2024-04-23 18:00:52
In “The nudity of the imperfect copy”, released in Brazil by the publisher Nós, the artist Wagner Schwartz revisits, reinvents and elaborates the episode experienced in 2017, when an army of robots and Jair Bolsonaro’s allies used an image of his performance The beastinspired by the series Animals, by Lygia Clark (1920-1988), presented at MAM. Taken out of context, the photo, where a friend’s daughter touches the artist’s naked body, triggered an unprecedented virtual lynching and thousands of threats to his life.
On September 26, 2017, a Brazilian artist, Wagner Schwartz, performed at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in São Paulo. Inspired by the series Animalsby visual artist Lygia Clark, Schwartz’s performance was called The beast. Inside the room, one of the artist’s long-time friends and colleagues, Elisabeth Finger, was present with her four-year-old daughter, who at a certain point during the performance touches the artist’s naked body. This moment is captured in a photo that, taken out of its context, is taken to the internet, multiplied and transformed into thousands of death threats, in a virtual lynching, inside and outside Brazil.
The episode is revisited by artist Wagner Schwartz in the book “A Nudez da Cópia Imperfeita”, with which he ended a tour of Brazil and which will be launched in Paris on May 29th, with readings by Portuguese actress Maria de Medeiros. “In the book I talk about the effects of this context [do episódio]but not exactly about the fact, the fact is already, let’s say, mediatized, revealed, extrapolated in newspapers in Brazil and abroad”, explains Schwartz, who spoke with RFI about the publication.
RFI: You quote journalist Eliane Brum, who says that in Brazil fiction is obsolete, there is only reality. It’s interesting because the book also makes a poetic and fictional reinterpretation of a moment of hers and of a very important Brazilian moment. And you mention “Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas”, a marker of Brazilian realism from 1881, by Machado de Assis. You return to the same Machado’s irony with this proposal of “hyperrealism”, this realism that the journalist Eliane Brum talks about…
Wagner Schwartz: Eliane Brum was very important for me and for the development of this plot, because I, at the moment I was attacked in Brazil, decided not to speak to any press. The phenomenon of one day being, let’s say, unknown by the press and, the next day, being sought out by the biggest and most important publications in Brazil was very interesting. But in reality, they didn’t want to interview me, they wanted to interview someone who didn’t exist, who wasn’t me. And I couldn’t give an interview in the name of this Wagner who didn’t exist.
RFI: Who was this person?
WS: He was a person invented by the far right and their followers. So I couldn’t speak for him. I could only speak for myself. And at that moment I was completely injured, I couldn’t give an interview. There is a tacit symbolic network of censorship today in Brazil that is extremely worrying.
RFI: You were virtually lynched. The scene was taken out of the context in which it existed and was disseminated throughout the country and beyond, where we heard the echoes. Swedish director Ingmar Bergman said that “the shadow of death gives prominence to life”. How did you bring the lynching to life in this book?
WS: Still taking Eliane Brum’s line, she contacted me, a month after everything had happened and when she contacted me, I told her that I wouldn’t be able to respond to her at that moment. How she was part of a newspaper [o El País], which has a different dynamic structure than the others, she told me it could wait. And I answered these questions for her in my time. Eliane managed to accompany me and make sense of this moment and publish the moment. So she was the person who managed, somehow and perhaps without knowing it, to take care of my pain at that moment, as a journalist knows how to do. There were many death threats. Death threats are, of course, not pretty. They are strategically horrible and create a feeling of fear that you, in reality, don’t have on a daily basis. In Brazil, we were born with fear, we walked in the street with fear, but this feeling was heightened to maximum power, because I didn’t disbelieve them, it only took one to take my life.
RFI: How was the reaction of Brazilian artistic institutions to this episode?
WS: They closed off, I think. I believe that they have created a program or programming that is for a “non-public”, and that is what is most worrying for me. Today it seems to me that art institutions in Brazil in general are creating programs for those who don’t go, for those who don’t visit these institutions. (…) If we go here [em Paris] At the Center Pompidou, we know what we’re going to find. If we go to the Palais de Tokyo, we know that we can find it, but Brazilian art institutions are more concerned with what this “non-public” can see, can become aware of, than with the public itself that is there to watch. So there is a tacit symbolic network of censorship today in Brazil that is extremely worrying. And as we now have a left-wing government in Brazil, an entire extraordinary team of very intelligent people, capable of dealing with this discomfort in the body, this body that has been buried for years in our culture. We have changes in laws, but, institutionally, in the art world, there are none. What there is is a “progressive” distrust of these bodies.
RFI: You dedicate the book to the person who removed the child’s image from Instagram and who triggered this whole process.
WS: Without this person, this book would not have happened. And important changes in the Brazilian mentality perhaps would not have happened either. Before, I believed that art played little of its social, political role, and I believe today that when it is taken out of its packaging, it can cause disturbances, and good disturbances in society. I have already publicly thanked Jair Bolsonaro to the MBL, who are deplorable figures in the Brazilian political system, for doing the work that journalists were previously unable to do in Brazil, which was exactly exploring art as it is. When we are censored, we begin to censor ourselves too.
RFI: You quote Laurie Anderson saying that “it’s not the bullet that kills, it’s the hole.” I would like to know in this progressive censorship that you mention, what is the hole that kills, which bodies are allowed and which bodies are excluded?
WS: Look, I’m going to use the word even more now, at a time when perhaps I shouldn’t. When we are censored, we begin to censor ourselves too. And I’m planning to not do that. Yesterday, for example, a friend sent me a notice made between the French consulate and the German consulate about a new curatorial project in which they are looking for themes related to “happiness”. So, have you ever imagined how many “happy” artists we will see submitting their project? I have no idea how a topic like this can arise at a time when wars are happening, when we see victims falling in front of us, absurd climate changes and censorship happening inside and outside Brazil.
RFI: You started this book through a documentary process of the episode, and ended up drifting at a certain point through fiction. Why?
WS: I chose fiction because I didn’t want to give voice to voices that had already been heard in this book. I needed to talk about what happens inside. So it’s my body that speaks, it’s my memory that speaks and it’s fictional because the real has its own time. There is an instant of it happening, and, from the moment your body disconnects from reality, from fact, it is impossible for fiction not to be this bridge that creates this link between language, between an effect and a perspective of the effect. And I needed fiction, because in fiction there is more space. The fact is closed. In the past it is fixed, but through fiction and art, the past is not fixed, it can be restructured.
*To watch the video of this interview in full, click on the photo.
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