x 9 1/16" (46 x 23 cm)
Collection Ada Schendel Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo
 118 119

77. Mira Schendel 78. León Ferrari

Trenzinho (Little train). 1965 Untitled. 1991
Sheets of thin Japanese paper and nylon line, Oilstick on hardboard,
dimensions variable 6' 6 3/4" x 37 3/8" (200 x 95 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Richard Zeisler The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Bequest, gift of John Hay Whitney, and Marguerite K. Promised gift of Marie-Josée and
Stone Bequest (all by exchange) and gift of Patricia Henry Kravis
Phelps de Cisneros and Mimi Haas through the
Latin American and Caribbean Fund
120 121

79. Mira Schendel 80. León Ferrari

Untitled from the series Objetos gráficos Untitled. 1983
(Graphic objects). c. 1969 Oilstick and pastel on hardboard,
Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese 40 x 40" (101.6 x 101.6 cm)
paper between transparent acrylic sheets, Collection Ruben Cherñajovsky, Buenos Aires
39 3/8 x 39 3/8 x 3/8" (100 x 100 x 1 cm)
Collection Diane and Bruce Halle
122 123

81. Mira Schendel 82. León Ferrari

Untitled from the series Objetos gráficos Untitled. 1985
(Graphic objects). 1967 Oilstick and pastel on hardboard,
Graphite, transfer type, and oil on paper 39 3/8 x 38 9/16" (100 x 98 cm)
between transparent acrylic sheets Collection Patricia Rousseaux
with transfer type, 39 5/16 x 39 5/16 x 3/8"
(99.8 x 99.8 x 1 cm)
Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
124 125

83. Mira Schendel 84. León Ferrari

Untitled from the series Objetos gráficos Untitled. 1983
(Graphic objects). Late 1960s Oilstick and pastel on hardboard,
Oil transfer drawing and transfer type on thin 19 11/16 x 19 11/16" (50 x 50 cm)
Japanese paper between transparent acrylic Collection Patricia Rousseaux
sheets with transfer type,
39 3/8 x 39 3/8 x 5/16" (100 x 100 x 8 cm)
Private collection, São Paulo
126 127

85. Mira Schendel 86. León Ferrari

Untitled from the series Objetos gráficos Untitled. 1984
(Graphic objects). 1967–68 Oilstick and pastel on hardboard,
Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper 31 1/2 x 39 3/8" (80 x 100 cm)
between painted transparent acrylic sheets, Collection Cesare Rivetti
38 3/8 x 38 3/8 x 3/8" (97.5 x 97.5 x 1 cm)
Private collection
128 129

88. Mira Schendel

Untitled from the series Objetos gráficos
(Graphic objects). Late 1960s
Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese
paper between transparent acrylic sheets,
19 11/16 x 19 11/16 x 3/8" (50 x 50 x 1 cm)
Collection Marta and Paulo Kuczynski,
São Paulo

89. Mira Schendel

87. Mira Schendel Untitled from the series Objetos gráficos
Untitled from the series Objetos gráficos (Graphic objects). Late 1960s
(Graphic objects). 1967–68 Oil transfer drawing and transfer type on
Oil transfer drawing on thin Japanese paper thin Japanese paper between transparent
between painted transparent acrylic sheets, acrylic sheets, 19 11/16 x 19 11/16 x 1/4"
39 3/8 x 39 3/8 x 3/8" (100 x 100 x 1 cm) (50 x 50 x .6 cm)
Collection Ernesto and Cecilia Poma Private collection, São Paulo
 130 131

90. Mira Schendel 91. León Ferrari

Untitled from the series Objetos Untitled. 1980s
gráficos (Graphic objects). 1967 Oilstick and pastel on hardboard,
Typewriting on paper between transparent acrylic 28 3/4 x 44 1/2" (73 x 113 cm)
sheets, 39 3/8 x 39 3/8 x 3/8" (100 x 100 x 1 cm). Collection Hector Babenco
Seen from both sides
Collection Ada Schendel
132 133

92. León Ferrari 93. Mira Schendel

La embarazada (The pregnant one). 1979 Untitled from the series
Stainless steel, Objetos gráficos (Graphic objects). 1973
19 5/16 x 19 5/16 x 19 5/16" (49 x 49 x 49 cm) Transfer type on thin Japanese paper between
Private collection transparent acrylic sheets, 22 x 22 x 3/8"
(55.9 x 55.9 x 1 cm)
Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
134 135

94. León Ferrari 95. Mira Schendel

Planeta (Planet). 1979 Untitled from the series Objetos gráficos
Stainless steel, diam.: 51" (129.5 cm) (Graphic objects). 1972
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Transfer type on thin Japanese paper between
Fractional and promised gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros transparent acrylic sheets, 37 3/8 x 37 3/8 x 3/8"
in honor of Mirriam Levenson through the Latin American (95 x 95 x 1 cm)
and Caribbean Fund Collection Clara Sancovsky
136 137

97. León Ferrari

Espectadores (Spectators) from the series
Heliografias (Heliographs). 1981 (signed 2007)
One from a series of twenty-seven diazotypes,
comp.: 36 x 36 5/8" (91.4 x 93 cm), sheet: 37 13/16 x
37 7/16" (96 x 95.1 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift of the artist

98. León Ferrari 99. León Ferrari

96. León Ferrari
Cuadrado (Square) from the series Untitled from the series Heliografias
Opus 113. 1980
Heliografias (Heliographs). 1982 (signed 2007) (Heliographs). 1982 (signed 2007)
Stainless steel, 7' 5 /4" x 26 /8" x 25 /16"
3 1 9

One from a series of twenty-seven diazotypes, One from a series of twenty-seven diazotypes,
(228 x 66.3 x 65 cm)
comp.: 35 11/16 x 35 1/2" (90.7 x 90.2 cm), comp. (irreg.): 37 13/16 x 38 1/16" (96 x 96.7 cm),
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
sheet: 39 1/8 x 38 9/16" (99.3 x 98 cm) sheet: 40 15/16 x 41 1/8" (104 x 104.5 cm)
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift of the artist Gift of the artist
138 139

101. León Ferrari

100. León Ferrari
Untitled. 1979
Untitled. c. 1977–78
Ink on paper, 41 15/16 x 29 13/16" (106.5 x 75.8 cm)
Stainless steel, 6' 6 3/4" x 27 9/16" x 27 9/16"
Collection Cesare Rivetti
(200 x 70 x 70 cm)
Private collection
 141

102. Mira Schendel

Untitled from the series
Datiloscritos (Typed writings). 1970s
Typewriting on paper, 19 11/16 x 14 3/16"
(50 x 36 cm)
Private collection

103. Mira Schendel 105. Mira Schendel 106. Mira Schendel

Untitled from the series 104. Mira Schendel Untitled from the series Datiloscritos (Typed Untitled from the series Datiloscritos (Typed
Datiloscritos (Typed writings). 1974 Untitled from the series Datiloscritos writings). 1975 writings). c. 1970s
Typewriting, ink, and transfer type on paper, (Typed writings). 1974 Typewriting and felt-tip pen on paper, Typewriting and ink on paper, 19 3/4 x 14 1/4"
19 3/4 x 14 1/4" (50.2 x 36.2 cm) Typewriting and transfer type on paper, 20 1/16 x 14 9/16" (51 x 37 cm) (50.2 x 36.2 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 20 1/16 x 14 3/8" (51 x 36.5 cm) Collection Estrellita and Daniel Brodsky The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Committee on Drawings Funds Private collection Committee on Drawings Funds
142 143

107. León Ferrari 108. Mira Schendel 109. Mira Schendel

P4CR from the series Xadrez (Chess) Untitled from the series Letras Untitled from the series Letras
and the book Imagens (Images). 1979 circunscritas (Circumscribed letters). 1974 circunscritas (Circumscribed letters). 1974
Transfer type and cut-and-pasted printed Felt-tip pen on paper, 19 13/16 x 14 5/16" Felt-tip pen on paper, 18 5/8 x 13" (47.3 x 33 cm)
papers on paper, 12 7/8 x 8 7/16" (32.7 x 21.4 cm) (50.3 x 36.4 cm) Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
144 145

110. León Ferrari 111. Mira Schendel 112. Mira Schendel

Untitled. March 17, 1980 Untitled. 1960s Untitled. 1960
Ink, transfer type, and cut-and-pasted printed Felt-tip pen on paper, 40 9/16 x 27 3/8" Felt-tip pen on paper, 40 3/4 x 27 9/16"
papers on paper, 12 7/8 x 8 7/16" (32.7 x 21.4 cm) (103 x 69.5 cm) (103.5 x 70 cm)
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Collection Ivo Vel Kos Collection Adherbal Teixeira
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
146 147

113. León Ferrari

Kama-Sutra I from the series
Códigos (Codes) and the book Imagens
(Images). 1979
Ink on paper, 13 x 8 7/16" (33 x 21.5 cm)
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires

114. León Ferrari 115. León Ferrari 116. Mira Schendel

Kama-Sutra III from the series Kama-Sutra II from the series Untitled. 1971
Códigos (Codes) and the book Imagens Códigos (Codes) and the book Imagens Transfer type between transparent acrylic
(Images). 1979 (Images). 1979 sheets, 3 9/16" (diam.) x 3/8" (9 x 1 cm). Seen
Ink on paper, 13 x 8 7/16" (33 x 21.5 cm) Ink on paper, 12 13/16 x 8 7/16" (32.5 x 21.5 cm) from both sides
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Collection Ada Schendel
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
148 149

117. León Ferrari 118. León Ferrari 119. Mira Schendel

Traduções (Translations) from the series Zoología (Zoology) from the series Untitled. 1972
Códigos (Codes) and the book Imagens Códigos (Codes) and the book Imagens Transfer type between brushed acrylic
(Images). 1979 (Images). 1979 sheets, 10 5/8" (diam.) x 3/16" (27 x .5 cm)
Ink and transfer type on paper, 12 3/16 x 8 7/16" Ink and transfer type on paper, 12 3/16 x 8 7/16" Lent by the American Fund for the
(31 x 21.5 cm) (31 x 21.5 cm) Tate Gallery 2007
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
 150 151

120. Mira Schendel 121. León Ferrari

Ondas paradas de probabilidade Juicio final (Last Judgment). 1994
(Still waves of probability). 1969 Printed paper (reproduction of Michelangelo’s Last
Nylon thread and printed wall text, installation, Judgment) with bird excrement, 59 1/16 x 47 1/4 x 4 3/4"
variable dimensions (150 x 120 x 12 cm)
Collection Ada Schendel Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
152 153

122. Mira Schendel

Homenagem a Deus—pai do Ocidente
(Homage to God—father of the West). 1975
Transfer type, airbrush, and ink on paper,
sixteen sheets, each: 19 15/16 x 16 1/2" (50.6 x
26.6 cm)
Private collection
154 155

125. León Ferrari 126. León Ferrari

123. León Ferrari 124. León Ferrari Helicóptero (Helicopter) from the series Ángel apocalíptico (Apocalyptic angel)
Untitled from the series Relecturas de la Untitled from the series Relecturas de la Relecturas de la Biblia (Rereadings of the from the series Relecturas de la Biblia
Biblia (Rereadings of the Bible). November 1986 Biblia (Rereadings of the Bible). February 3, 1987 Bible). 1988 (Rereadings of the Bible). 1988
Cut-and-pasted printed paper on printed Cut-and-pasted printed paper on printed Cut-and-pasted printed paper on printed Cut-and-pasted printed paper on printed
paper, 11 1/4 x 8 13/16" (28.5 x 22.4 cm) paper, 9 1/4 x 8 1/4" (23.5 x 21 cm) paper, 9 13/16 x 9 7/16" (25 x 24 cm) paper, 13 3/4 x 9 7/16" (35 x 24 cm)
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
156 157

127. León Ferrari 128. León Ferrari

Untitled. 1986 Untitled. c. 1988
Cut-and-pasted printed paper on printed paper, Cut-and-pasted printed papers on paper,
7 3/4 x 6 1/8" (19.7 x 15.5 cm) 10 7/16 x 13 3/8" (26.5 x 34 cm)
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
158 159

129. León Ferrari

Renovación (Renewal) from the series
L’Osservatore Romano. 2001 130–33. Mira Schendel
Cut-and-pasted printed paper (reproduction Four untitled works from the series
of a detail of Michelangelo’s Last Toquinhos (Little things). 1977
Judgment) on printed paper, 16 15/16 x 11 7/16" Transfer type, dyed paper, and pencil on
(43 x 29 cm) paper, each: 19 5/16 x 10 1/16"
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. (49 x 25.5 cm)
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo
160 161

134. León Ferrari 135. León Ferrari

Unión libre (Free union). 2004 Leda y el cisne (Leda and the swan). 1997
Braille (surface embossing) of the poem Braille (surface embossing) on printed paper 136. Mira Schendel 137. Mira Schendel
"Union libre" by André Breton, in Spanish (reproduction of Leonardo’s Leda and the Untitled from the series Toquinhos Untitled from the series Toquinhos
trans. by Aldo Pellegrini, on a gelatin silver Swan), 15 3/8 x 9 1/16" (39 x 23 cm) (Little things). 1970s (Little things). 1973
photograph by Cesar Augusto Ferrari, c. 1924, Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Transfer type on shaped acrylic on acrylic Transfer type on shaped acrylic on acrylic
11 5/8 x 8 1/4" (29.5 x 21 cm) Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires sheet, 18 15/16 x 8 1/16 x 1 3/8" sheet, 18 1/2 x 10 1/4 x 1 9/16" (47 x 26 x 4 cm)
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. (46.5 x 20.5 x 3.5 cm) Private collection, São Paulo
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Collection Esther Faingold
162 163

138 (top). León Ferrari 139 (bottom). León Ferrari

Untitled from the series Relecturas Untitled from the series Relecturas 140. Mira Schendel
de la Biblia (Rereadings of the Bible). 1986 de la Biblia (Rereadings of the Bible). Three untitled works from the series
Cut-and-pasted printed paper on November 26, 1986 Desenhos lineares (Linear drawings). 1973
printed paper, 10 5/8 x 14 3/16" (27 x 36 cm) Cut-and-pasted printed paper on Transfer type on thin Japanese paper, each:
Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. printed paper 10 5/8 x 8 1/4" (27 x 21 cm) 18 1/2 x 9 1/4" (47 x 23.5 cm)
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Courtesy Galeria Millan, São Paulo
Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
164 165

141. Mira Schendel

Untitled from the series Sarrafos (Splints). 1987
Synthetic polymer paint on wood,
6' 1 5/8" x 70 7/8" x 5 7/8" (187 x 180 x 15 cm)
Collection Dulce and João Carlos de
Figueiredo Ferraz
143. León Ferrari 144. León Ferrari
142. Mira Schendel Ramas (Branches). 2007 Huesos (Bones). 2006
Untitled from the series Sarrafos (Splints). 1987 Willow branches and wire, Polyurethane bones and wire,
Synthetic polymer paint on wood, 7' 8 1/2" x 35 7/16" x 35 7/16" (235 x 90 x 90 cm) 64 15/16 x 31 1/2 x 27 9/16" (165 x 80 x 70 cm)
6' 5 /16"" x 70 /8" x 3 /8" (198 x 180 x 9.2 cm)
15 7 5 Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Private collection, New York
Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
166

145. Mira Schendel 146. León Ferrari

Untitled from the series Tijolos (Bricks). 1988 Árboles (Trees). 2006
Brick dust on hardboard, 39 3/8" x 6’ 6 3/4" Polyurethane foam and synthetic polymer
(100 x 200 cm) trees, 72 13/16 x 31 1/2 x 27 9/16" (185 x 80 x 70 cm)
Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari.
Universidade de São Paulo Archivo y Colección, Buenos Aires
chronology By Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães
169

