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Carlos Bunga is a Portuguese artist whose work was on view at the New Museum’s exhibition Unmonumental in March. Translation by Cláudia Pinto
Carlos Bunga, Installation at Manifesta 5, Spain, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.
All the texts written about my work have been approaches (all worthwhile ones) that have left me feeling unsatisfied. Each text focused on a particular aspect of my work, while other aspects were neglected or were not appreciated in the analysis. The need to bring together all these aspects encouraged me to write this text.
The creative process is a mix of emotions. We don’t always have answers to things. We have more doubts than answers, and those same doubts make us search, question and move forward.
In 1998, I enrolled in a degree in Visual Arts at the Escola Superior de Arte e Design (ESAD). It was a relatively new school in Portugal, located in a small Portuguese municipality called Caldas da Rainha. This town was already associated with some art movements of some importance in Portugal, and also had an artistic culture before the school’s existence. I then enrolled in painting, an area I was deeply interested in. There, I experimented on painting using many different techniques and teachings: oil, acrylic, tempera, serigraphy and etching. This more technical side of my training was always complemented with theoretical courses which were in the first years related to Portuguese art history and later on broadened to embrace information about international artistic influences. All this was intensely felt and lived out by the students and spirit of the emergent school in a small place. Unlike other schools of higher status, located in large cities as Lisbon or Porto, from where all leading Portuguese artists had sprouted, some even becoming internationally acclaimed, this small school was seen and understood as peripheral. Paradoxically, what made this school even more interesting was that absence of the symbolic weight or responsibility of being the leading school of reference for Portuguese artists. All these characteristics were important in the way people in-training saw these spirits and influences.
My interest in painting was deep but I wasn’t pleased with the paintings I had been doing so far. I started out by figurative painting (which I had been doing even before college). All the experiments I was working on (the school is a privileged space for experimenting) but also the information conveyed in class about the many international artistic movements and trends made me question my work process and I would end up with a constant feeling of dissatisfaction. Every time I experimented on something or worked on a painting I would question: Why? What for? What am I looking for here? I had so many doubts… Experimenting became crucial in my ability to question. After many experiments in painting, and largely due to my increasing dissatisfaction, I then decided to make a video piece. I asked a colleague of mine to tape an action I was to perform. I didn’t know beforehand what I would do or how it would turn out but I felt the need to try and to experiment this way! My colleague took the camera and I did one of my first painting performances. Four paintings on a wall: one displayed conventionally, another two placed between the wall and the floor, and yet another one painted on wood. I enter and begin to smash the paintings, ripping the canvas, kicking the frames…Later I would spend hours, back in my studio, watching the footage. I couldn’t quite grasp the need I felt to perform those actions. And I always ask: Why? I ended up not knowing whether it represented an end to painting or the beginning of something else.
At this point, I got interested in urban space, buildings, but especially decaying spaces. What a fascination I felt just by looking at those torn-down houses and empty lots and the marks they had left behind on the adjacent buildings! I still had some paintings in my studio, all of them with (aesthetic) features resembling those spaces. At the time, I was very fond of artists such as Antoni Tàpies or movements as the Arte Povera. But I also questioned the results of placing these works in the spaces they had originated in. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, from 1916-17 had turned the ready-made into a reference and raised many issues and much debate. An object displaced from its original context assumed another dimension. How did the first westerners feel when they reached the first colonies and came face to face with something so strange and new? And those who already lived there, how did they regard them? These questions came up from an Anthropology course I was attending at school…
All these questions made me think and reflect. Buildings, walls and remnants of demolitions I found around town sparked my interest and I then decided to bring context into the paintings I had on my walls. I started looking around for those spaces that resembled my paintings and then I would go there and hang them on the empty remaining walls. I wanted them to become contextualized but also for them to be exposed to weather conditions (rain, wind, sunshine…) so that I could observe them there and see the way they would come to decay with the passing of time. Once again, back in my studio I looked over and over again at the photos I had taken from that intervention and asked: Why? One of my teachers saw the photos and drew my attention to the fact that the paintings and the “performance” of hanging them on those particular buildings was very interesting, but the spaces I had chosen to place them were much more interesting in themselves. I realized then: what I was actually interested in was the concept of space. Even the performance of “destroying” my paintings betrayed the frustration I felt with two-dimensional support and a need for three-dimensionality. The walls where I had placed my paintings interested me as memory, time, history, house or space, but I also looked at them as paintings. The walls held such a strong pictorial side to them that made them interesting as paintings. This realization, however, lead me to another kind of problem: How could I materialize and work on the concepts entailed in those buildings? In my studio, I began building small cardboard “houses”, so that I could work deeper on spatial notions, but the first assemblages I made were very close to images I had in my mind of homeless people, shanty towns and slum houses, and this meant yet another problem! That was not the kind of architecture I was looking for, so I built another sort of “houses”, and later on I painted them, in an attempt to depict a real “house”. But that was not quite what I was aiming at either. Therefore I decided to make some others, a bit more abstract this time. I also began directing short videos in my studio. In these experiments I felt displeased with yet another thing, dimension. I always had the ability to master and control both the videos and the “maquettes”. Architecture maquettes also began to interest me, and I started asking myself what it would be like to experience a maquette, but on a different scale. What would happen if we could walk around inside a maquette?
