Carla Zaccagnini
ELEMENTS OF BEAUTY: A TEA SET IS NEVER JUST A TEA SET
13 Nov 2015 - 13 Mar 2016
Elementos de beleza: Um jogo de chá nunca é apenas um jogo de chá [Elements of Beauty: A Tea Set Is Never Just a Tea Set], a work that is part of MASP’s collection and is being shown for the first time in Brazil, is based on research by Carla Zaccagnini concerning the suffragettes – activists who fought for the woman’s right to vote in England at the beginning of the 20th century. From 1909 onward, the suffragettes began breaking the windows of politicians’ homes and public buildings, as well as store windows – targets full of symbolism, on the borderline between the public and the private. They later aimed their attention – and their weapons – at the museums and the narratives they disseminate, especially in regard to masculine power, patriarchalism and depictions of women with idealized bodies or in rigid social roles.
On March 10, 1914, Mary Richardson entered the National Gallery of London as though she were an ordinary visitor. After a time spent sketching Velasquez’s masterpiece painting Rokeby Venus, however, she pulled a meat cleaver out of her sleeve and used it to break the painting’s protective glass and slash the canvas seven times in the section that shows the goddess’s nude torso – marks which she defined as “hieroglyphs,” able to express something “to future generations.” Her declaration also stated: “Justice is an element of beauty as much as color and outline on canvas.” Through her project, Zaccagnini reminds us that behind the political thrust of these and other actions by the suffragettes there pulses a certain relation with the image and its mechanisms of exhibition.
The suffragettes attacked a total of 29 artworks and ethnographic and archaeological artifacts. Elementos de beleza refers to this selection of items, arranging on a large wall 23 frames painted directly on the white surface, in the same dimensions as the originals, along with six numbers to represent those artworks whose size is unknown. The visitor is oriented by an audio guide with conjectures concerning what may have motivated the activists to choose a certain artwork and not another, pointing to possible relationships between the elements depicted and the type of damage that the canvases suffered.
Feminism and the question of gender are not the artist’s only concerns in this project, which deals with currently urgent themes such as the participation of minorities in democratic decisions, the conservatism of the political elites who resist change, the crisis of social identities and representation in the public sphere in the 20th century, activism and the confrontation of oppressive structures, and, finally and especially, the challenge to the power constituted by the system of art and its institutions, in which female artists suffer from gender discrimination, treated differently than their male counterparts. For Zaccagnini – interested in the discourse’s unfoldings and its political and cultural consequences, as well as how it is conveyed in the media, in the system of art and in another systems – this work “approaches art objects as agents with a social role, able to carry out an active historical and political function, even during their museological existence.
It is important to note that this work is debuting in Brazil at a socially intense moment for both the country and the world, when the dilemmas of the model of political representativity by way of voting is accompanied by a greater presence of people in the public space, which includes the debate on the renovation of feminism in Brazil, as was also expressed in the recent marches on Avenida Paulista. Elementos de beleza is being held at MASP, a museum whose free span has become synonymous with a public square for every sort of manifestation, exposing political impasses and contrasts that epitomize the contradictions of our time, while also revealing that the suffragettes’ struggle for a more egalitarian society has not yet been completely won.
On March 10, 1914, Mary Richardson entered the National Gallery of London as though she were an ordinary visitor. After a time spent sketching Velasquez’s masterpiece painting Rokeby Venus, however, she pulled a meat cleaver out of her sleeve and used it to break the painting’s protective glass and slash the canvas seven times in the section that shows the goddess’s nude torso – marks which she defined as “hieroglyphs,” able to express something “to future generations.” Her declaration also stated: “Justice is an element of beauty as much as color and outline on canvas.” Through her project, Zaccagnini reminds us that behind the political thrust of these and other actions by the suffragettes there pulses a certain relation with the image and its mechanisms of exhibition.
The suffragettes attacked a total of 29 artworks and ethnographic and archaeological artifacts. Elementos de beleza refers to this selection of items, arranging on a large wall 23 frames painted directly on the white surface, in the same dimensions as the originals, along with six numbers to represent those artworks whose size is unknown. The visitor is oriented by an audio guide with conjectures concerning what may have motivated the activists to choose a certain artwork and not another, pointing to possible relationships between the elements depicted and the type of damage that the canvases suffered.
Feminism and the question of gender are not the artist’s only concerns in this project, which deals with currently urgent themes such as the participation of minorities in democratic decisions, the conservatism of the political elites who resist change, the crisis of social identities and representation in the public sphere in the 20th century, activism and the confrontation of oppressive structures, and, finally and especially, the challenge to the power constituted by the system of art and its institutions, in which female artists suffer from gender discrimination, treated differently than their male counterparts. For Zaccagnini – interested in the discourse’s unfoldings and its political and cultural consequences, as well as how it is conveyed in the media, in the system of art and in another systems – this work “approaches art objects as agents with a social role, able to carry out an active historical and political function, even during their museological existence.
It is important to note that this work is debuting in Brazil at a socially intense moment for both the country and the world, when the dilemmas of the model of political representativity by way of voting is accompanied by a greater presence of people in the public space, which includes the debate on the renovation of feminism in Brazil, as was also expressed in the recent marches on Avenida Paulista. Elementos de beleza is being held at MASP, a museum whose free span has become synonymous with a public square for every sort of manifestation, exposing political impasses and contrasts that epitomize the contradictions of our time, while also revealing that the suffragettes’ struggle for a more egalitarian society has not yet been completely won.