Augusto and Susana Ferrari, 1918

León Ferrari

1920 1922 1934–38

September 3: León Cesar Ferrari Augusto Ferrari is contracted to Attends high school at the Colegio
del Pardo born in Buenos Aires, renovate the exterior and interior Guadalupe, Buenos Aires. Even
Argentina, the third of six children. of the Iglesia de San Miguel though I went to mass while we
His parents are Augusto C. Ferrari, Arcangel, Buenos Aires. He will were in the countryside, it wasn’t a
an Italian artist and architect, and paint until 1965, producing land- very pious atmosphere. It was even
Susana Celia del Pardo. scapes, nudes, portraits, self- my luck to be sent to a high school
portraits, and still lifes, in addition run by priests. And there, yes,
to photographing nudes. that was hell. Not because of any
explicit torture, but for the notion of
hell they stuffed into your head.1

Schendel, Milan, mid-1920s Ada Saveria Gnoli, Milan, late 1930s

Schendel, Milan, mid-1930s

Mira Schendel

1919 1920 1922 Mid-1920s 1936

June 7: Mira Schendel born March 17: Karl Dub moves to Berlin, June: Ada moves to Mussoco, a From the time I was four or five Ada meets Count Tommaso Gnoli,
Myrrha Dagmar Dub in Zurich, followed by Ada shortly after. Ada suburb of Milan, after separating years old I drew at a furious rate; director of the Biblioteca Estense
Switzerland, the only daughter of soon returns, however, to be with from Dub. it must have been with colored Universitaria, Modena, Italy, whom
Jewish parents Karl Leo Dub, a her daughter, who has remained in pencils and graph paper. I drew she will marry in the following
fabric merchant, and Ada Saveria Zurich with her maternal grand- September: Ada divorces Dub figures. . . . I read or I drew. I always year. Mira stops taking art classes
Dub (nee Büttner), a milliner. parents. after four years of marriage. Her had a drawing pad and a black and begins to study philosophy at
parents join her in Italy. Dub, who pencil with me. I sketched and the Università Cattolica del Sacro
August 19: Ada returns to Berlin, is believed to have emigrated to people watched me draw furiously.1 Cuore, Milan, which combines
again leaving Mira with her grand- South America, will lose contact an academic education with a
parents. with his daughter and ex-wife, but Early 1930s religious one.2
Mira remains in touch with his fam- Takes art courses. Little else is
October 20: at her mother’s ily and visits them occasionally. recorded, however, about her
request, Mira is baptized at education during this period.
the Kirche St. Peter und Paul, a
Catholic church in Zurich.

1921
August 27: is taken to Berlin to
be reunited with her parents.
 Ferrari and Alicia Matilde Barros Castro,
Ferrari and his son Ariel, Castelar, Left to right: Ferrari, Rafael Alberti,
Tigre, Buenos Aires, March 8, 1942
Buenos Aires, c. 1960 and Perla and Enrique Rotzait.
Ferrari in his studio, Rome, 1955 León Ferrari. Ceramics. c. 1955 Ezeiza airport, Buenos Aires, 1963

León Ferrari. Alicia. 1947.

Oil on wood, 15 3/4 x 18 1/2” (40 x 47 cm).
Collection Alicia and León Ferrari

Ferrari

1938–1947 1946 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1958
Studies engineering at the Facultad December 10: marries Alicia Death of Susana, Ferrari’s mother. The family moves to Castelar, June 7: birth of third child, Ariel Fall: Marialí contracts tuberculous Alicia and Marialí return to Buenos June: participates in a ceramics February 15–28: León Ferrari, Collaborates with Birri on the film
de Sciencias Exactas, Físicas y Matilde Barros Castro. Begins to Buenos Aires, where they will live Adrián Ferrari. meningitis. León and Alicia move Aires. Ferrari moves to Rome, competition held by the Museo Galleria Cairola, Milan. His first La primera fundación de Buenos
Naturales, Universidad de Buenos paint still lifes and portraits using November 9: birth of second until 1976. León sets up a labora- with her to Florence, Italy, where rents a studio in Trastevere, and Nazionale delle Ceramiche di solo exhibition, it contains fifty Aires (The first founding of Buenos
Aires. While at the university he loose, broad brushstrokes and a child, Pablo Augusto Ferrari. tory to investigate the metallic she will remain in treatment at begins making large ceramics, Faenza, his first group show. ceramics. Returning to Buenos Aires), based on a drawing by the
becomes interested in art and dark color palette similar to his element tungsten. the Ospedale Pediatrico Meyer some designed to be hung. One Aires before the show opens, he Argentine cartoonist Oscar Conti.
starts making ceramics. Along with father’s style. for nine months. Through the use month before we were due back, will work as an engineer until 1958. In 1959 we went to the Cannes
a fellow student we used to draw. of the antibiotic streptomycin to I took some ceramic lessons at [My father] advised us not to study Festival, the film received three
I liked it but didn’t think of dedicat- 1948 treat her bacterial infection, she the studio of some Sicilian named art . . . because he said that it was prizes in Argentina and that’s
ing myself to that alone.2 August 28: birth of María Alicia loses her hearing and speech. [Salvatori] Meli, and there I fell in difficult to support a family as an where the adventure ended, and
Ferrari, also known as Marialí, the love with clay and ceramic forms.3 artist.4 Studies tungsten, tantalum, I began to do something else.5
first of three children. At Rome’s Instituto Italo Argentino and niobium, intending to create a Begins to concentrate on making
de Intercambio Cultural he meets small family business to produce sculpture.
Argentine exiles including film- compounds of these elements.
maker Fernando Birri.

Mira Schendel. Untitled. 1953

Schendel, São Paulo, 1952
See page 72

Schendel, Porto Alegre, 1952

Knut Schendel, Berlin, 1932

Mira Schendel. Untitled. 1954

Schendel and Josip Hargesheimer, Sarajevo, See page 70
1942

Schendel

1939 1941 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955
Benito Mussolini passes laws ban- April 19: marries Josip Begins work at the International July 27: the couple leave Italy, sail- Schendel begins to paint. After June 1–10: exhibits in the first Salão After her exposure to contempo- January 31–February 8: partici- Meets Knut Schendel, a German July 2–October 12: participates in
ning the enrollment of non-Italian Hargesheimer, a Catholic Croatian Refugee Organization (IRO), ing from Naples on the ship Protea. the war, I began painting; drawing Universitário Baiano de Belas-Artes, rary art at the Bienal, Schendel pates in the first Festival de Arte immigrant to Brazil who owns the the third Bienal de São Paulo, along
Jews in institutions of higher edu- whom she meets in Sarajevo. founded in 1946 to deal with the came later. . . . Life was very hard; Salvador, Brazil, and wins the salon’s begins to work more seriously and e Música de Bento Gonçalves, well-known São Paulo bookstore with Brazilian contemporaries Lygia
cation, forcing Schendel, classified massive refugee problem created August 13: they arrive in Rio de I didn’t have money for paints, but gold medal. to exhibit more often. From now on, Salão de Artes Plásticas, Bento Canuto and whom she will later Clark, Milton Dacosta, Maria Leon-
as a Jew, to leave the Università 1944 by World War II.3 She will work here Janeiro on route to Porto Alegre, I bought cheap paints and painted the struggle will be decisive. Today, Gonçalves, Brazil. Wins an honor- marry. tina, Alfredo Volpi, and others.
Cattolica. On her mother’s advice, On receiving a Croatian passport, for a year. A displaced person where Schendel will register as passionately. It was a matter of October 20–December 23: par- one must truly choose. Today, one able mention.
she sets out for the home of her returns to Italy to spend time herself, Schendel is engaged by Mirra Hargesheimer on August 31st. life and death.5 She takes draw- ticipates in the first Bienal de São must truly commit oneself. Thus, October 12: Mira: Exposição de During this period Schendel is
aunt, in Sofia, Bulgaria, to escape with her mother and stepfather. the agency’s mandate of assisting ing and sculpture classes at the Paulo with the painting Paisagem art also can be nothing less than a July: separates from Hargesheimer pinturas, Museu de Arte Moderna getting to know a small intellec-
fascist persecution. Her trip is The following year she and refugees either by helping them city’s school of fine arts while (Landscape). Other artists rep- religious commitment.7 and moves to São Paulo. In a letter de São Paulo. The paintings of this tual circle, including the psycho-
diverted to Vienna, where she joins Hargesheimer will settle in Rome. “to return to their countries of studying philosophy and theology resented include Morandi, Lucio to relatives, she comments on period, called Fachadas (Facades) analyst, art critic, and poet Theon
a group of refugees who travel to nationality and/or former habitual independently. Fontana, and Max Bill. Of submit- Participates in the first Exposição Porto Alegre’s remoteness from and Geladeiras (Refrigerators), Spanudis, the theoretical physicist
Sarajevo. residence, or by finding new ting her work she will say, I had de Arte Moderna, Santa Maria, the world of artists: On the one comprise irregular geometric and art critic Mário Schenberg, the
homes elsewhere.”4 Schendel and October: first solo exhibition, at the that courage. The courage of youth, Brazil, and wins a prize. hand, this isolation is not all bad, shapes resembling abstract build- philosopher Vilém Flusser, and the
Hargesheimer soon begin planning Auditório do Correio do Povo, one of craziness. I was accepted.6 that is, was not all bad. . . . I could ing facades, and are rendered in Concrete poet Haroldo de Campos.
to find a new home for themselves, of Porto Alegre’s few art spaces. work quietly, hearing no criticism, a predominantly dark, monochro- De Campos will later remember
considering moving to Argentina, Shows six portraits, still lifes, and seeing nothing which would distract matic palette. Schenberg introducing him to
Venezuela, Canada, and the United landscapes. The works recall the me. . . . I now need open competi- Schendel: “When she was almost
States before settling on the city of quiet aesthetic of the Italian mod- tion. Having no serious contenders unknown, he called me to his home
Porto Alegre, Brazil. ernist Giorgio Morandi. is not at all pleasant. It doesn’t mat- to show me samples of Mira’s work
ter to me if I win awards (it was im- and through him I came to know
portant last year); what is important Mira personally. . . . Mário Schen-
to me is to carry out serious work.8 berg, a really extraordinary figure
in our culture, soon perceived the
importance of her work.”9
 León Ferrari. Torre de Babel
León Ferrari. Carta a un León Ferrari, La civilizacion
(Tower of Babel). 1964
general (Letter to a general). occidental y cristiana.
172 chronology See page 114 gutiérrez-guimarães 173
June 18, 1963 See page 96 (Western Christian civilization). 1965.
Ferrari in Galeria Levi, Milan 1962 See page 53

Ferrari

1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965

November 7–19: León Ferrari. October 4–18: León Ferrari. Metal February 21–March 10: partici- Fall: the collector and author April: begins the series Carta a November: participates in La es- January: begins to develop the September 19: writes down his September 1–23: partici- similar. When I changed my mind
Esculturas, Galería Galatea, y madera, Galería Van Riel, Buenos pates in Pittori, scultori argentine, Arturo Schwarz invites Ferrari to un general (Letter to a general), cultura en pequeño, Galería Lirolay, idea of “babelism,” a notion first ideas for Cuadro escrito pates in the Premio Nacional e about art, motivated by the bomb-
Buenos Aires. Exhibits sculptures Aires. Exhibits sixteen carved-wood Teatro del Croso, Milan. contribute to Antología internazion- works on paper in which serial, Buenos Aires. touched on in Torre de Babel: (Written painting): Make a drawing Internacional Instituto Torcuato ings in Vietnam, I warned him that
in cement, plaster, and wood. works and his first wire sculptures. ale dell’incisione contemporanea, gestural lines and curvilinear ab- There could be one person who whose title . . . is an inextricable, Di Tella. Having considered a I would do something else.14 Ferrari
March 12: León Ferrari, Galleria December 1963–February 1964:
Critics describe the work as Applauding his understanding of an anthology of prints, published in stract forms suggest deformed puts the tower together with things ostensible and failed description number of possible submissions, receives a strong reaction from
Pater, Milan. His wire sculptures participates in L’Art argentin actuel,
“smooth” and “alive”; his “grand the materials he uses in his work, Milan, by various artists including writing. from others, or better yet, make of the painting that should be most of them political in connota- the press on the three works
are described as “drawings in Musée National d’Art Moderne,
vessels, gourds and pregnant tor- the press describes his sculptures Jackson Pollock. When someone it among all of us, crossing each hanging there.13 Completed on tion, Ferrari finally settles on La that remain, two of which refer to
space that have almost more light June 19: begins work on the sculp- Paris.
sos have the softness and elastic- as “luminous,” “grandiose,” and makes sculptures and drawings it other, covering each other . . . all December 17, the work comprises civilización occidental y cristiana school bombings in Vietnam and
than body, like an explosion of ture Torre de Babel (Tower of Babel), an elaborate, gestural, calligraphic
ity of bodies.”6 Meets the Spanish “monumental.”7 is assumed that the drawings are Participates in Schrift und Bild, an of us together working . . . without (Western Christian civilization), include a skeletal representation
sparks.”8 which he will finish on January 24, text describing what Ferrari would
poet Rafael Alberti, an exile in made first . . . I began the sculptures exhibition including artists such looking at what the other is doing.12 a Christ figure crucified to the of Christ.15 Ferrari responds in an
December: begins a five-month 1964. This is his last sculpture of the paint if he only could.
Argentina since 1939, and they April: returns to Buenos Aires. in 1960, and the drawings two years as Paul Klee and Henri Michaux, at belly of a U.S. fighter jet. The work open letter: Given the way in which
stay in Milan. 1960s: It’s too much . . . never again April 1–15: León Ferrari: Escrituras,
collaborate on the book Escrito later in Italy, on account of an invita- the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, is installed, but director Jorge the chronicler describes my works,
August 13–September 1: León will I do something like this. I have to alambres y manos, Galería Lirolay, November: begins series of
en el aire (Written in the air), to be tion received by Arturo.9 and the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. Romero Brest asks Ferrari to re- I worry that someone could think I
Ferrari. Alambres y dibujos, Galería work on other things. Maybe the idea Buenos Aires. written drawings, some of them
published in 1964. move it before the show opens am a communist and add my name
Antigona, Buenos Aires. November 17: begins work on of making a Babel among several openly criticizing Christianity, and
October 7: participates in Feria on the grounds that it offends to the blacklists. . . . It therefore
an abstract drawing based on people.11 containing collages of found im-
de la Feria, Galería Lirolay, Buenos the staff. Romero Brest invited seems prudent to clarify that I am
Alberti’s poem “Sermón de la ages.
Aires, where he exhibits seven- me to the ’65 Premio supposing (I not a communist . . . and that I am
sangre” (Sermon of the blood). I teen Botellas (Bottles). believe) that I would send either profoundly worried by the U.S. war
started to work on the poem . . . a wire sculpture . . . or something against Vietnam.16
with the idea of making something
very complex . . . with red, blood.10
Mira Schendel. Untitled. 1963–64 Mira Schendel. Untitled. Mid-1960s Schendel with a Droguinha,
Mira Schendel and Ada Clara Schendel, See page 93
See p. 77 São Paulo, 1980s
São Paulo, 1957 Signals gallery, London, 1966