At the time I found the concepts of Minimalist Art very appealing as they made the spectator conscious of his/her own body. The monumentality of those minimalist sculptures focused on that relationship with one’s body. How could I bring that spatial relation into my work? I decided to build a large-scale “maquette” in one of the corridors at my school. I gathered a bundle of cardboard boxes that I found near a factory and I started building up a cardboard structure in the corridor. It was a hard task. To build, for the first time, a cardboard structure of those dimensions, just using adhesive tape, was to finally put into practice the concepts conveyed by the maquettes, the videos and the demolished buildings across town. What an immense challenge that was, and what a thrill…
After finishing the structure I painted it in the same white colour as the corridor, so that it would be completely included and adapted to the building’s architecture. I wanted the structure to be and to hold an architectural dimension. After painting the exterior, I used other colours, yellow and blue, for the inside walls. These colours would intentionally relate to the pictorial concept of the paintings that fascinated me so much in the demolished buildings. The next stage would be demolition! With an x-acto knife I cut around the structure’s foundations, next to the ground and ceiling. This deliberate, intentional gesture was needed to separate what I wanted to be demolished from what was to stay in place. I placed a rope in several sensitive parts of the building, so that, when I pulled on them, the whole building would crumble. I asked some friends to videotape the action and began to direct the building’s demolition. Off camera, I pulled on the ropes I had strategically placed in the building… but they were too thin and they snapped. It still demolished part of the structure, but not enough to bring it down. I was a bit frustrated by the outcome and wanted to continue with the action, so I decided to enter the structure myself and demolish it with my own body. It was an incredible feeling, coming from underneath the shattered structure and getting to see, now from the outside, all the colors I had used on the inside walls. The markings left by the previous building were not just a simulation of an actual demolition they also had the “appearance” of something new… I cleared the fallen/demolished cardboard debris from the floor, leaving just the markings and the colours of the structure in place. That “simulacrum” had made me think about so many things…
Later in 2003, when I was finishing university, I was invited to participate in a competition for young artists (Prémio EDP) that took place at the Serralves Museum. I ended up winning with a work similar to the one I had carried out in school. Marta Kuzma, one of the curators of the Manifesta 5 Biennial, which was going to be held in San Sebastian, Spain, in 2004, was on the jury of the competition. I was invited to participate, along with another Portuguese artist, Maria Lusitano. The venue I was given at the biennial (The Kubo Kursaal Museum) was so big that my installation had to grow, and so instead of being just a small sculpture in all that space, I designed it to both confront and adapt to the characteristics of the museum architecture.
