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Carnival of Perception: Selected Writings on Art by Guy Brett

by Guy Brett
Institute of International Visual Arts, London, U.K., 2004
264 pp., illus. 120 b/w. Paper, £ 14.99
ISBN: 1-899846-34-4.

Reviewed by Katia Maciel
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro


kmaciel@acd.ufrj.br

Carnival of Perception is collection of essays about art——or rather yours, and my, "carnival" of sensations experienced only through art.

Rose Finn-Kelcey’s work Openings ,illustrated in the book, is a single room with many doors. This image captures what Brett suggests——that is, many virtual paths. What is meant by this statement is that his writing is like an invitation that you can either take up or not: He never imposes his point of view. On the contrary, he leaves you free to find your own way of experiencing the works he writes about. And many are, indeed, included in the book. Works by Helio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, David Medalla, Cornelia Parker, Gabriel Orozco, Susan Hiller, Juan Davila, Joao Penalva, Derek Boshier, Takis, Eugenio Dittborn, Carlyle Reedy, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Tina Keane, Hanna O Shea, Mona Hatoum, John Dugger, and Rasheed Araeen are all present in this volume. Artists were not selected by chance; rather, they are all dissenters from the institutional context of art, all concerned about the relationship between art and life.

Brett was a close friend of many of these artists and shared their preoccupations. He shows a kind of complicity with them when he says, "I would like to be seen as one of the interpreters of these non-verbal discourses in words". And the artists have repaid him reciprocally with a homage. For example, Oiticica dedicates his Program in Progress CC7 to Brett. Like many other experiments by Oiticica, these experiences were a kind of path to paradise, to happiness, to joy. Brett is constantly enchanted by such feelings, by the freedom that inspires such propositions. At the same time he has taken into his fold artists that turn this relationship the other way round, putting us in the cage as with Hatoum’s work; activating our senses as in Dugger’s banners, being in between the material and spiritual as in Takis’s pieces; being captured by narratives such as with Penalva; sleeping as a monument as with Parker; seriously being not serious as in Medalla’s work, and perpetually reversing inside and outside as in Clark.

In the way Brett matches the processes of art with the words used to describe them——which go beyond the limits of description, demonstrates a sensitivity to problems of experimentation, and leaves them wide-open for interpretation——Brett conducts a unique dialogue with contemporaneity
.

Just as Medalla’s Bubble Machines are simultaneously energy and event, so are these texts because Guy Brett extends the poetic sense of each work with a light touch that forms and evaporates the space between the work, the artist, and life.

 

 




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