Mira Schendel. A trama (A fabric net). 1960s

See page 89

1957 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966

November 26: birth of Ada Clara June 30: participates in the Salão March 19: Mira Schendel: Pinturas and background. Its rectangular February 26: opening of Mira Beginning this year and continu- July 22–September 22: partici- This year Schendel begins May: Mira Schendel, Museu de do Rio de Janeiro] combined,
Schendel, Schendel’s only child. Paulista de Arte Moderna, São opens at the Galeria de Arte São shapes stood out, here and there, Schendel: Oleos e desenhos, ing until 1967, Schendel pro- pates in Soundings Two, Signals the three-dimensional series Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro. somewhat, with the work itself. . . .
To look after her, Schendel stops Paulo. Luiz, São Paulo. The paintings of so that the rest of the picture Galeria Astréia, São Paulo. duces over 2,000 works on thin Gallery, London, on Brett’s invita- Droguinhas (Little nothings) Schendel’s first major museum I remember that in London, in ’66,
making art, a suspension that will this period are in oil and tempera served as a backdrop. Form left Schenberg describes “difficult and Japanese paper. The series will tion. Cofounded by Paul Keeler and makes the installation retrospective is accompanied by it was an ebullient, changing time;
November 22: solo exhibition,
last until 1960. mixed with sand, polymer, plaster, off being form, living form, plastic austere canvases, of a strong on- become known as Monotipias, or and David Medalla in 1964, Trenzinho (Little train), both us- an exhibition catalogue in which it was a very important moment. I
Galeria Selearte, São Paulo,
and the red earth of the São Paulo form, in order to become compos- tological sense, in which the rigor Monotypes; as the critic Rodrigo Signals Gallery is an avant-garde ing thin Japanese paper. In the a poem by Campos describes remember the gallery. It was full.
1960 dedicated to her series Bordados
region. Subdued colors saturate ite form.”10 of construction and the constraint Naves has written, this is a misno- space that has already exhibited Droguinhas, the paper is knotted, Schendel’s work as “an art of People were coming and going.
March 17: marries Knut Schendel. (Embroideries). Among the first
the compositions and the interlaid of color and texture made us feel mer, although the technique bears Brazilian art by Camargo, Clark, braided, and twisted into organic, voids/where the utmost redun- People were all over the place. A
Meets the Brazilian artist Sérgio drawings she makes on Japanese September 28–December 22:
materials create vivid textural the Parmenidian being, unchanged a relation to the monotype meth- and Hélio Oiticica. tangible nets; in Trenzinho, sheets dancy begins to produce original totally different climate.15
Camargo, who will later introduce paper, using Ecoline ink, these participates in the Bienal de São
patterns, accentuated by minimal and rigid in its own identity. In one od. Schendel will cover a glass of thin, semitransparent paper information/an art of words and
her to the British critic and curator works feature repeated geometric Paulo. September 4–November 28: Fall: Desenhos de Mira Schendel,
traces of lines and geometric or the other, the rigid and massive laminate with oil paint, sprinkle hang from a nylon thread, gently quasi-words/where the graphic
Guy Brett. motifs. participates in the Bienal de São Galerie Buchholz, Lisbon.
shapes. The critic Mário Pedrosa Being appeared threatened by a a layer of talcum powder over it, intersecting the space with a form veils and unveils seals and
Paulo. Portuguese critic José Augusto
writes, “Formerly, the line which devouring Nothingness.”11 and lay the paper over the talc. ghostlike presence. Brett writes, unseals/sudden semantic values/
França comments, “The con-
divided the rectangle into multiple She will then use her fingernails October 4: Mira Schendel, Petite “Schendel’s Droguinhas do not de- an art of constellated alphabets/
March 14: Mira: Pinturas opens sciousness of the relationships
or successive, repetitive, regular or some other sharp instrument to Galerie, Rio de Janeiro. scribe any particular movement, of beelike letters swarming and
at the Galeria Aremar, Campinas, between line, form and space,
shapes also divided it into figure draw lines on the paper’s surface, but they are vital contributions solitary/all-pha-bbb-ees.”14
Brazil. which this experience accom-
pressing the paper through the to the language of movement,
October 29–November 12: panies, and which justifies it,
talc into the oil.12 The end result is because their fragility and energy
Mira Schendel, Signals Gallery, place Mira Schendel’s draw-
an imprint, a residue transferred indicate space as an active thing,
London—Schendel’s first retro- ings in a modern category [in]
from one surface to another, like a field of possibility.”13
spective outside Brazil. That was which few artists would dare rate
the shadow of gestural lines,
very strange, the low attendance themselves.”16
marks, and eventually letters,
[at the Museu de Arte Moderna
phrases, and symbols.
 León Ferrari. P4CR from the series
Ferrari at the Espaço Alternativo Xadrez (Chess) and the book
León Ferrari. Untitled. c. 1977–78
exhibition, Galpão de São Paulo, 1979 Imagens (Images). 1979
174 chronology León Ferrari. Palabras ajenas See page 138
See page 142
(Words of others). Cover.
See page 20

Ferrari

1966 1968 1969 1971 1972 1976 1977 1978 1979

April 25–May 7: participates in August: presents his essay “El June 30: participates in Malvenido September: contributes to the August–September: participates March: starts to collect newspa- In São Paulo, Ferrari puts his polit- September 5–October 1: León May 10: participates in Espaço June: participates in a group ex-
Homenaje al Viet-nam de los ar- arte de los significados” (The Rockefeller, Sociedad Argentina book Contra-bienal (Counter- in Contra-Salón, Sociedad Central per clippings detailing the crimes ical art aside and begins to make Ferrari. Esculturas, gravuras e alternativo, Galpão de São hibition at the Gabinete de Artes
tistas plásticos, Galería Van Riel, art of meanings) in reaction to de Artistas Plásticos, Buenos biennial), published by the de Arquitectos, Buenos Aires. of the military junta led by Jorge sculpture again. The Brazilian desenhos, Pinacoteca do Estado, Paulo. Exhibits Planeta (Planet), Gráficas, São Paulo, where he
Buenos Aires. the censorship of the exhibition Aires. Exhibits the national Movimiento de Independencia Rafael Videla. Ferrari will later people are sweet, free thinking and São Paulo, his first solo exhibi- a large, spherical wire sculpture exhibits drawings and sculptures.
October: participates in Salón
Experiencias 1968 at the Instituto Argentine flag superimposed with Cultural Latinoamericano (MICLA) present these clippings under the unprejudiced. This finally motivated tion in Brazil. In the catalogue, intended to hang from the ceil-
Begins work on the book Palabras Independiente, Sociedad September 4–26: participates in
Di Tella in May. a portrait of Che Guevara. The to protest the Bienal de São Paulo. title Nosotros no sabíamos (We me to decide to take on art as a critic Aracy Amaral calls his wire ing. Begins the series Codigos
ajenas (Strange words of others), Argentina de Artistas Plásticos, Escultura lúdica, Museu de Arte
exhibition is organized on the didn’t know). profession.18 Meets Brazilian artists sculptures “prismatic,” “musical,” (Codes), Xadrez (Chess), Baños
an imaginary dialogue among 120 October: presents Palabras ajenas November: participates in Buenos Aires. Moderna de São Paulo. Exhibits
occasion of a visit to Argentina by Regina Silveira, Carmela Gross, “poetic,” “linear galaxies.”19 (Bathrooms), and Plantas (Plants),
characters—Adolf Hitler, Lyndon theatrically at the Arts Laboratory, Exposición en repudio al II Certamen November 11: with his family, Berimbau, a large sculpture of
Nelson Rockefeller, which sets off November: Palabras ajenas and others. drawings made with ink, pressure-
Baines Johnson, Pope Paul VI, London, under the title Listen, Nacional de Experiencias Visuales, leaves Argentina for Brazil, to October: participates in Panorama vertical rods of different diam-
many protests. is produced at the Larrañaga sensitive transfer type, and
God, and others. Here, Now: A news concert for four Sociedad Argentina de Artistas escape Videla’s “Dirty War”—the de arte atual Brasileira. Escultura/ eters, which can be stroked to
Theater, Buenos Aires, directed by collage. These series are later
voices and a soft drum. 1970 Plásticos, Buenos Aires. abduction and murder of thou- Objeto, Museu de Arte Moderna make musical notes. The work is
Pedro Asquini and titled Operativo published in the books Imagens
Death of Augusto, León’s father. sands of Argentines, as well as de São Paulo. named after an Afro-Brazilian folk
November 25: participates in pacem in terris (Operation peace (Images) and Hombres (Men).
Tucumán arde, an exhibition at countless other human rights instrument.
on earth).
the Sede Central de la CGT de los violations. Ariel alone stays behind;
Wins the sculpture prize at the
Argentinos, Buenos Aires, denounc- the family will never see him again.
Salão de Arte de Riberão Preto.
ing the exploitation of sugarcane He stopped writing at the end of
workers in the province of Tucumán. February. . . . Only in September of November 19–December 16:
1978 did we receive the news that Mira Schendel. Untitled from the participates in Multimedia
Mira Schendel. Ondas paradas de
series Datiloscritos. 1975
probabilidade. (Still waves of probability). they had killed him. . . . We found Internacional, Universidade de São
See page 141
Mira Schendel. Untitled from the series Schendel’s installation at the Venice Biennale, 1968 1969 (this installation 1994). See page 27 out that [Alfredo] Astiz [an officer Paulo, Escola de Comunicações e
Objetos gráficos (Graphic objects). 1967 in the Argentine navy] went to his Mira Schendel. Untitled. 1972 Artes, São Paulo.
See page 122 See page 149
house looking for him, he left, a
confrontation took place and they
killed him.17

1967 1968 1969 1971 1972 1974 1975

February–March: Mira Schendel, very transparent paper with equally September 30–October 31: June 22–October 20: with Clark, September 27–December 14: March 31: wins the Gold Medal November 20–December 8: July 4: participates in Poesía May 23–June 4: Mira Schendel. November 7–30: participates in
University of Stuttgart. In Stuttgart transparent acrylic laminate— participates in the Salão de Arte Farnese de Andrade, and Ana participates in the Bienal de São in the New Delhi International Mira Schendel. Através: Acrílicos, Visual, Museu Lasar Segall, São Desenhos de 1974/75: Datiloscritos, the Salão de Arte Contemporânea
meets Max Bense, professor of white, obviously. That’s where Contemporânea de Campinas, Letycia Quadros, represents Brazil Paulo with the installation Ondas Triennial of Modern Art. Linhas, Transformáveis, Toquinhos, Paulo. Mandalas, Paisagens, Gabinete de Campinas, Museu de Arte
philosophy and theory of knowl- the large plates came from, the Museu de Arte Contemporânea in the Venice Biennale. Flusser paradas de probabilidade—Antigo Bordados, Fórmicas, Espirais, de Artes Gráficas, São Paulo. Contemporânea de Campinas
edge at the university. Once in so-called Objetos gráficos, which de Campinas José Pancetti, São describes her Monotipias and Testamento, Livro dos Reis, I, 19 October 21–November 7: par- September 26–November 15: Mira
Discos, Outros desenhos, Galeria The Datiloscritos (Typed writings) José Pancetti, São Paulo.
Europe, travels to Zurich and Milan were an attempt to bring about Paulo. Objetos gráficos as “arranged texts (Still waves of probability—Old ticipates in Amelia Toledo/Donato Schendel. Visuelle Konstruktionen
Ralph Camargo, São Paulo. series are works on paper depict-
for the first time since moving to drawing through transparency—in reminiscent of the Greek or Latin Testament, I Kings 19), a mass of Ferrari/ Mira Schendel, Museu und Transparente Texte, Creates Homenagem a Deus—Pai
ing abstract geometric shapes
Brazil, and meets the philosopher other words, to avoid back and alphabets. . . . These symbols clus- nylon threads hanging from the de Arte Contemporânea da 1973 Schmidtbank, Nuremberg, and at do ocidente (Homage to God—
composed of typewritten letters,
Umberto Eco. front. . . . acrylic laminate really ter occasionally in what appear to gallery ceiling to the floor and Universidade de São Paulo, exhib- January 12–February 5: The Avant- the Studiengalerie, University of father of the West), a series of
numbers, and symbols, occasion-
gave me a fantastic opportunity . . . be words (of many existent or non- accompanied by a text from the iting 150 Cadernos (Notebooks) garde Works by Mira Schendel, Art Stuttgart, the following year. sixteen works on paper in which
September 22, 1967–January 8, ally accompanied by gestural,
to concretize an idea, the idea of existent languages) . . . and recall, Book of Kings. Six years after her from 1970–71. In these books she Gallery of the Brazilian-American bold brushstrokes are accompa-
1968: participates in the Bienal de October 26: participates in the rhythmic abstract patterns.
doing away with back and front, in this aspect, palimpsests.”18 death, it will be reinstalled at the experiments with language and Cultural Institute, Washington, D.C. nied by typed excerpts from the
São Paulo with the Objetos grá- Salão de Arte Contemporânea
before and after, a certain idea of Bienal de São Paulo of 1994 in her pursues serial explorations of Schendel’s first exhibition in the July 15–August 10: Mira Schendel, Book of Psalms.
ficos (Graphic objects) series, in July–August: travels in Europe. de Campinas, Museu de Arte
more or less arguable simultaneity, honor. circles, letters, arrows, and num- United States. Galeria Luiz Buarque de Hollanda
which sheets of Japanese paper, In Bern, meets German philoso- Contemporânea de Campinas
the problem of temporality, etc., bers. & Paulo Bittencourt, Rio de Janeiro.
showing graphic letters, symbols, pher Jean Gebser. Visits Bense in October 18–November 18: Mira José Pancetti, São Paulo.
spatiotemporality, etc. . . . This is
and pressed type, are mounted Stuttgart, then goes to Hamburg, Schendel, Gromholt Galleri, Oslo.
how the so-called Objetos gráficos
between sheets of transparent Copenhagen, Oslo, and Nordkapp,
came about.17
acrylic laminate. These works are Norway, the northernmost point in
suspended in space so that both Europe.
sides can be seen simultaneously.
The idea came to me of mixing that
 León Ferrari. Opus 113. 1980 Uma catedral ao vento dos direitos humanos, Ferrari’s monument to Alceu
176 chronology See page 136 Amoroso Lima, São Paulo, c. 1983. Left to right: Ferrari’s grandchildren Anna, gutiérrez-guimarães 177
Julieta, Florencia, Paloma, and Maitén, with Alicia
León Ferrari. Untitled. 1984 See page XX

Ferrari in performance, 14 Noites de

Performance (14 nights of performance), Ferrari in his São Paulo studio, c. 1982
SESC Fábrica da Pompéia, São Paulo, 1981