The snapping of the ropes at the school installation, that had forced me to get inside the structure to complete the action, became part of the performance and I worked for about a month on making a large-scale structure. As I knew that the performance or the demolition of the structure was a powerful action, I had decided to do it at the opening. Many people didn’t understand why, having worked for so long on a structure of those dimensions, I had to demolish it or bring it down on the day of the opening. But I was convinced about doing it because I needed to experiment and see what would happen. On the day of the performance there were many people at the museum… When I went inside the structure and started to cut the foundations of the building with an x-acto knife, I could still hear them talking, but as the building started to be demolished, a great silence overtook the museum. Raising the structure was such a hard work that demolishing it evoked a very strong feeling in me. Yet still I asked myself: Why? But I was determined to carry out that action. When I finished the demolition, I was exhausted…
Executing installations without previous planning forces me to have a great ability to adapt myself to the space where I am going to build it. The pre-existing characteristics of the space influence the structure which is born within that space. Depleted, I emerged from the rubble… When I appeared outside the structure, the public looked at me in silence without really understanding what had happened. At this point someone starts to clap and all others follow. There was so much emotion in the museum as a result of that action, and everyone was applauding euphorically! Yet, in me, there was only silence! I sat down in front of the structure and I could see that transforming moment. If before there was a formalist building (almost minimalist, although made of cardboard,) the revelation of all those colours, which were originally on the inside, moved me deeply and I left the museum without speaking to anyone. I needed to be alone…
After this “performance” I had yet another problem. In all the invitations I got afterwards, people wanted me to repeat the performance. I began to be seen and understood as a performance artist and this brought me some issues because I didn’t feel that my work was only demolition or performance. In my work process I also questioned the existence of other aspects such as space, painting and appropriation. Was this senseless? Was it just a performance? It was a very delicate matter to me. And another thing was the euphoric clapping, meaning a major success. That “big show” was hard to handle because I had thought that my work obeyed a more introspective and inquisitive process. That moment became the work and nothing else… I needed time to reflect and find answers for that problem.
After the biennial I started working with the gallery Elba Benítez, located in Madrid. I did an installation at the gallery, but I decided to have the performance a day before the opening, just for the people of the gallery. At the opening day some people didn’t understand why I hadn’t performed the demolition at the opening, because they wanted to witness the event. In the exhibition at the gallery they could see, in a light box, photos of the installation building process, but not of the demolition. At the gallery, only the marks of a structure that had existed in that space were visible. It was interesting, the fact of not having any videos or images of the structure demolition, but just the constructive memory (photography) and the physical and deconstructive memory in the space (installation), where one could walk through the ruins and experience the painting expanded in space! Between one and the other there was enough room for questioning: Why? Is it the same thing? What happened? Even so, there were still some features in my work that weren’t fully understandable.
I did another installation in a collective exhibition in New York, at the Artists Space, called Things Fall Apart All Over Again, curated by Cecília Alemani and Simone Subal, in which two other artists, Heather Rowe and Michael Sailstorfer, also participated. Yet I was not happy…I thought the work had some features that were not being acknowledged and all the references understood, classifying the work (Gordon Matta Clark) was important, but something was missing.In 2005 I did another installation at the San Diego Museum of Art (Insite 05) with Adriano Pedrosa as curator and I decided not to demolish the structure. It remained intact until the end of the exhibition. When I finished building and painting the structure, some people asked me how I had managed to raise such a large structure just using cardboard and duct tape. I answered: I don’t know! Without any previous planning the shape the structure will bear later is always a mystery to me. I surprise myself every time. I managed to have two people helping me build this installation.
In late 2005 I had another installation in Porto, Portugal, at Culturgest, with Miguel Wandscheneider as curator. Culturgest is a very complicated venue: the gallery was not designed to have exhibitions. It is an open cross-shaped space, with a central nucleus and four rooms, many columns, a dome of coloured stained-glass windows, and profusely ornamented with Art Deco revival themes. When I first visited the space I was a bit worried for it meant a challenge. I was astounded by the history of the place and its architectural features, but I also felt that this place would force me to deal with new problems and I was thrilled just to think about the decisions I would have to make and the emotions I would experience! Intense and contradictory emotions always emerge throughout the work process. Everything happens while the structure is being built. It becomes my studio and I make all the decisions. It is a mix of improvisation and rationality working together at a same time and place! Of course, at the end of each installation I am exhausted, physically, mentally, sad, thrilled… I didn’t demolish this installation either.
