The discourse produced around artistic objects was closely connected to the author’s lives, until the mid-eighteenth century, when Johann Winckelmann established the modern version of Art History. The tradition was made famous by Vasari, whose writings relied on the biographical accidents of artists to organize and justify the entire analytical edifice. The problem Winckelmann had with this model reflected the new ideology of the Age of Enlightenment and the goals the scientific revolution was achieving at the time: the objects of knowledge should dismiss any conjectural approach (such as the case of the biographical method), to get treated based on evidence and critical distance. In the specific case of Art History, this movement led Winckelmann to establish new parameters for this subject and to base them on a rigorous observation of the origin, development, and decline of the artistic phenomena. Artworks then, became autonomous from their authors and gained their own biography, based on the same three ages, on the same three breaths: «The arts..., like all inventions, began with necessity; afterward one sought beauty, and finally there followed the superfluous: these are the three outstanding stages of art.»¹

The peculiarity of the objects that Laurindo Marta is now presenting at the Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra lies in the astute way in which they merge these three stages within themselves. It is as if, faced with the obvious awareness of the artificiality of Winckelmann’s rule – even facing the impossibility of continuing to think of artistic phenomena on those terms –, his practice focused not exactly on dismantling it, but rather on making it implode. And therefore, an exhibition filled with objects, or rather, an exhibition filled with machines whose usefulness is as evident as the effort the artist made to annul it, can be found here. If not, one can look at: the airplane from Razão de Subida (2016), the guitar from Solo (2016), the car from Andamento (2016), and the water pump from Primeiro Poço (2016), all of them work. All of them perfectly respond to the necessities that originated them. However, as machines, as work apparatuses, they produce nothing that can be expected. On the other hand, all of them were hobbled through artifices whose purpose clearly was to restrict their productive nature. In a way, they were placed in situations where neither do they stop working, nor does their work led to anything besides a (re)production of themselves – i.e. of their work – as images. An airplane that does not stop flying, nor does it ever leave the same place; a water pump that uninterruptedly fills a shallow vat, never overflowing; a car whose eternal route does nothing more than track its own circularity – all of them get crystalized in their repetition, forcing that same hypnotic abstraction game from which comes the power of the loop or of the mantra.

Like Sisyphus, these objects were condemned by the artist to repeat their functions endlessly and without any results. Like Sisyphus, they persist and resist the spectacle of its inoperability. Like an omnipotent deity, the artist has condemned them to that condition, not for feeling threatened by them, but because he knows them too well because his relationship with the material world comes imbued with an irrepressible curiosity about the mechanics of things, about its nature. Laurindo Marta’s parascientific impulse becomes more explicit in the titles of these pieces like Sobre a Relação entre o Tamanho dos Círculos e a Velocidade (2016) or Sobre a Flexibilidade dos Cabos de Madeira (2017), clearly descriptive and analytical expressions, but who have also undergone a perversion of meaning which transforms them into «nada» [nothing] saying machines. Not because they do not say anything, but because «nada» [nothing] is all that can be said about the flexibility of wooden handles or the relationship between the size of the circles and speed. As allusive and tautological machines, these titles lead to the objects they name, amplifying their absurd nature, their disconcerting nature, and their emptiness.

The exhibition ends precisely with this emphasis on emptiness. Mesa Vaga offers a set of objects marked by a strange familiarity. Their presence in one’s daily life can be felt, but the exact spot they occupy on the great taxonomy of vernacular utensils is not fully traceable. Unlike the previous ones, none of them work. They lay lifeless on the table as if staring at someone, sharing the same silence and the same potency. Potency because, although they are elemental structures, these pieces suggest a possible function, not only a hypothetical utility yet to be determined, but also would inevitably involve interaction with other elements.

The pieces that make up Mesa Vaga are the lifeless and elementary counterpoint of compound and kinetic objects that precede them on the exhibition route. Nevertheless, all of them share a resilient attitude and cultivate a certain dignity in their inoperability and, ultimately, in their superfluous condition. It is already known that this inoperability, their inscription outside of the productive circuits, and inherently, in candidates for artworks. However, and despite the weight of their visual quality, appropriated from the world of industrial products (in fact, the majority of these are assisted readymade objects), what makes them truly appealing as symbolic objects is simultaneously the crash that they, through that appropriation, cause with the functional side of daily life, and the equidistance that they keep concerning the three ages which Winckelmann proclaimed for all inventions. Not exactly necessary, nor exclusively beautiful, nor entirely superfluous, Laurindo Marta’s objects live in a singular dimension, indicating a cosmogony exempt from the weight of any discourse that structures it, of a norm that organizes it, and even of a meaning that justifies it.

Bruno Marchand

¹ Jauss, H. R. (1982). Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, (pp.48). Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press. Quoted in: Winckelmann, J. (1764). Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. Dresden.