Ferrari

1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985

May 6–June 1: A arte de León Fall: participates in Gerox, April 7–May 3: participates in León and Alicia return to Buenos April 7: León Ferrari: Planos, With Alicia, begins to travel regu- November 24: León Ferrari hoje: April–May: participates in Artistas July 3–21: León Ferrari: Ocho años May 15: participates in Cúpulas de
Ferrari, Museu de Arte Moderna Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, Heliografia, Pinacoteca do Estado, Aires for the first time since 1976, heliografias y fotocopias opens at larly to Buenos Aires. Begins the Quadros, desenhos, esculturas e en el papel and Libros de artistas, en Brasil, 1976–1984, Galería Arte Buenos Aires. Entre la realidad y la
de São Paulo. Exhibits over 100 an exhibition that also includes São Paulo. to investigate the death of their Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City. series Relecturas de la Biblia instrumentos musicais, Galeria Centro Cultural de la Ciudad de Nuevo, Buenos Aires, his first solo utopía, Centro Cultural San Martín,
drawings, lithographs, blueprints, Mira Schendel, among others. son Ariel. As a protection, Ferrari (Rereadings of the Bible), collages Humberto Tecidos, São Paulo. The Buenos Aires, his first group exhi- exhibition in Buenos Aires since Buenos Aires.
July 22: participates in Mostra October: León Ferrari: Prismas
watercolors, and books, and sixty This is the only exhibition the two has asked for and received Italian combining Catholic and erotic Associação Paulista dos Críticos bitions in Buenos Aires since his his departure from Argentina. A
latinoamericana de arte, Galeria e retângulos, Museu de Arte June 12–July 26: participates in
stainless steel sculptures includ- artists share until the exhibition citizenship for himself and his Asian iconography and examining de Arte gives the exhibition its departure from Argentina. critic calls this “one of the most
Azulão, São Paulo. Moderna, Rio de Janeiro. Caligrafias e escrituras, Galeria
ing Planeta. Ferrari describes his at The Museum of Modern Art in family; now, having unsuccessfully the violence in Christian scripture prize for best show of the year. interesting theoretical-practical
April 17–29: participates in Sergio Millet e Espaço Alternativo,
sculptures as an explosion, a nest 2009. October 27–November 4: partici- petitioned the military government July 12–25: participates in 14 and its impact on Western society. shows with an experimental artis-
December 10: Ferrari’s monumen- Sonicolor. Projeto Brasileiro- Rio de Janeiro.
of lines, half hidden behind others pates in Artes visuales e identidad for a list of Italian citizens who Noites de Performance, SESC tic base that has taken place in
October 13–November 21: March: shows several works at tal public sculpture Uma catedral Argentino nas artes, Pinacoteca
or mixed with others behind them, en America Latina, Foro de Arte have “disappeared,” Ferrari asks Fabrica Pompeia, São Paulo. 1984.”21 October 4: participates in
participates in Exposició de tramesa the Casa de las Americas, Havana, ao vento dos direitos humanos (A do Estado, São Paulo.
which can be seen or not, depend- Contemporáneo, Mexico City. the Italian ambassador, Sergio Releitura, Bienal de São Paulo.
postal/Mail art exhibition, Espai Cuba. Gives his metal sculpture cathedral for the wind of human
ing on how the eye or the light Kociancich, to request the list May–June: participates in the
del Centre de Documentacio d’Art La niña (The girl) to Fidel Castro rights), commissioned in honor
switches.20 on behalf of the Italian govern- Bienal de La Habana, Centro de
Actual, Barcelona. as a gift. of the philosopher, essayist, and
ment. The list will eventually be Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo
July 25–August 13: participates in art critic Alceu Amoroso Lima, is
December 16–18: León Ferrari: published in the Italian newspaper April 6–June 25: participates in Lam, Havana.
Xerografia, Pinacoteca do Estado, installed in São Paulo.
Percanta, esculturas sonoras, Corriere della Sera. Multiples by Latin American Artists,
Casa das Artes Plásticas ‘Miguel
música não figurativa, Pinacoteca Franklin Furnace, New York.
Benice A. Dutra’ and Núcleo de
do Estado, São Paulo.
Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo. October 14–December 20: partici-
pates in Arte e videotexto, Bienal
August 14–31: León Ferrari:
de São Paulo.
Esculturas, licopódios (xerografias),
heliografias, desenhos, gravuras
em metal e livros, Museu Guido
Viaro, Curitiba, Brazil.
Schendel, São Paulo, 1980s

Mira Schendel. Monocromático

(Monochromatic). 1986. See page xx

Schendel

1976–1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985

Participates in various group ex- May 31–June 19: Mira Schendel. September 20–October 15: Death of Schendel’s mother, Ada April 25–July 30: participates March–April: participates in Arte May 17: birth of second grandson, April 19–May 7: Mira Schendel: May–June: participates in Retrato September 1985–October
hibitions: Brazilian Art: Figures and Desenhos, Gabinete de Artes participates in the Venice Biennale Saveria Gnoli, in Brescia, Italy. in Homenagem a Mário Pedrosa, transcendente, Museu de Arte João Paulo Schendel. 65 Desenhos, 2 Droguinhas, 1 e auto-retrato da arte Brasileira. 1986: Mira Schendel. Coleção
Movement, Galeria Arte Global, Gráficas, São Paulo. among the eighty-one women Galeria Jean Boghici, Rio de Moderna de São Paulo, organized Trenzinho, 1 Quadro de 1964 e Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand, Theon Spanudis, Museu de Arte
February: participates in Coleção June 5–28: Mira Schendel, Paulo
São Paulo; American Biennial of artists included in the exhibition Janeiro. by Theon Spanudis. a Série Deus—Pai do Ocidente, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Contemporânea da Universidade
June 8–July 22: participates in Theon Spanudis, Museu de Arte Figueiredo Galeria de Arte, São
Graphic Arts, Cali, Colombia; Art Materializzazione del Linguaggio: Galeria Thomas Cohn Arte Paulo and subsequently Barbican de São Paulo.
América Latina: Geometria sen- Contemporânea da Universidade May 21–31: Mira Schendel. May–July: participates in Do Paulo. Sheila Leirner writes, “In
Fair 76, Bologna, Italy; Panorama La Donna fra Linguaggio e Contemporânea, Rio de Janeiro. Art Gallery, London, that same
sível, Museu de Arte Moderna de de São Paulo. The show includes Desenhos, Cosme Velho Galeria moderno ao contemporâneo. the last exhibition . . . her abstract November 5–26: Mira Schendel.
de Arte Atual Brasileira, Museu Immagine, curated by Mirella year.
Rio de Janeiro. During the exhibi- works by Dacosta, Volpi, Arnaldo de Arte, São Paulo. Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand, works . . . revealed a rich mirror of June 14–July 30: Mira Schendel, Pinturas recentes, Paulo Figueiredo
de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; Bentivoglio.
tion, a fire at the museum burns Ferrari, José Antonio da Silva, and Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio an existential universe. Today, her Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo. June: participates in Le Petit Galeria de Arte, São Paulo. Exhibits
and Recent Latin American Fall: participates in Gerox,
several of Schendel’s works. All Participates in Objeto na arte: Brasil others.20 de Janeiro. works are bright like a jewel.”21 Format, Paulo Figueiredo Galeria large monochromatic paintings in-
Drawings 1969–1976: Lines of Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo,
of the works in the large exhibition anos 60, at the Museu de Arte de Arte, São Paulo. corporating spare gestural lines or
Vision, International Exhibition an exhibition that also includes June 2–27: Mira Schendel, Galeria August 9–23: Mira Schendel,
burned. Including mine . . . a disas- Brasileira da Fundação Armando simple geometric forms, some in
Foundation, Washington, D.C. León Ferrari, among others. This is Luisa Strina, São Paulo. Gravura Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro. July 18: birth of third and last
ter. . . . It’s a pity, but these things Álvares Penteado, São Paulo. gold leaf, placed off center in the
the only exhibition the two artists grandchild, Nina Schendel.
happen. Besides my five drawings September–October: partici- compositions. Leirner writes, “The
share until the exhibition at The October 16–December 20: partici-
which Light had bought, there were pates in Women of the Americas: September 12–October 2: Mira recent works by Mira Schendel . . .
Museum of Modern Art in 2009. pates in the Bienal de São Paulo
also twelve which I had sold to the Emerging Perspectives, Center Schendel, Paulo Figueiredo Galeria could exemplify with perfection the
During this time Schendel also with I Ching, a series of twelve
museum collection. Seventeen in of Inter-American Relations (now de Arte, São Paulo. post-minimalism canon.”22
befriends the artist José Resende, paintings inspired by the ancient
all. Perhaps I will make a donation Americas Society), New York.
the critics Naves and Ronaldo Chinese Book of Changes. The November 1984–January 1985:
later.19
Brito, and the art dealer Paulo positive and negative spaces participates in Tradição e ruptura:
Figueiredo. within these serial compositions síntese da arte e cultura Brasileira,
deal with the idea of the dynamic Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.
October 11: birth of Schendel’s
balance of opposites.
first grandson, Max Schendel.
León Ferrari. Juicio Final León Ferrari. Ángel apocalíptico
(Last Judgment). 1985. See page 56 (Apocalyptic angel) from the series Léon Ferrari. Juicio final
Relecturas de la Biblia León Ferrari. La Justicia (Justice). 1991. (Last Judgment). 1994. See page 151
(Rereadings of the Bible). 1988 Installation view, Espacio Museo Sívori,
León Ferrari. Untitled from the
See page 155 Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires
series Relecturas de la Biblia
(Rereading of the Bible). November
1986. See page 154

1985 (cont’d) 1986 1987 1988 1988 1989 1991 1992 1993
November: participates in January: participates in Uma January 25–February 22: par- through a cross-shaped opening June 3–26: Relectura de la Biblia, June 4–30: participates in The May 18–August 6: Latin American Moves back to Buenos Aires, May 21–June 12: participates March: participates in Erotizarte,
Panorama da arte atual Brasileira: virada no século, Pinacoteca do ticipates in A trama do gosto. onto paper; the resulting crosses Galería Arte Nuevo, Buenos Aires. Debt, Exit Art, New York, which scholar and curator Dawn Ades taking an apartment at 1032 in One World Art, Museum für Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos
Formas tridimensionais, Museu Estado. Um outro olhar sobre o cotidiano, of excrement are hung on the It is part of my investigation of includes works by Luis Camnitzer, chooses fourteen collages from Reconquista, later to be used as Völkerkunde, Hamburg, with two Aires.
de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. Bienal de São Paulo. gallery walls. The installation God’s conduct. . . . everyone says Cildo Meireles, Marta Minujin, Ferrari’s series Relecturas de la his office and storage space. bookshelves filled with bottles
August 5: León Ferrari, Galeria March 18–21: participates in
Exhibits two pigeons in a cage also includes thirty photographic that the Bible is a marvelous book. Juan Downey, and others. Ferrari Biblia for the exhibition Art in containing images protesting the
Papier, São Paulo. October–November: participates March 1: begins the Errores Primera muestra del horror urbano,
hung above a reproduction of enlargements of collages from I believe that the Bible contains a exhibits two doves, their cage Latin America: The Modern Era conquest of the New World.
in Palavra imágica, Museu de Arte (Errors) series of works on paper, Centro Municipal de Exposiciones,
Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, September: A nova dimensão the Relecturas de la Biblia series. complete justification of fascism.24 this time set up so that they def- 1820–1980, The Hayward Gallery,
Contemporânea da Universidade thick accumulations of gestural June 11–28: León Ferrari: Sobre Buenos Aires.
on which their excrement falls. do objeto, Museu de Arte It is a critique of Christianity, of ecate on U.S. dollar bills, which London. One of these works is
de São Paulo. September: participates in Arte curvilinear lines superimposed in justicias y preservativos, Espacio
The work, he writes, criticizes the Contemporânea da Universidade Christian gods, of Christ as well he intends to send to President reproduced in the catalogue but April 23–May 9: participates in
argentino en las decadas del 20, abstract, saturated, compact com- Giesso, Buenos Aires. La justicia
Christian Multinational that pro- de São Paulo. November 13–December 18: León as Jehovah. I try to point out these Ronald Reagan to help pay Latin none appear in the exhibition, an Los Coleccionistas. El caos en el
40 y 60, Museo Municipal de Artes positions. It was, I think, about the reappears under a different title,
motes, sustains and uses these art Ferrari: Capilla hereje (Heretic gods’ characters—they are the fa- America’s escalating debt.25 exclusion that Ferrari views as orden, Centro Cultural Recoleta,
November 26–December 31: Plásticas Eduardo Sívori, Buenos pure line winding about freely, but Autocensura (Self-censorship),
works to advertise hell in its most chapel), Franklin Furnace, New thers, the genes of repression and censorship. Buenos Aires.
participates in the Bienal de Aires. Exhibits La civilización oc- October 17–November 13: par- without being so, it was free only to and with an embalmed chicken
political and evangelical campaign York. In Capilla hereje, the excre- current excesses, of intolerance
La Habana, Centro de Arte cidental y cristiana. ticipates in El pensamiento lineal, October 7–29: León Ferrari: err, sinuous on the paper . . . that is instead of a live one. The show May 26–June 6: participates in
of fear.22 ment of two caged pigeons falls and of torture.23
Contemporánea Wifredo Lam, Fundación San Telmo, Buenos Retrospectiva, Museo Municipal one of the things that drawing can also includes several versions Fotoespacio, pintores y escultores,
Havana. Aires. de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sívori, be, the sum of the infinite persever- of Justicia final (the work using Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos
Buenos Aires. ing errors that a pen commits as it Michelangelo’s Last Judgment) Aires.
December 1–18: participates in
caresses the paper.26 and bottles of condoms, in a cri-
Cópias e pastiches, Museu de Arte September 16–30: participates in
tique of the Church’s opposition to
Contemporânea da Universidade May: participates in Quinto cen- Buenos Aires vista por sus artistas,
their use and distribution during
Mira Schendel. Obras recentes. Installation view, de São Paulo. tenario de la Inquisición, Centro sus arquitectos, sus escritores y
the aids epidemic.
Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud, São Paulo, 1987 Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires. sus psicoanalistas, Galería Ruth
July 26: participates in Cuba. No Benzacar, Buenos Aires.
July 23–August 24: Escrituras y
al bloqueo. Exposición internacio-
esculturas de León Ferrari, Galería October 4–20: participates in
nal de Arte Correl, Espacio de Arte
Alvaro Castagnino, Buenos Aires. Observaciones sobre la violencia,
del Correo Viejo, Montevideo.
Mira Schendel. Untitled from the series Facultad de Filosofia y Letras,
Tijolos (Bricks). 1988. See page 166
November 21: participates in A
August 6–23: participates in 500 Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Vicente Marotta, Museo Municipal
Años de represion. Muestra abi-
de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sívori,
erta internacional, Centro Cultural
Buenos Aires, with La justicia
Recoleta, Buenos Aires.
(Justice), in which a caged chick-
en defecates onto a scale, attract- October 19–November 20: par-
ing public criticism and attention ticipates in Surrealismo. Nuevo
from the Sociedad Argentina Mundo, Biblioteca Nacional,
Schendel Protectora de los Animales. Buenos Aires.

1986 1987 1988

April 5: Mira Schendel. Pinturas March–June: Mira Schendel. August 5–25: Mira Schendel. Obras February 26: participates in Cem July 21: is hospitalized at the
recentes, Galeria Tina Presser, Coleção Theon Spanudis, Museu recentes, Paulo Figueiredo Galeria desenhos selecionados, Paulo Oswaldo Cruz Hospital, São Paulo.
Porto Alegre. de Arte Contemporânea da de Arte, São Paulo. Figueiredo Galeria de Arte, São
Universidade de São Paulo. Paulo. July 24: death of Mira Schendel,
August 14–September 14: Mira Figueiredo sets up a studio for at the age of sixty-nine. Brazilian
Schendel. Pinturas recentes, August 5–25: Mira Schendel. Schendel in his gallery, where she April 6–May 8: participates in curator and critic Paulo Herkenhoff
Galeria de Arte da Universidade Obras recentes, Gabinete de Arte begins the Tijolos (Bricks) series, Modernidade: Arte Brasileira remarks, “Mira took Brazilian art
Federal, Niteroi. Raquel Arnaud, São Paulo. Exhibits paintings made with granulated do Século XX, Museu de Arte and transformed it into a philo-
Sarrafos (Splints), the last com- brick dust. She will complete only Moderna de São Paulo. sophical matter. Through her no-
November 12–December 6: par- plete series she will make before three of these works. tion of space, sign and material,
ticipates in Caminhos do desenho her death: Black wooden bars pro- May: diagnosed with advanced she questioned the world like
Brasileiro, Museu de Arte do Rio trude from twelve wooden panels September 15–October 9: Mira lung cancer while traveling in a philosopher.”24 Naves writes,
Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre. painted with white tempera, mak- Schendel, Thomas Cohn Arte Germany. “Just like the lines should appear
ing lines that erupt from the plane. Contemporânea, Rio de Janeiro. in the weave of the paper in her
It sprang from the moment of lack June: upon returning to Brazil, drawings, as though they came
of determination and disorder that October 5: Mira Schendel receives confirmation of lung from within, without the exterior
Brazil lived through in March of opens at the Galeria Usina Arte cancer from her doctors. quality of a superimposed line, life
this year, when apparently we were Contemporânea, Vitória, Brazil. also for her—as I now understand
living in a tropical Weimar.23 it—never could be based only on
a will to live that gave life to a
feeble organism. I deeply hope
that she becomes a star.”25
 León Ferrari. Leda y el cisne León Ferrari. Renovación (Renewal) from
(Leda and the swan). 1997. the series L’Osservatore Romano. 2001
See page 160 See page 158
180 chronology
León Ferrari. Retrospectiva. Obras
1954–2004. Installation view,
Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, 2004

