ESSAY The Irony of the Sublime JOãO MARIA GUSMãO and PEDRO PAIVA by Paola Nicolin João Maria Gusmão’s and Pedro Paiva’s films, sculptures, photographs and installations describe a subtle, fabulous and strange universe. The Portuguese duo create a form of expression that defies classification, a document which belongs simultaneously to the past and to the future, and which urges us to regard anachronism as a thought method. Their short, silent movies, shot using 16mm film, and photographic sets are the technique, or rather the analytical tools, by which the duo directs our attention to unusual actions and surprise phenomena. Containing no leading players but merely extras from a lyrical and surreal theater, their films are as much a cross-section of the life of a romantic hero, who transforms spleen into irony, as of the life of an alchemist who combines elements without making them explode. In abstract scenarios, men and objects rotate, fall, and are transformed, directed by an alchemist who seeks the panacea by combining medicine, religion, chemistry, physics, semiotics, metallurgy and mathematics. There are recurring themes and topos in the works. Actions repeat themselves. They are always the same and yet always different, linked to the imperceptible transformation of a natural landscape (Experiment on the Effluvium, 2009,) to the abstract geometry of planets (Planetary System, 2011,) to archaeology and ruins as a future scenario, to symbols of lunar eclipses, to situations of suspension or the theater of the absurd with a Surrealist flavor (Clepsydra, 2010, or Dirty Kitchen.) They are often connected to the staging of pseudo-scientific experiments that are destined to fail or create an expectation of change that is never fully met. Together with these atmospheres, works such as Falling Potato, 2010, develop 33 GUSMÃO AND PAIVA ESSAY 35 ESSAY GUSMÃO AND PAIVA the relationship between image and the state of mind of the observer. The image of a window open onto the outdoors that frames a falling potato seems to allude, not without ironic distancing, to the ready-made tradition (or rather to Étant donnés by Duchamp, 1946-1966,) where the work is a machine-device for determining the conditions of a particular form of vision. As well as this reference, the iconography of the window that frames a vision is a mental exercise that has been an instrument for gaining experience of art and knowledge, from Antonello da Messina to Caspar David Friedrich. Works such as these are often stories without a history, which happen in a fraction of suspended space-time. However, these non-histories draw on the repertoire and atmospheres of classical myths, of biblical texts or on ancient history and archaeology as a study of civilizations and as a store of symbolical shapes and objects that are often decontextualized and made unrecognizable at first sight. Here one finds a blend of reality and artifice. This bent for decontextualizing the object and its action leads the artists to re-elaborate the assumptions of existential philosophy and the echo of the relationship between literature and metaphysics in the form of silence and the slow repetition of a movement. Slow motion footage such as Ventriloquism, 2009, or Cyclopean Eye, 2008, or Fried Eggs, 2008, therefore have a great deal in common with the literature of Magic Realism, such as the talent for creating situations or describing moments of suspended action where, for instance, an imaginary town of Macondo becomes a small world in which incredibly human and extraordinarily surreal people and things move. The play on words found in some titles like Dirty Kitchen or Gatolarge is also an experiment in perception rather than a choice of content, as though to induce that anti-retinal attitude which from Anemic Cinema onwards placed art at the service of the mind. The mechanism of optical precision by means of which João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva construct the film is constantly balanced by irony and a sense of humor, which spreads from the corners to the center of the scene. In this sense the analytical use of cinema is a little like the analytical 36 use of technical drawing: designed to eradicate taste and make the image and its construction a mental exercise. Humor and irony in the film also entail a meditation on the meaning of laughter (often tragic and socially engaged,) on the lesson of Henri Bergson. How much space does laughter occupy in social processes? Does comedy not perhaps concern the relationship between spirit and body, the imaginative memory and the automatic memory, concentration and distraction? The artists thus put into practice a method that is firmly based on meditation on slow motion footage, which establishes a relationship between ‘ephemeral and transitory.’ As Natxo Checa, curator of the 53rd Venice Biennial Pavilion, writes: “In their footage the human subconscious is channelled towards the acceptance of the fact that the absolute is extra temporal and diluted in the multiplicity of the world, or rather that the ego is considerably scaled down in the scheme of things, not because it is crushed by the absolute but because the margins within which anyone can organize logos are situated far beyond such uncertainty.” Page 32 Falling Potato, 2010, cm 93 x 128. Page 33 Falling Cat, 2010, cm 90 x 70. Page 34 Body of Straw, 2011, cm 95 x 135. Left Tortoise and Strange Parrot, 2011, cm 45 x 60. Above Peeled Potato, 2010, cm 50 x 65. Page 39 Clepsydra, 2010, cm 75 x 100. Page 40 Planetary System, 2010, cm 93 x 128. All images C-print, © the artist, courtesy Zero gallery, Milan 37 It is also true that the air one breathes when immersed in their projections is infused with occult flavors, para-scientific doctrines that bring the artists close to the experiments of Symbolism which, as a consequence of the emphasis placed on stylization and anti-naturalism, led to the development of abstraction. Gusmão and Paiva are therefore hard to catalogue precisely because the very nature of their work is an attempt to escape from the dualism of mimesis and manipulation of the event to be filmed, and an attempt to chase their own shadow, trying to trap something that is constantly shifting, which quintessentially eludes definition. However, their works also tend to render visible that which cannot be named, the very experience of time that, for Barnett Newman, was the essence of ‘the sublime is now.’ Is their work sublime? In order to speak of the sublime we have to return to Nicolas BoileauDespréaux and the 1674 French translation of Peri Hypsous, a Hellenic treaty dating from the first century A.D. and attributed to Pseudo-Longinus on the subject of the Sublime. A treatise dedicated to rhetoric, or the art of speaking (which, for Gusmão and Paiva, becomes the sublime of silence and not speaking, in view of the ‘no sound’ and the absence of plot or narration in the films and photography,) the text is a description of the dualism between wanting to say something and knowing how to put it into words. The link with silence is anyway relevant, as already in the Hellenic age the sublime style was unforgettable, designed to lead to reflection, and could take the form of silence in order to narrate what could not be expressed. One might therefore say that the artists tend towards the inexpressible, to which they give a human and emotional gloss by means of a clever and sophisticated use of the smile. Suddenly falling objects, blurred edges behind shadows or abstract curtains, or actual vanishing acts due to the placing of one thing on top of another, are visual pretexts or tricks that are set up in order to be ironic about the sublime and not miss the chance to create reality through cinema. Gusmão and Paiva are nevertheless interested in creating a new language, a new dictionary of concepts and terms that allude to the invisible, such as DeParamnésia, 2001- 2002, Magnetic Effluvium, 2004 - 2006, and Abissology, 2008. The Sublime is “something which cannot, to put it in plain words, be proven or demonstrated, but a marvel which strikes and arouses sentiments,” wrote Boileau. From this perspective the dichotomy of beauty and the sublime also exists in the work of Gusmão and Paiva, where beauty moves beyond the perceptive and cognitive capacities of the human mind and has no rules. Indeed, in classical literature and philosophy the origin of the world remains an invisible phenomenon. It is, nevertheless, the clinamen that is the origin of freedom: a concept which is rarely visible but which has many consequences. But unless the atoms were accustomed to decline from the right line, they would all fall straight down, through the void profound, like drops of rain through the air; nor would there have been any contact produced, or any collision generated among the primaryelements; and thus nature would never have produced anything [...]. Further if all motion is connected and dependent, and a new movement perpetually arises from a former one in a certain order, and, if the primary elements do not produce any commencement of motion by deviating from the straight line to break the laws of fate, so that cause may not follow cause in infinite succession, whence comes this freedom of will to all animals in the world [...]. By means of which we go wheresoever inclination leads each of us? Lucretius, On the Nature of Things: Book II (translated by John Selby Watson, 1851) 38 GUSMÃO AND PAIVA ESSAY GUSMÃO AND PAIVA ESSAY 41