Ferrari

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2004
May 6–June 30: participates in Wins a Guggenheim Fellowship May 15–June 9: participates in March 19: León Ferrari: Tormentos Over the years, Ferrari has written January 2–March 7: participates May 9–June 2: Infiernos e idola- April 16–May 19: León Ferrari: July 3–13: participates in The March 4–July 25: participates
the Bienal de La Habana, Centro for the project Sexo y violencia Las abuelas y los artistas, Centro y amores, Galería Arcimboldo, a number of open letters to the in Cantos Paralelos: Visual Parody tries, Centro Cultural de España, L’Osservatore Romano, Galería Architecture of Madness, University in MoMA at El Museo: Latin
de Arte Contemporaneo Wifredo en iconografia cristiana (Sex and Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires. Exhibits works in press. These public statements in Contemporary Argentinean Art, Buenos Aires. Ferrari shows his Sylvia Vesco, Buenos Aires. The of Essex, Colchester, United American and Caribbean Art from
Lam, Havana, Cuba. violence in Christian iconogra- which Bible texts and poems by now intensify through a series of Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Justicia final series and a group of show contains collages made Kingdom. the Collection of The Museum of
June 12: participates in Eco: la
phy), which entails research into Jorge Luis Borges are printed in newspaper articles on subjects Austin, Texas. Ferrari’s sculpture kitschy mass-produced objects— from the Vatican’s weekly newspa- Modern Art, El Museo del Barrio,
May 28–June 9: León Ferrari ultima palabra, Salas Nacionales September 14–October 14: par-
Christian iconography and its re- Braille on reproductions of erotic ranging from the Church and La civilización occidental y cris- plastic saints and animals, dildos, per, reproductions of images by New York. For one critic, Ferrari’s
60-70-80-90, Espacio Rozarte, de la Cultura Palais de Glace, ticipates in Pie de obra, Festival
representation in his work. and religious images, including anti-Semitism to atheism, pagan- tiana appears for the first time frying pans, chessboards, cages, Hieronymus Bosch and Albrecht work in drawing “raises issues of
Rosario, Argentina. Buenos Aires. Internacional de Poesía, Museo
photographs by Man Ray, prints ism, poverty, abortion, and human in the United States, along with toasters—arranged in scenarios Dürer, and photographs of illusion, representation, and iden-
March: participates in Erotizarte II, Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan B.
September 20–October 16: June 29–July 17: participates in by Kitagawa Utamaro, and paint- rights. The idea is to take advan- Braille and bird-excrement works. of torment from the Bible. I re- Argentine military figures. tity similar to those explored by
Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Castagnino, Rosario.
León Ferrari: Cristos y maniquíes, II Salón Nacional del Mar, Centro ings by Giotto and Fra Angelico. tage of freedom of opinion in order produce Hell, but instead of do- contemporary figures like Thomas
Aires. April 28–August 29: participates March 22: participates in Pinturas
Galería Filo, Buenos Aires. Shows Cultural Teatro Auditorium Mar del to express mine.28 ing so with regular people, I do it September 20–October 27: Demand and Cindy Sherman. It is
May 8–September 7: participates in Global Conceptualism: Points por la vida, Universidad Popular
a series of mannequins. I dress March 15–April 20: participates in Plata. with the very saints who vouched participates in Arte y politica a waterfall of lines, delicate and
in Re-Aligning Visions. Alternative June: León Ferrari: Escrituras, of Origin, 1950s–1980s, Queens Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Buenos
the female mannequin with words Muestra internacional de libros de for the idea of Hell.29 The public en los ’60, Salas Nacionales de lyrical, a kind of Spanish moss
November 4–9: participates in Currents in South American 1962–1998, Galería Filo, Buenos Museum of Art, New York. Aires.
or images that are at times like artista, Galería Bookstore, Buenos is outraged and the Spanish am- Exposiciones Palais de Glace, hanging in and creating pictorial
Arte Con/ciencia, Centro Cultural Drawing, El Museo del Barrio, Aires.
caresses and at others biblical Aires. August 13–22: participates in bassador is urged to close the May 31–June 1: participates in La Buenos Aires. space.”30
General San Martín, Buenos Aires. New York.
threats of punishment.27 October 30–November 22: partic- Muestra coloquio de Buenos Aires. exhibition. It stays open, but two gran exposición de arte, Fabrica
October 31–November 19: par- March 25–April 30: León Ferrari:
November 20–December 20: May 15–24: Nora Correas, León ipates in the Bienal Internacional La desaparición: Memoria, Arte y days before its scheduled close, a Brukman, Buenos Aires. 2003
November 23: participates ticipates in Arte al sur, Centro Escrituras, Galería Ruth Benzacar,
participates in Acerca del poder, Ferrari, VI Feria de Galerías de de Arte Experimental NO CON Politica, Centro Cultural Recoleta, crowd gathers outside the Centro May 8–July 6: León Ferrari: planos
in La Justicia, Galería del Sur Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires. June 21–July 1: participates in No Buenos Aires.
Galería de Arte de la Facultad de Arte Buenos Aires, ArteBA art fair, ’98, Museo Municipal de Arte Buenos Aires. Cultural de España and throws y papeles 1979–1986, Museo de
de la Universidad Autónoma a la tortura. Equipo Argentino de
November 6–25: participates in Psicologia de la Universidad de Buenos Aires. Moderno, Mendoza. garbage and tear gas into the gal- Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. June 20–September 12: partici-
Metropolitana de Mexico, Mexico October–November: León Ferrari, trabajo e investigación psicosocial,
El surrealismo en Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires. leries while reciting the rosary. pates in Inverted Utopias: Avant-
City. August 10–September 11: wins December 1998–March 1999: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos July 30–August 24: participates in
Galería La Porte Ouverte, Buenos Garde Art in Latin America, The
the Gran Premio in the III Salon León Ferrari. Nunca más y no- Bahía Blanca, Argentina. June 13–19: participates in No a la Aires. Manifestaciones sobre el malestar
Aires. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Nacional del Mar, Mar del Plata, sotros no sabíamos, Centro de tortura, Centro Cultural Recoleta, latinoamericano, Centro Cultural
November 10–28: participates in July 26–August 12: participates This exhibition is a reiteration of
Centro Cultural Teatro Auditorium, Documentación e Investigación Buenos Aires. Metropolitano, Quito, Ecuador.
Concurso Internacional J.L. Borges, in Argentinos en la Bienal de La the exhibition Heterotopías. Medio
Buenos Aires. de Culturas de Izquierda, Buenos
Salas Nacionales de la Cultura August: wins the Premio Habana, Centro Cultural Recoleta, September 25–October 19: siglo sin lugar: 1918–1968, at the
Aires.
August 12–September 24: partici- Palais de Glace, Buenos Aires. Costantini 2000 for his work Buenos Aires. participates in Encuentro Reina Sofia, Madrid, in 2000.
pates in Libros de artistas, Museo and artistic achievement, Museo Internacional de Poesía Visual,
December: participates in Siglo September 20: participates in September 9–October 23: León
Municipal de Artes Plásticas Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Sonora y Experimental, Centro
XX argentino, arte y cultura, Centro Arte en America Latina, malba- Ferrari: Politiscripts, The Drawing
Eduardo Sívori, Buenos Aires. Aires. Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires.
Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires. Fundación Costantini, Buenos Center, New York, curated by
September 29–October 10: par- December 5: participates in Dia Aires. Exhibits La civilización oc- October–December: León Ferrari, Luis Camnitzer. A critic writes in
ticipates in Che. Homenaje a 30 del arte correo, Palacio Central del cidental y cristiana, whose mean- Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre. the New York Times, “Because
anos de su muerte, CTA Congreso Correo Argentino, Buenos Aires. ing now seems informed by the even drawings that may be mere
de la Cultura, El Trabajo y la devastating attack on the World doodles are composed and ex-
December 12, 2000–February 27,
Producción, Buenos Aires. Trade Center, New York, the previ- ecuted with care, they all convey
2001: participates in Heterotopías.
ous week. the impression of carrying coded
October 2–November 30: par- Medio siglo sin lugar: 1918–1968,
and encrypted information known
ticipates in the Bienal de Artes Museo Nacional Centro de Arte October 3–31: participates in
only to the artist. In short, they
Visuales del Mercosur, Porto Reina Sofia, Madrid. Desapariciones. Encuentro interna-
are like a taunting gesture of
Alegre. cional de arte correo, Universidad
counter-censorship. Through its
Popular Madres de Plaza de Mayo,
very opaqueness, abstraction, real
Buenos Aires.
or imagined, becomes a political
tool.”31
 Léon Ferrari. Huesos
(Bones). 2006
182 chronology See page 165 gutiérrez-guimarães 183
Ferrari in his Pichincha studio,
Buenos Aires, 2008
Endnotes 10. Ferrari, Notebook 1, November 17, 21. Jorge Feinsilber, “Entrecruzadas 29. Ferrari, in Giunta, ed., León Ferrari:
León Ferrari 1962, c1, 5b, in Giunta, ed. León Ferrari: varillas de acero para sus escultu- Retrospectiva. Obras, 1954–2006, p. 418.
Ferrari at a rally, Centro Cultural Recoleta, 1. León Ferrari, in Juan Ignacio Boido, Retrospectiva. Obras, 1954–2006, p. ras ‘musicales,’” Ambito Financiero 30. Joshua Mack, “MoMA at El Museo:
Buenos Aires, December 19, 2004 New Perspectives in Latin American Art,
“Rojo y negro,” Pagina/30 (Buenos 396. (Buenos Aires), July 24, 1984. Eng. Latin American and Caribbean Art
1930–2006: Selections from a Decade of
Acquisitions. Installation view,
Aires), July 1999. Reprinted in 11. Ferrari, Notebook 2, January 24, 1964, trans. in Giunta, ed., León Ferrari: from the Collection of The Museum of
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007 Andrea Giunta, ed., León Ferrari: c2, 16b, in Giunta, ed., León Ferrari: Retrospectiva. Obras, 1954–2006, p. Modern Art,” Modern Painters 17, no. 3
Retrospectiva. Obras, 1954–2006 (São Retrospectiva. Obras, 1954–2006, p. 411. (Autumn 2004):120.
Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2006), p. 394. 396. 22. Ferrari, in León Ferrari: Serie de er- 31. Holland Cotter, “Art in review. León
2. Ferrari, in an interview with Giunta, 12. Ferrari, Notebook 2, January 1, 1964, rores and works, p. 86. Ferrari: politiscripts,” New York Times,
December 29, 1998, in ibid., p. 394. c2, 15–16, in ibid., p. 398. 23. Ferrari, quoted in Miguel Briante, October 8, 2004.
3. Ferrari, in Luis Felipe Noé, “A visit with 13. Ferrari, Notebook 3, November 17, “León que no se hace el sordo,” 32. Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio, quot-
León Ferrari,” in ibid., p. 379. 1964, c3, 27b, in ibid., p. 399. Pagina 12 (Buenos Aires), June 14, ed in Lyle Rexer, “Art and Religion:
4. Ibid. 14. Ferrari, letter to Giunta, August 7, 1993, 1988. Eng. trans. in Giunta, ed., León Controversy in Buenos Aires,” Art in
5. Ferrari, in the interview with Giunta, in ibid., p. 401. Ferrari: Retrospectiva. Obras, 1954– America, March 2005, p. 39.
p. 395. 15 See Ernesto Ramallo, “Los artistas 2006, p. 412. 33. Gustavo López, quoted in Peter
6. Hugo Parpagnoli, “León Ferrari,” La argentinos en el premio Di Tella 1965,” 24. Ibid. Hudson, “The Show That Had All
2004 (cont’d) 2005 2006 2007 2008 Prensa (Buenos Aires), November 18, La Prensa (Buenos Aires), September 25. See León Ferrari: Serie de errores and Buenos Aires Talking,” Artnews, April
October 28–November 13: Planos February 27: León Ferrari. Obra Begins work on large sculptures June 10–November 21: partici- February 2–March 24: León 1960. Eng. trans. in León Ferrari: Serie 21, 1965, p. 11. works, p. 87. 2005, p. 62.
y collages de León Ferrari 1980– reciente, Centro Cultural Recoleta, made from a range of materials pates in Think with the Senses, Feel Ferrari. Heliografias, Teatro de errores and works, 1962–2007 (New 16. Ferrari, “La respuesta del artista,” 26. Ferrari, in León Ferrari: Escritos en el 34. See ibid.
1982, Sicardi Gallery, Houston. Buenos Aires. including polystyrene, prosthetic with the Mind: Art in the Present Auditorium, Mar del Plata, York: Cecilia de Torres, 2007), p. 74. Propositos (Buenos Aires), October 7, aire, p. 92. 35. Ferrari, quoted in Cecilia Birbragher
bones, and tree branches. I was Tense, Venice Biennale. Receives Argentina. 7. “Leon Ferrari,” La Prensa (Buenos 1965. Eng. trans. in Giunta, ed., León 27. Ferrari, quoted in Fabián Lebeglik, “Un and Ana Ivonne Peni, “León Ferrari:
November 30, 2004–February 27, March 12–April 23: participates
interested in bones as an aesthetic the Golden Lion award in recog- Aires), October 11, 1961, p. 7. Ferrari: Retrospectiva. Obras, 1954– libro de artista en contra del olvido,” Interview,” Art Nexus (Bogota) 6,
2005: León Ferrari. Retrospectiva. in Redefining Maps and Locations, April 22–June 7: León Ferrari. Los
element because I approached nition of his artistic oeuvre. The 8. “Sottilissimi intrichi,” Domus (Milan), 2006, p. 436. Pagina 12 (Buenos Aires), January 9, no. 67 (December 2007–February
Obras 1954–2004, Centro Cultural University of Essex, Colchester. músicos, Galería Braga Menéndez,
a kind of forgetting what death announcement reads, “At the May 1962, p. 46. Eng. trans. in Giunta, 17. Ferrari, in the interview with Giunta, 1992. Eng. trans. in León Ferrari: Serie 2008):95.
Recoleta, Buenos Aires, curated Buenos Aires.
March 25–August 29: partici- means. It is like making a sculpture, Arsenale, Ferrari presented a body ed., León Ferrari: Retrospectiva. Obras, p. 406. de errores and works, p. 89. 36. Venice Biennale press release,
by Andrea Giunta. Conservative 1954–2006, p. 396. 18. Ibid. 28. Ferrari, quoted in Vicente Zito Lima, October 18, in León Ferrari: Serie de
pates in Drawing from the Modern, although the material gives it a of work that offers examples of May 6–June 29: León Ferrari,
Catholic clergy demand that the 9. Ferrari, in León Ferrari: Escritos en 19. Aracy Amaral, León Ferrari: Esculturas, “León Ferrari: Aprovecho la libertad errores and works, p. 93.
1945–1975, The Museum of Modern different charge, one that is tragic, a long and substantial career and Antologica, Museo Castagnino +
show be canceled; Jorge Mario el aire, 1961–2005 (Neuquén: Museo gravures e desenhos (São Paulo: para expresar mis ideas,” La Maga
Art, New York. strong, but I leave it to the viewer continuous critical stance in the macro, Rosario.
Cardinal Bergoglio, the archbishop Nacional de Bellas Artes Neuquén, Pinacoteca do Estado, 1978), prologue. (Buenos Aires) no. 39 (July 15, 1998).
to deal with the meaning.35 context of often adverse political
of Buenos Aires, calls for “a day of September 13–October 17: partic- May 17–October 13, 2008: par- 2005), p. 92. 20. Ferrari, “Prisms and rectangles,” 1979. Eng. trans. in Giunta, ed., León Ferrari:
and social circumstances. The
repentance . . . where we ask God ipates in Plumas y Brillos, Galería March 3–April 2: participates in 30 ticipates in Latin American and Eng. trans. in León Ferrari: Serie de Retrospectiva. Obras, 1954–2006, p. 418.
Jury decided to assign him this
to pardon our sins and those of Braga Menéndez, Buenos Aires. Años con memoria, Municipalidad Caribbean Art: Selected Highlights errores and works, p. 84.
prize not only for his ethical
the city.”32 The exhibition closes de Vicente López, Buenos Aires. from the Collection of The Museum
September 2–October 2: partici- and his political effort, but also
on a judge’s orders, but eighteen of Modern Art, curated by Pérez-
pates in Arte Memoria e identidad, April 7–June 4: participates in for the contemporary aesthetic
days later Centro Recoleta wins Oramas, New York State Museum,
Municipalidad de Vicente López, Daros Latin American Collection, relevance of his work developed
an appeal and it reopens. The Albany, New York.
Buenos Aires. Morris and Helen Belkin Art during the past sixty years.”36
city’s secretary of culture, Gustavo
Gallery, University of British November 29: León Ferrari: Serie
López, remarks, “The exhibition November 9–December 16: par- October 24–November 24: León
Columbia, Vancouver. de errores and works, 1962–2007,
may be provocative, but nobody ticipates in Pintura sin pintura, Ferrari, Galería Ruth Benzacar,
Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., New York.
is obliged to see it.”33 For Ferrari, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos August 14–September 4: León Buenos Aires.
the victory in the appeal is an Aires. Ferrari en la FADU, Facultad de Endnotes 8. Schendel, letter to relatives in 15. Schendel, in Guinle Filho, “Mira 19. Letter dated July 14, 1978. Translated
November 21, 2007–February Mira Schendel
unexpected achievement of the Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo, Barcelona, September 20, 1952. Eng. Schendel, Pintora,” in ibid., p. 90. from Portuguese in Salzstein, ed. No
December 9, 2005–February 25, 2008: participates in New 1. Mira Schendel, in Jorge Guinle Filho, trans. in ibid., p. 99. 16. José Augusto França, “Mais pintores vazio do mundo, p. 95.
exhibition.34 Buenos Aires.
12, 2006: Escrito en el aire, Perspectives in Latin American “Mira Schendel, Pintora,” Interview 9. Haroldo de Campos, in “Interview Brasileiros,” O Comercio do Porto, July 20. “Ideal posto em prática,” O Estado de
December 10, 2004–May 2005: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, October 7–November 26: León Art, 1930–2006: Selections from a (São Paulo), July 1981, p. 54. Eng. with Haroldo de Campos,” in 22, 1966. Eng. trans. in ibid., p. 89. São Paulo (February 18, 1979), p. 31.
León Ferrari: Artefactos para dibu- Neuquén. Ferrari: Poéticas e políticas, Decade of Acquisitions, curated by trans. in Sonia Salzstein, ed., No vazio Salzstein, ed., No vazio do mundo, p. 17. Schendel, statement to the 21. Sheila Leirner, “Mira Schendel,” O
jar sonidos, malba–Fundación Pinacoteca do Estado de São Luis Pérez-Oramas, The Museum do mundo. Mira Schendel (São Paulo: 227. Departamento de Pesquisa e Estado de São Paulo, June 29, 1982, p.
Constantini, Buenos Aires. Paulo. of Modern Art, New York. Editor Marca D’Agua, 1996), p. 79. 10. Mário Pedrosa, Mira Schendel: Pinturas Documentação de Arte Brasilera 20. Author’s translation.
2. See Università Cattolica del Sacro (São Paulo: Galeria de Arte São Luiz, da Fundação Armando Álvares 22. Leirner, “Mira e Amelia: Trabalho an-
Cuore, charter, article 1, quoted in 1963). Eng. trans. in ibid., p. 87. Penteado (Department of research tigo em relação a obra,” O Estado de
“Mission statement,” http://www3. 11. Mario Schenberg, Mira Schendel (São and documentation, Armando Álvares São Paulo, November 26, 1985, p. 19.
unicatt.it/pls/unicatt/consultazione. Paulo: Galeria Astréia, 1964). Eng. Penteado Foundation), São Paulo, Author’s translation.
mostra_pagina?id_pagina=15&id_ trans. in ibid., p. 259. August 19, 1977. Courtesy Arquivo Mira 23. Schendel, in an interview with César
lingua=4. 12. See, for example, Rodrigo Naves, Schendel, São Paulo. Translated from Giobbi, August 8, 1987. Eng. trans. in
3. On the IRO see http://avalon.law.yale. “Mira Schendel: The World as the Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers. Salzstein, ed., No vazio do mundo,
edu/20th_century/decad053.asp. Generosity,” in the present volume. For a longer excerpt, see Naves, “The p. 97.
4. Ibid. 13. Guy Brett, Kinetic Art: The Language World as Generosity,” in the present 24. Paulo Herkenhoff, quoted in “Morre,
5. Schendel, quoted in Guinle Filho, of Movement (London: Studio Vista, volume. aos 69 anos, a pintora Mira Schedel,”
“Mira Schendel, Pintora,” p. 81. Eng. 1968), p. 46. 18. Vilém Flusser, “Diacronia e diafanei- Folha de São Paulo, July 25, 1988.
trans. in Salzstein, ed., No vazio do 14. De Campos, in Mira Schendel (Rio de dade,” O Estado de São Paulo, May 3, Author’s translation.
mundo, p. 81. Janeiro: Museu de Arte Moderna do 1969, p. 4. Author’s translation. 25. Naves, “Uma antivirtuose por ex-
6. Ibid. Author’s translation. Rio de Janeiro, 1966). Eng. trans. by celência,” Folha de São Paulo, July 25,
7. Schendel, letter to Reverend Luigi, de Campos in Salzstein, ed., No vazio 1988. Eng. trans. in Salzstein, ed., No
1952. Eng. trans. in Salzstein, ed., No do mundo, p. 261. vazio do mundo, p. 98.
vazio do mundo, p. 83.
selected bibliography Compiled by Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães
185

LEÓN FERRARI “Paz, guerra y paloma.” Razón y Revolución (Buenos Aires) no. 4 (Fall Buenos Aires 64. Buenos Aires, Museo de Arte Moderno, 1964. Lo(s) publico(s). Arte, consumo y espacio social. III Foro Internacional de
1998):35–37. Colección de arte de la Cancillería Argentina. Periodo 1992–1999. Buenos Paraguay. Asunción, Ediciones Faro para las Artes, 2003.
Writings by Ferrari “En defensa de Paksa.” Ramona (Buenos Aires) no. 8 (December Aires, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Comercio Internacional Panorama de arte atual brasileira. Premio desenho y gravura 1980. São
Escrito en el aire. Milan, All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1964. With Rafael 2000):7. y Culto, 1999. Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1980.
Alberti. La bondadosa crueldad. Buenos Aires, Argonauta, 2000. Eros e Thanatos. São Paulo, Pinacoteca do Estado, 1988. Pellegrini, Aldo. Surrealismo en la Argentina. Buenos Aires, Centro de
Palabras ajenas. Conversaciones de Dios con algunos hombres y de “Sobre ‘Infiernos e idolatries.’” Página/12 (Buenos Aires), June 12, 2000, Esteban, Lisa. De Arturo al Di Tella. Buenos Aires, Galeria Ruth Benzacar, Artes Visuales del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, 1967.
algunos hombres con algunos hombres y con Dios. Buenos Aires, p. 24. 2002. Premios Costantini 2000 en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Buenos
Falbo, 1967. “Infiernos.” Página/12 (Buenos Aires), June 28, 2000, p. 36. Freire, Cristina, ed. Arte conceitual e conceitualismos. Anos 70 no Aires, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2000.
Labirinto. São Paulo, Licopódio, 1980. “Blasfemias y censuras.” Ramona (Buenos Aires) no. 3 (June/July acervo do MAC USP. São Paulo, Museu de Arte Contemporãnea da Ramírez, Mari Carmen, ed. Re-Aligning Vision. Alternative Currents in
Bairro. N.p., L. Ferrari, 1980. 2000):4–5. Universidade de São Paulo, 2000. South American Drawing. Austin, Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery
Xadrez. São Paulo, Licopódio, 1980. “Querido Tono.” Ramona (Buenos Aires) no. 12 (May 2001):50. Giunta, Andrea, ed. León Ferrari Retrospectiva. Obras 1954–2004. Buenos and The University of Texas at Austin, 1997.
El camisón. São Paulo, Licopódio, 1980. “Me gusta.” Veintitrés (Buenos Aires) no. 196 (April 11, 2002):88. Aires, Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2004. Ramírez, Mari Carmen, and Héctor Olea. Heterotopías. Medio siglo sin
Poesías. São Paulo, Licopódio, 1980. Prosa política. Buenos Aires, Siglo Veintiuno Editores Argentina, 2005. ———. León Ferrari Retrospectiva. Obras 1954–2006. São Paulo, Cosac lugar. 1918–1968. Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Camas. N.p., L. Ferrari, 1981. “Contra el juicio final.” Razón y Revolución (Buenos Aires) no. 4 (Fall Naify, 2006. Sofía, 2000.
Estudo. N.p., L. Ferrari, 1981. 1998):183. ———. León Ferrari. Obras 1976–2008. Mexico City, Instituto Nacional de ———. Inverted Utopias, Avant-garde Art in Latin America. New Haven
Mesas. N.p., L. Ferrari, 1981. “Por un milenio sin infiernos.” Radar (Buenos Aires), December 24, Bellas Artes, 2008. and London, Yale University Press, in association with The Museum
Projeto. N.p., L. Ferrari, 1981. 2000, n.p. Global Conceptualism, Points of Origins. 1950s–1980s. New York, Queens of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004.
Cuentos. São Paulo, Licopódio, 1983. Museum of Art, 1999. Ramírez, Mari Carmen, Marcelo Eduardo Pacheco, and Andrea Giunta.
Hombres. São Paulo, Licopódio, 1984. Books and Exhibition Catalogues Herzog, Hans-Michael, et al. Las horas. Artes visuales de América Latina Cantos Paralelos. La parodia plástica en el arte argentino contem-
Cuadro escrito. São Paulo, Licopódio, 1984. 1 Bienal de la Habana ‘84. Havana, Dirección de Artes Plásticas y Diseño contemporánea. Zurich, Daros-Latinoamérica AG, and Ostfildern- poráneo. Austin, The Blanton Museum of Modern Art, and Buenos
La Basílica. São Paulo, Edición del autor, 1985. del Ministerio de Cultura de Cuba, 1984. Ruit, Hatje Cantz, 2005. Aires, Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 1999.
ParaHereges. Collages. São Paulo, Expressão, 1986. I Bienal de Artes Visuales del Mercosur. Porto Alegre, Fundação Bienal Ideas y contextos en el arte latinoamericano actual. Montevideo, Museo Schrift und bild. Art and Writing. L’Art et l’écriture. Frankfurt am Main,
Bíblia. Collages. São Paulo, Edições EXU, 1989. de Artes Visuales, 1997. Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan Manuel Blanes, 1993. Typos Verlag, 1963.
Imagens. São Paulo, Edições EXU, 1989. Ades, Dawn. Art in Latin America. The Modern Era, 1820–1980. New León Ferrari. Esculturas, gravuras e desenhos. São Paulo, Pinacoteca do Siglo XX argentino. Arte y cultura. Buenos Aires, Centro Cultural Recoleta,
Exégesis. Buenos Aires, Ediciones EXU, 1993. Haven, Yale University Press, 1989. Published in Spanish as Arte en Estado, 1978. 1999.
“Cárcel a la libertad de conciencia.” Madres de Plaza de Mayo, July Iberoamérica, 1820–1980. Madrid, Turner and Ministerio de Cultura, León Ferrari. Planos, heliografias y fotocopias. Havana, Galería Tras los pasos de la norma. Salones Nacionales de Bellas Artes (1911–
1993, p. 5. 1990. Latinoamericana, Casa de las Américas, 1983. 1989). Buenos Aires, Ediciones del Jilguero, 1999.
“Trayectoria de espacios.” Artinf (Buenos Aires) 19, no. 90 (Autumn Arte al sur. I Encuentro de arte contemporáneo. Buenos Aires, Centro León Ferrari, The Architecture of Madness. Colchester, Palladian Press, Voces y visions. Highlights from El Museo del Barrio’s Permanent
1995):9. Cultural Recoleta, 1995. 2002. Collection. New York, El Museo del Barrio, 2003.
“Sexo y violencia en la iconografía cristiana.” Arte y violencia. Mexico Arte, sociedad, reflexión. Quinta Bienal de La Habana. Havana, El Bienal, León Ferrari. Escrituras. Buenos Aires, Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte,
City, XVIII Coloquio Internacional de Historia de Arte. Universidad 1994. 2004. Periodicals and Newspapers
Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Arteaga, Agustin. Arte en América Latina. Buenos Aires, malba-Colec- León Ferrari. Los músicos. Buenos Aires, Braga Menendez. Arte Alarcon, Cristian. “Gas lacrimongeno, basura, y pintura contra una
Estéticas, 1995. Pp. 289–335. ción Costantini, 2001. Contemporáneo, 2008. muestra de arte pagano.” Página/12 (Buenos Aires), May 31, 2000,
“Barra.” Noticias de la Semana (Buenos Aires), July 6, 1996, p. 20. Basilio, Miriam, Fatima Bercht, Deborah Cullen, et al. Latin American and León Ferrari, Politiscripts. New York, The Drawing Center, 2004. p. 18.
“El infierno.” Razón y Revolución (Buenos Aires) no. 4 (Fall 1998):2. Caribbean Art, MoMA at El Museo. New York, El Museo del Barrio Alonso, Alejandro G. “Expone León Ferrari.” Diario de la Juventud
and The Museum of Modern Art, 2004. Cubana (Havana), March 7, 1983, n.p.
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Ameijeiras, Hernán. “El plástico León Ferrari expone sus duras críticas ———. “Los peores infiernos.” Ramona (Buenos Aires) no. 2 (May/June ———. “Ferrari, Dibujos y escritos otros. Brailles.” Artinf (Buenos Aires) Laudanno, Claudia. “Ferrari, Cuerpos transferidos.” Artinf (Buenos Aires)
a la religión cristiana.” La Maga (Buenos Aires) no. 22 (June 10, 2000):21. no. 101 (Winter 1998):17. no. 97 (Fall 1997):29.
1992):23. Cohen, Ana Paula. “Conceptual Art and Conceptualisms, The 1970s at ———. “Polarois de locura cotidiana.” Radar (Buenos Aires), May 4, Leffingwell, Edward. “Latin American Modern.” Art in America 92, no. 9
———. “Una muestra con amenazas anónimas y opiniones del cardinal MAC-USP.” Art Nexus (Bogotá) no. 40 (May–July 2001):112–13. 2003, n.p. (October 2004):76–83.
Quarracino.” La Maga (Buenos Aires) no. 63 (March 24, 1993):11. Collazo, Alberto. “León Ferrari.” Arte en Colombia (Bogotá) no. 42 Goes, Marta. “Galeria londrina veta collagens com temas religiosos.” O Leirner, Sheila. “Técnica heliográfica, Arte ou simples apropriação?” O
“A música de León Ferrari na Pinacoteca.” O Estado de São Paulo, (December 1989):102. Estado de São Paulo, Caderno 2, August 30, 1989, p. 3. Estado de São Paulo, April 14, 1981, p. 24.
December 16, 1980, p. 21. ———. “León Ferrari.” Art Nexus (Bogotá) no. 4 (April 1992):154. Gomez, Alberto, and Dot Tuer. “Of Virgins in Blenders and Rats That “León Ferrari.” Art Nexus (Bogotá) no. 16 (April–June 1995):102–3.
Batkis, Laura. “Argentinian Sculptors, Museum of Contemporary Art ———. “Videla cumple con la Biblia.” Fin de Siglo (Buenos Aires) no. 11 Sing.” Fuse Magazine 28, no. 3 (July 2005):52. “León Ferrari.” La Prensa (Buenos Aires), October 11, 1961, p. 7.
of Chile, Santiago.” Art Nexus (Bogotá) no. 21 (July–September (May 1988):54–57. Grinstein, Eva. “León Ferrari.” Art Nexus (Bogotá) no. 56 (April–June “León Ferrari rele a Biblia e mostra outros trabalhos.” O Estado de São
1996):103–4. “Con ‘Cristos y maniquies’ la creación continúa.” Madres de Plaza de 2005):139–40. Paulo, November 29, 1984, p. 19.
Birbragher, Francine. “Inverted Utopias, Avant-garde art in Latin America.” Mayo, October 1994, p. 19. Groothuis, Marjan. “In Where Things Happen.” Buenos Aires Herald, Lopéz Anaya, Jorge. “Beyond Political Radicalism in Argentinean Art.”
Art Nexus (Bogotá) no. 54 (October–December 2004):102. Cotter, Holland. “Ready to Rumba!” The New York Times, August 27, February 9, 2003. Art Nexus (Bogotá) no. 28 (May–July 1998):76–81.
Boecker, Susanne. “Schritte zur Flucht von der Arbeit zum Tun.” 2004. Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Geaninne. “The Drawings of León Ferrari, Lopéz Oliva, Manuel. “Exposición de Ferrari en la Casa de las Américas.”
Kunstforum International no. 170 (May–June 2004):299–301. ———. “León Ferrari. ‘Politiscripts.’” The New York Times, October 8, Manipulation of the Line.” Friends of Contemporary Drawing Bulletin, Granma (Havana), March 9, 1983, p. 3.
Boido, Juan Ignacio. “Rojo y negro.” Página/30 (Buenos Aires), July 2004. The Museum of Modern Art (New York), Spring 2006, pp. 6–7. Mack, Joshua. “Moma at El Museo, Latin American and Caribbean
1999, pp. 4–10. Damian, Carol. “Art Miami 2006.” Art Nexus (Bogotá) 5, no. 60 (March– Hudson, Peter. “The Show That Had All Buenos Aires Talking.” Artnews Art from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art.” Modern
Brett, Guy. “Inverted Utopias.” Artforum 43, no. 3 (November 2004):217. May 2006):116–18. 104, no. 4 (April 2005):62. Painters 17, no. 3 (Autumn 2004):119–21.
Buffone, Xil. “El Cristo de Ferrari.” Veintitrés (Buenos Aires) no. 187 De Zavalia Dujovne, Diego. “Pensar o creer.” Ramona (Buenos Aires) no. Indij, Guido. “Sinfonía atonal.” Ramona (Buenos Aires) no. 12 (May Mercado, Tununa. “Nuevas glosas escatológicas.” Página/12 (Buenos
(February 7, 2002):65. 3 (June/July 2000):4. 2001):50. Aires), May 2, 2000, p. 29.
———. “Pesadillas vaticanas.” Ramona (Buenos Aires) no. 12 (May ———. “Se podría decir que es un chiste.” Ramona (Buenos Aires) no. Jacoby, Roberto. “Ferrari es heterogéneo y extravagante.” Ramona Monzón, Hugo. “León Ferrari.” Artinf (Buenos Aires) no. 44/45 (April–
2001):39. 12 (May 2001):39. (Buenos Aires) no. 3 (June/July 2000):3. May 1984):26.
———. “Un León haciendo planos.” Veintitrés (Buenos Aires) no. 254 Ellegood, Anne. “6th Mercosul Bienal.” Artforum 46, no. 7 (March ———. “Las herejías de León Ferrari.” Crisis (Buenos Aires) no. 50 Noé, Luis Felipe. “Carta al León octogenario.” Página/12 (Buenos Aires),
(May 22, 2003):50. 2008):356–57, 388. (January 1987):72–73. September 3, 2000, p. 30.
Burnet, Eliane. “Le Christ à l’avion, Blaspheme ou christologie appli- Fazzolari, Fernando. “Ferrari. La gloria siniestra.” Artinf (Buenos Aires) J.G. [Judith Gociol]. “Exégesis.” La Maga (Buenos Aires) no. 97 ———. “Carta a León sobre ‘El caso Ferrari.’” Fin de Siglo (Buenos Aires)
qué?” Art Press (Paris) no. 337 (September 2007):87. no. 109 (Winter 2000):13. (November 24, 1993):20. no. 12 (June 1988):71.
Camnitzer, Luis. “Parallel Songs.” Art Nexus (Bogotá) no. 33 (August– Fernandez, Raul. “Temporada alta en el averno.” Ramona (Buenos Aires) Jitrik, Magdalena. “León Ferrari.” Poliester (Mexico City) no. 23 (Fall “Os experimentos de León Ferrari e o abstrato Takashi Fukishima.” O
October 1999):94–97. no. 2 (May/June 2000):21. 1998):42–47. Estado de São Paulo, November 24, 1983, p. 24.
———. “Flying in Weightlessness.” Art Nexus (Bogotá) no. 58 (September– Gainza, Maria. “León Ferrari, Ruth Benzacar Galeria de Arte.” Artforum Kartofel, Graciela. “León Ferrari.” Art Nexus (Bogotá) no. 55 (January– Pacheco, Marcelo. “Movimientos artísticos en Argentina desde las
November 2005):110–14. 42, no. 10 (Summer 2004):256. March 2005):155–57. vanguardias históricas.” Lápiz (Madrid) no. 158/159 (December/
“Carta a un general, León Ferrari, pluma y tinta china, 1963.” La Maga ———. “Letras libres.” Radar (Buenos Aires), April 4, 2004, n.p. Kaufman, J. E. “Government Shuts Down León Ferrari Show after January 1999/2000):31–37.
(Buenos Aires), July 8, 1998, p. 51. Garcia Navarro, Santiago. “León Ferrari. Political and Poetic.” Arte al Dia Attacks by Radical Catholics.” Art Newspaper (London) 14 (January “Panorama, Formas tridimensionais.” O Estado de São Paulo, November
“Carta de lectores.” Ramona (Buenos Aires) no. 6 (October 2000):45–46. (Bogotá) no. 116 (October–November 2006):22–27. 2005):7. 12, 1985, p. 22.
Catador Catado, El. “La conjura de los necios.” Radar (Buenos Aires), Giunta, Andrea. “Destrucción-creación en la vanguardia argentina “La obediencia debida es una ley cristiana.” Crisis (Buenos Aires) no. Perazzo, Nelly. “El silencio y la violencia. Fundación Telefonica.” Art
June 4, 2000, n.p. del sesenta. Entre arte destructivo y Ezeiza es Trelew.” Razón y 66 (November 1988):78–79. Nexus (Bogotá) no. 57 (June–August 2005):156–59.
Cippolini, Rafael. “Ferrari.” Página/12 (Buenos Aires), June 19, 2000, p. 24. Revolución (Buenos Aires) no. 4 (Fall 1998):11–25. “Las ideas de sus dioses.” Veintidós (Buenos Aires) no. 99 (June 1, Pérez-Rementeria, Dinorah. “Oscar Bony and León Ferrari.” Art Nexus
2000):82. (Bogotá) 6, no. 64 (April–June 2007):130–32.
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Piguet, Philippe, and Bénédicte Ramade. “En direct de la Biennale de Tiscornia, Ana. “El MoMA at El Museo del Barrio.” Art Nexus (Botogá) no. General Books Lateinamerika und der Surrealimus. Bochum, Stiftung fur Kunst und
Venise.” L’oeil (Paris) no. 594 (September 2007):18–31. 53 (July–September 2004):92–95. Amaral, Aracy. Arte e meio artistico. Entre a feijoada e o x-burger. São Kultur NRW und Durch das Aswartige Amt, 1993.
Quipi, Señor. “Liliana Porter, León Ferrari y el Indio Solari sin saberlo en “Uma serie de encontros com León Ferrari.” O Estado de São Paulo, Paulo, Nobel, 1983. Longoni, Ana, and Mariano Mestman. Del Di Tella a “Tucumán arde.”
la Pueyrredon.” Ramona (Buenos Aires) no. 4 (August 2000):5. January 31, 1984, p. 20. L’Art argentin actuel. Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1964. Vanguardia artística y política en el ’68 argentino. Buenos Aires, El
Ramallo, Ernesto. “Los artistas argentinos en el Premio Di Tella 1965.” “Um hombre y los fusiles.” Primera Plana (Buenos Aires) no. 214 (January Arte argentino del siglo XX. Premio Telefónica de Argentina a la Investigación Cielo por Asalto, 2000.
La Prensa (Buenos Aires), September 21, 1965, p. 11. 31–February 6, 1967):70. en Historia de las Artes Plásticas. Buenos Aires, Fundación para la Lopéz Anaya, Jorge. Historia del arte argentino. Buenos Aires, Emecé,
Rexer, Lyle. “A New Map of Latin America’s Avant-Garde.” The New York “Untitled.” El Porteño (Buenos Aires) no. 31 (July 1984):75. Investigación del Arte Argentino, 1997. 1997.
Times, August 8, 2004. Verlichak, Victoria. “Con pies de barro.” Noticias de la Semana (Buenos Arte latinoamericano. Territorio de utopiías. Vol. 2. Buenos Aires, Ediciones Narrativa argentina. Noveno encuentro de escritores Dr. Roberto Noble.
———. “Art and Religion Controversy in Buenos Aires.” Art in America 93, Aires), May 27, 2000, p. 18. Instituto Movilizador de Fondos Cooperativos, 1992. Buenos Aires, Grupo Clarín y Fundación Roberto Noble, 1996.
no. 3 (March 2005):39. ———. “De mariposas y piedras.” Noticias de la Semana (Buenos Aires), Arte y política en los ’60. Buenos Aires, Fundación Banco Ciudad, 2002. Ocho años en Brasil, 1976–1984. Buenos Aires, Arte Nuevo, 1984.
———. “León Ferrari at the Drawing Room.” Art in America 93, no. 4 (April January 19, 2002, p. 14. Artes plásticas na America Latina contemporânea. Porto Alegre, da Pellegrini, Aldo. Panorama de la pintura argentina contemporánea.
2005):147–48. ———. “El peso de la pluma.” Noticias de la Semana (Buenos Aires), Universidade, 1994. Buenos Aires, Paidós, 1967.
———. “The Case of León Ferrari, Protest and Survival in Argentina.” June 27, 1998, p. 22. Becker, Heribert. Die allmacht der begierde. Erotik im Surrealismus. Sacco, Graciela. Escrituras solares. La heliografía en el campo artístico.
Modern Painters, June 2005, pp. 51–53. ———. “Identity.” Art Nexus (Bogotá) no. 41 (August–October Berlin, Karin Kramer Verlag, 1994. Rosario, Sacco, 1994.
Romero, Juan Carlos. “La iconografía cristiana como excusa.” Ramona 2001):137–38. Briante, Miguel. El ojo en la palabra. Textos sobre arte y artistas (1969–
(Buenos Aires) no. 2 (May/June 2000):20. ———. “Juegan en primera.” Noticias de la Semana (Buenos Aires), 1994). Buenos Aires, Asoc. Amigos de Miguel Briante, 1996.
Russo, Miguel. “Santos y herejes.” Veintidós (Buenos Aires) no. 99 (June August 19, 2000, p. 18. Burucua, José Emilio. Nueva historia argentina. Arte, sociedad y política. MIRA SCHENDEL
1, 2000):82. ———. “Juego de letras.” Noticias de la Semana (Buenos Aires), April 17, Vol. 2. Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 1999.
Schwerfel, Heinz Peter. “Feldforschung mit den Mitteln der Kunst.” art, 2004, p. 14. Cultura y política en los años ’60. Buenos Aires, Oficina de Publicaciones Writings by Schendel
das Kunstmagazin (Hamburg) no. 4 (April 2004):94. ———. “La construcción de la memoria.” Noticias de la Semana (Buenos del CBC, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1997. Grafische Reduktionen. Stuttgart, E. Walther, 1967.
Siegel, Katy. “Venice, The Buck Stops Here.” Artforum 46, no. 1 Aires), August 27, 1995, p. 20. Curiel, Gustavo, Renato González Mello, and Juana Gutiérrez Haces. ”O drama dos imigrantes europeus.” Correio do Povo (Porto Alegre),
(September 2007):386–90. ———.“León Ferrari.” Arte al Día (Bogotá) no. 103 (June/July 2004):63. Arte, historia e identidad en América. Visiones comparativas. XVII January 7, 1950, pp. 1, 4.
“Sottilissimi intrichi.” Domus (Milan), May 1962, p. 46. ———. “Marcar el rumbo.” Noticias de la Semana (Buenos Aires), Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte. Vol. III. Mexico City,
Spence, Rachel. “52nd Venice Biennale.” Art and Australia 45, no. 1 December 6, 1997, pp. 18–19. Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Autónoma de Books and Exhibition Catalogues
(September 2007):26–29. ———. “Mas allá de lo visible.” Noticias de la Semana (Buenos Aires), México, 1994. VIII Salão nacional de artes plásticas. Atitudes contemporâneas. Sala
Sredni de Birbragher, Cecilia, and Ivonne Pini. “León Ferrari.” Art Nexus July 5, 2003, p. 14. Entre el silencio y la violencia. Arte contemporáneo argentino. Buenos especial a arte seseus materiais. Rio de Janeiro, FUNARTE/Galeria
(Bogotá) 6, no. 67 (December 2007/February 2008):90–95. ———.“Porto Alegre, Brazil.” Art Papers 28, (January/February 2004):60. Aires, ArteBA Fundación, 2004. Seriog Milliet, 1985.
Storr, Robert. “Venice Revisited, Robert Storr Responds to His Critics.” ———. “Turning Power Around.” Art Nexus (Bogotá) 3, no. 54 (October– ExArgentina. Pasos para huir del trabajo al hacer. Buenos Aires, Goethe- X Salão de arte contemporânea de Campinas. Arte no Brasil. Documento/
Artforum 46, no. 5 (January 2008):48, 51–52, 55–56, 59–60. December 2004):173–74. Institut, 2004. debate. Campinas, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Campinas
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Suazo, Félix. “FIA 2006.” Art Nexus (Botogá) 5, no. 62 (October Yasenza, Conrado. “Sobre ángeles y serpientes.” La Maga (Buenos ———. La producción simbólica. Mexico City, Siglo XXI, 1979. 1981.
2006):124–26. Aires) no. 339 (July 15, 1998):35. Giunta, Andrea. Vanguardia, internacionalismo y política. Arte argentino Adams, Beverly, ed. Constructing a Poetic Universe, The Diane and
Swann, Maxine. “Vino Ramona.” Artforum 43, no. 8 (April 2005):196. en los años sesenta. Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2001. Bruce Halle Collection of Latin American Art. Houston, The Museum
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Ades, Dawn. Art in Latin America. The Modern Era, 1820–1980. New Carvajal, Rina, Alma Ruiz, and Susan Martin, eds. The Experimental Jiménez, Ariel, and Virginia Pérez-Ratton. Ecos y contrastes. Arte ———. Mira Schendel. A forma volatil. Rio de Janeiro, Centro de Arte
Haven, Yale University Press, 1989. Published in Spanish as Arte en Exercise of Freedom, Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio contemporáneo en la colección Cisneros. Venezuela, Colección Helio Oiticica, 1997.
Iberoamérica, 1820–1980. Madrid, Turner and Ministerio de Cultura, Oiticica, Mira Schendel. Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Cisneros, 2005. Souza Dias, Geraldo. Mira Schendel. Kunst zwischen Metaphysik und
1990. Art, 1999. Kautz, Willy, and Rodrigo Naves. Mira Schendel. Continuum amorfo. Lieblichkeit. Berlin, Galda + Wilch Verlag, 2000.
Amaral, Aracy, and Paulo Herkenhoff. Ultramodern, The Art of Contemporary Da Rocha Lagoa, María Beatriz. Forma transitiva. Poética de Paul Klee e Mexico City, Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo, and Monterrey, ———. Mira Schendel. São Paulo, Cosac Naify, forthcoming 2009.
Brazil. Washington, D.C., National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1993. Mira Schendel. Ph.D. thesis, Pontifícia Universidade Catolica do Rio Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, 2004. Sullivan, Edward. Brazil, Body & Soul. New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim
Amaral, Aracy, ed. Arte constructiva no Brasil. Coleção Adolpho Leirner. de Janeiro/PUC-RIO, 2005. Klintowitz, Jacob. O ofício da arte. A pintura. São Paulo, SESC, 1987. Museum, 2001.
São Paulo, Dórea, 1998. De Zegher, Catherine M. Inside the Visible, An Elliptical Traverse of Livro-objeto. A fronteira dos vazios. Rio de Janeiro, Centro Cultural ———. Concrete Realities, The Art of Carmen Herrera, Fanny Sanin, and
Art from Brazil in New York. New York, LedisFlam and Galerie Lelong, 1995. Twentieth Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine. Cambridge, Banco do Brasil, April 1994. Mira Schendel. New York, Latincollector, 2004.
Arte constructiva no Brasil. Coleção Adolpho Leirner. São Paulo, Museu Mass., The MIT Press, 1996. Marques, Maria Eduarda. Mira Schendel. São Paulo, Cosac Naify, 2001. Tendências do livro de artista no Brasil. São Paulo, Centro Cultural São
de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1998 D’Horta, Vera. MAM, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. São Paulo, Mira Schendel. São Paulo, Paulo Figueiredo Galeria de Arte, 1982. Paulo, 1985.
Arte transcendente. São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Dórea, 1995. Mira Schendel. Pinturas Recentes. São Paulo, Paulo Figueiredo Galeria Transit, Latin American Art at the University Gallery. Colchester, University
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192 193

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———. “Crianças jogam o bê-á-bá visual de Schendel.” O Estado de São ———. “Mira, anos 60.” Guia das artes (São Paulo) no. 27 (November/ Leirner, Sheila. “Mira Schendel, Metáforas.” O Estado de São Paulo, ———. “Principal marca de Mira era a discrição absoluta.” O Estado de
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index of plates
197

León Ferrari Mira Schendel

Ángel apocalíptico from the series Manos. 1964, 112 Unión libre. 2004, 160 Untitled. c. 1988 (cut-and-pasted A trama. 1960s, 89 Objetos gráficos series, untitled Tijolos series, untitled of 1988, 166
Relectura de la Biblia. 1988, 155 Manuscritos series, see El día que Untitled. 1960 (ceramic), 75 printed papers on paper), 157 Alleluia series, untitled of 1973, 101 of 1967–68 (oil transfer drawing Toquinhos series, untitled of
Árboles. 2006, 167 amanecí muerto, Milagro en la Untitled. 1960/1961 (ceramic), 75 Untitled. 1980s (oilstick and pastel on thin Japanese paper 1970s, 161
OEA Untitled. 1961 (ceramic), 73 on hardboard), 131 Datiloscritos series, untitled of between painted transparent Toquinhos series, untitled of 1973,
Carta a un general. June 18, 1963, Milagro en la OEA from the series Untitled. 1962 (ink on gessoed Untitled. 1991 (oilstick on 1970s, 140 acrylic sheets), 126, 128 161
96 Manuscritos. May 9, 1965, 102 wood), 94 hardboard), 119 Datiloscritos series, untitled of c. Objetos gráficos series, untitled of Toquinhos series, untitled of 1977,
Códigos series, see Kama-Sutra Mujer preocupada. 1960/1961, 73 Untitled. 1962 (ink on paper), 108 Untitled from the series 1970s, 141 c. 1969 (oil transfer drawing on 159
I–III, Traduções, Zoología Mujer. c. 1960, 71 Untitled. March 1962 (ink on Heliografias. 1982, 137 Datiloscritos series, untitled of thin Japanese paper between Trenzinho. 1965, 118
Cuadrado from the series Musica May 2, 1962, 82 paper), 82 Untitled from the series Relectura 1974, 140 transparent acrylic sheets), 120
Heliografias. 1982, 137 Untitled. April 26, 1962 (ink on de la Biblia. 1986 (cut-and- Datiloscritos series, untitled of Objetos gráficos series, untitled Untitled. 1953 (oil on canvas), 72
Cuadro escrito December 17, 1964, Opus 113. 1980, 136 paper), 84 pasted printed paper on 1975, 141 of late 1960s (oil transfer Untitled. 1954 (oil on canvas), 74
98 Untitled. October 24, 1962 (cut- printed paper), 162 Desenhos lineares series, untitled drawing and transfer type on Untitled. 1954 (tempera on wood),
P4CR from the series Xadrez. 1979, and-pasted painted paper on Untitled from the series Relectura of 1973, 163 thin Japanese paper between 70
El árbol embarazador. 1964, 100 142 painted paper on wood), 92 de la Biblia. November 1986 Droguinhas series, untitled of c. transparent acrylic sheets with Untitled. 1960 (felt-tip pen on
El día que amanecí muerto from Planeta. 1979, 134 Untitled. November 21, 1962 (ink (cut-and-pasted printed paper 1964–66, 115 transfer type), 124 paper), 145
the series Manuscritos. 1964, and colored pencil on paper), on printed paper), 123 Droguinhas series, untitled of Objetos gráficos series, untitled of Untitled. 1960s (felt-tip pen on
104 Quisiera hacer una estatua. c. 80 Untitled from the series Relectura 1965, 111 late 1960s (oil transfer drawing paper), 145
Espectadores from the series 1964, 102 Untitled. 1964 (ink on paper), 86 de la Biblia. November 26, 1986 Droguinhas series, untitled of on thin Japanese paper Untitled. 1960s (oil transfer
Heliografias. 1981, 137 Untitled. 1964 (ink on paper), 90 (cut-and-pasted printed paper 1966, 113, 116 between transparent acrylic drawing on thin Japanese
Ramas. 2007, 165 Untitled. 1964 (ink and cut-and- on printed paper), 162 Droguinhas series, untitled of c. sheets), 129 paper), 81
Gagarín. c. 1961, 86 Reflexiones. 1963, 110 pasted printed paper on Untitled from the series Relectura 1966, 109 Objetos gráficos series, untitled Untitled. 1963 (incised tempera on
Relectura de la Biblia series, see paper), 104 de la Biblia. February 3, 1987 of late 1960s (oil transfer wood), 78
Helicóptero from the series Ángel apocalíptico; Helicóptero; Untitled. c. 1964 (ink on paper), 90 (cut-and-pasted printed papers Escritas series, untitled of 1965, drawing and transfer type on Untitled. 1963–64 (tempera on
Relectura de la Biblia. 1988, 155 untitled of 1986; untitled of Untitled. c. 1977–78 (stainless on black paper), 154 83, 95, 97, 103 thin Japanese paper between canvas), 77
Heliografias series, see Cuadrado, November 1986; untitled of steel), 138 transparent acrylic sheets), 129 Untitled. 1964 (gouache on
Espectadores, untitled of 1982 November 26, 1986; untitled of Untitled. 1979 (ink on paper), 139 Xadrez series, see P4CR Homenagem a Deus—pai do Objetos gráficos series, untitled paper), 76
Hombre (Maguete). 1962, 107 February 3, 1987 Untitled. March 17, 1980 (ink, Ocidente. 1975, 152 of 1972 (transfer type on thin Untitled. 1964 (oil transfer drawing
Huesos. 2006, 165 Renovación from the series transfer type, and cut-and- Zoología from the series Códigos. Japanese paper between on thin Japanese paper), 83,
L’Osservatore Romano. 2001, pasted printed papers on 1979, 148 Letras circunscritas series, transparent acrylic sheets), 135 87, 91
Juicio final. 1994, 151 158 paper), 144 untitled of 1974, 143 Objetos gráficos series, untitled Untitled. 1965 (oil transfer drawing
Untitled. 1983 (oilstick and pastel Letras series, untitled of 1964, 85 of 1973 (transfer type on thin on thin Japanese paper), 91, 117
Kama-Sutra I from the series Sin titulo (Castelar). 1962, 106 on hardboard), 121 Letras series, untitled of 1965, 85 Japanese paper between Untitled. Mid-1960s (tempera on
Códigos. 1979, 146 Sin titulo (Sermón de la sangre). Untitled. 1983 (oilstick and pastel transparent acrylic sheets), 133 burlap), 93
Kama-Sutra II from the series 1962, 79 on hardboard), 125 Objetos gráficos series, untitled Ondas paradas de probabilidade. Untitled. 1971 (transfer type
Códigos. 1979, 146 Untitled. 1984 (oilstick and pastel of 1967 (graphite, transfer type, 1965, 150 between transparent acrylic
Kama-Sutra III from the series Torre de Babel. 1964, 114 on hardboard), 127 and oil on paper between sheets), 147
Códigos. 1979, 146 Traduções from the series Untitled. 1985 (oilstick and pastel transparent acrylic sheets with Sarrafos series, untitled of 1987, Untitled. 1972 (transfer type
Códigos. 1979, 148 on hardboard), 123 transfer type), 122 164 between brushed acrylic
L’Osservatore Romano series, see Untitled. 1986 (cut-and-pasted Objetos gráficos series, untitled Segno dei segni. 1964–65, 105 sheets), 149
Renovación printed paper on printed of 1967 (typewriting on paper Sem titulo (Achilles). 1960s, 99
La embarazada. 1979, 133 paper), 156 between transparent acrylic
Leda y el cisne. 1997, 160 sheets), 130
credits
199

Individual works of art appearing © 2009 Artists Rights Society © 2009 Joseph Kosuth/Artists Pedro Roth, plate 57.
herein may be protected by (ARS), New York/Pro Litteris, Rights Society (ARS), New York. Adrián Rocha Novoa, Pérez-
copyright in the United States of Zurich, Naves, fig. 6. Courtesy the artist and Sean Oramas, figs. 3, 20, 29, 34, 38;
America, or elsewhere, and may © 2009 Artists Rights Society Kelly Gallery, New York, Pérez- Giunta, figs. 3–10; plates 2, 4,
not be reproduced in any form (ARS), New York/SABAM, Oramas, fig. 28. 5, 7, 8, 13, 28, 29, 32, 37, 43, 65,
without the permission of the Brussels, Pérez-Oramas, fig. 10. Courtesy Paulo Kuzcynski, Naves, 72, 80, 96, 107, 110, 113–15, 117,
rights holders. In reproducing © 2009 Artists Rights Society fig. 4; plate 88. 118, 121, 123–29, 134, 135, 138,
the images contained in this (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome, Tim Lanterman, Pérez-Oramas, 139, 143, 144, 146; Chronology,
publication, the Museum obtained Naves, fig. 8. fig. 5; plate 67. Ferrari figs. pp. 172 (right),
the permission of the rights © 2009 Artists Rights Society Isabella Matheus, plate 92. 173, 175 (right), 176 (left), 178,
holders whenever possible. (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Courtesy Galeria Millan, São 179 (right), 180, 181 (left), 182
Should the Museum have been Bonn, Naves, fig. 3. Paulo, Naves, fig. 9; plate 120. (center left, far right).
unable to locate the rights © 2009 Artists Rights Society Mark Morosse, Pérez-Oramas, Max Schendel, frontispiece (right);
holder, notwithstanding good- (ARS), New York/VEGAP, Spain, fig. 7; plates 71, 142. Pérez-Oramas, figs. 1, 18, 19,
faith efforts, it requests that any Pérez-Oramas, fig. 6. The Museum of Modern Art, 22, 23, 36; Naves, fig. 2; plates
contact information concerning Oscar Balducci, Pérez-Oramas, New York, Imaging Services 18, 19, 21–23, 25, 35, 36, 38–40,
such rights holders be forwarded fig. 26; plates 17, 26, 41, 64, 70. Department, Pérez-Oramas, 54–56, 75, 76, 90, 108, 109,
so that they may be contacted for Courtesy “The World of Lygia figs. 16, 28. Photographs by 116, 130–33, 140; Chronology,
future editions. Clark” Cultural Association, Robert Gerhardt, Naves, fig. 3. Schendel figs. pp. 169, 170 (left,
Naves, fig. 7. Thomas Griesel, Pérez-Oramas, center), 171 (left, center), 172
All works by León Ferrari © 2009 David Clarke, plate 69. figs. 6, 8, 9, 10, 31; Naves, fig. 8; (left), 173 (center, right), 174
Fundación Augusto y León Vicente de Mello, Naves, fig. 1; plates 27, 52, 59–63, 66, 77, (center), 177 (left), 178 (left);
Ferrari. Archivo y Colección, Chronology, Schendel figs. 78, 99, 103, 106; Chronology, back cover (right).
Buenos Aires. p. 177 (right). Schendel figs. p. 173 (left). Kate Gustavo Sosa Pinilla, plate 53.
All works by Mira Schendel Renato Donzelli, Pérez-Oramas, Keller, Pérez-Oramas, fig. 15. Gregg Stanger, plate 93.
© 2009 Mira Schendel Estate. fig. 35; plates 102, 104. Jonathan Muzikar, plates 97, Alejandra Urresti, Pérez-Oramas,
Rômulo Fialdini, Pérez-Oramas, 98; Chronology, Ferrari figs. fig. 21; Chronology, Ferrari figs.
Vera Albuquerque, Pérez-Oramas, fig. 30; Naves, figs. 5, 10; plates p. 182 (center right). John p. 181 (right).
fig. 33; plates 82, 84, 100; 1, 11, 30, 31, 33, 83, 85, 86, 89, Wronn, Pérez-Oramas, figs. 2, © 2009 Lawrence Weiner/Artists
Chronology, Ferrari figs. p. 176 91, 95, 101, 111, 112, 122, 137, 141, 4, 27; plates 14, 15, 24, 34, 58, Rights Society (ARS), New York,
(center). 145; Chronology, Ferrari figs. 68, 73, 94. Pérez-Oramas, fig. 27.
Denise Andrade, plates 74, 105; p. 177 (right), Schendel figs. Eduardo Ortega, Pérez-Oramas, John Yost, plate 12.
Chronology, Schendel figs. pp. 171 (right), 172 (right), 178 figs. 24, 37; plates 6, 9, 10, 42,
p. 175 (right). (right). 44–51, 87, 119. Chronology, The texts by Mira Schendel that
Archivo León Ferrari, frontispiece © 2009 Fondation Lucio Fontana, Schendel figs. p. 172 (center), accompany Mr. Naves’s essay are
(left); Pérez-Oramas, figs. 11–14, Pérez-Oramas, fig. 15. 175 (left). reprinted courtesy Arquivio Mira
17; Giunta, figs. 1, 2; Chronology, Carlos German Rojas, plates 3, 81; © 2009 Paulo Pasta, Naves, fig. 9. Schendel, São Paulo.
Ferrari figs. pp. 169–71, 172 Chronology, Schendel figs. Photograph, Nelson Kon.
(left), 174, 175 (center), 176 p. 170 (left), 174 (left). © 2009 Alejandro Puente, Pérez-
(right), 177 (left), 179 (left), 182 Courtesy Diane and Bruce Halle Oramas, fig. 8.
(far left); back cover (left). Collection, plate 79.
© 2009 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/
Estate of Marcel Duchamp,
Pérez-Oramas, fig. 9.
trustees of the museum of modern art

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