The idea of spectators to be able to walk inside the sculpture pleased me. I searched for a dialogue between the original architecture and the one I was working on. There were some elements of the original space that became part of this new space and elements of this space that became part of the existing building. While the spectator wandered around the different spaces, mutations took place. Elements like windows and bas-reliefs were not covered but could not be seen, depending of the spectators standing point, parts of columns were covered, but with pre-existent elements left showing, and one column was even totally visible. A game of hiding and showing. The installation was highly complex in detail, but not immediately apprehensible. These large installations are a kind of scale-models, giving the spectator new possibilities of understanding space. These installations weren’t demolished, but the way they were built and the characteristics of the material themselves (cardboard) explored the notion of fragility!
These architectures in already-built spaces made me more aware of a concept of “appropriation”, and in this sense I started intervening in objects such as tables. The three sculptures I now have in the exhibition Unmonumental, at the New Museum refer to that concept. A table is a functional object that possesses a fairly common and universal meaning. However, by intervening artistically on a table one effectuates an appropriation of the structure and therefore its identity and function becomes questioned! This new white structure takes us to a more sculptural or architectural meaning and the non-painted cardboard to a deeper feeling of inner space. These features are also present in my larger installations. Together, the table and this new structure, they create a new “dimension”. How can it be defined? How does it relate? How do we deal with this new identity?
My interest in architecture and spatial issues is becoming more noticeable in each new work, as is my interest in painting, for this is a process work, and we could approach it as a painting process. I am fond of artists such as Kurt Schwitters and his Merzbau project, which deals with the ephemeral. Hannover (destroyed in 1937), Oslo (destroyed in 1951) and Elterwater, England, 1947-48, the latter never finished due to his death. Even if we doubt the fact of it being a finished piece, what is interesting about it is the constant mutation of the project. It is also interesting to think that Schwitters started by painting; I remember his collages back with the Dada movement and feel that his work process comes clearly from painting in the way he understands space and deals with the Merzbau concept.
In New York, I felt the city could work as a fabulous laboratory for my research! This city changed my perception of what I knew about architecture, in ways of understanding space and physical relationships with the urban universe. In these latest works, the city of New York was a central influence of crucial importance. I started buying architecture books and magazines. I walk around the city a lot and take the subway everyday. I have been living in Brooklyn. Museums and galleries are very important but so are the city and people – they come together in a microcosm of influences and stimuli…
I always had a strange reaction to what was written about my installations, to what people thought and said about the work I was doing. Cardboard held a strange “fascination” in the whole discourse. I would say that what I was doing was seen and understood somewhat “superficially”. However, by continuous experimenting and questioning I reached a deeper level of understanding things. It is not just a question of cardboard! Cardboard is just a way of questioning things! I use cardboard but I don’t talk about cardboard! This awareness and way of seeing things made me feel the need, again, to materialize the concepts I was discussing in my installations. You have to read beyond the surface to get to the bottom of these issues. My interest and awareness in architecture is increasing and I am not just interested in thinking about architecture, but in living it intensely… Inside this huge urban laboratory, I experience and feel… I began ripping pages out of architecture magazines and intervening on top of them with acrylic paint.
The title of these works, More Space for Another Construction shows my conscious intent to appropriate myself of architecture (its photos in magazines) and by intervening on them with acrylic paint, I’m thus creating a strong relationship with painting. In my installations, structures are abstract and allow new spatial possibilities, with the monochromatic planes, which are the walls, painted inside and out, always related with both the architecture/sculpture and painting universes. Performance is a sort of mutation ending at its most intense identity: painting! When I don’t demolish we can perceive painting and architecture in the same space and the installations allow us to reflect and argue on the many different issues… We can even find references to Gordon Matta Clark, Fred Sandback, Lucio Fontana, Robert Smithson, Donald Judd… all this is meaningful and can be important to situate in time and history. However, I feel that, as important as those references may be, we cannot let ourselves be comfortably accommodated in these justifications, for “impermanence” is always present. Performances where I make things “transform” into something else is but the speeding up of their temporality.
I was deeply moved by images of 1945 Hiroshima, after the atom bomb! I was shocked by the Chernobyl accident in 1986! I was astonished by images of Berlin after World War II. It was a marvellous city in the centre of the world, which in a short time was reduced to ashes! Natural phenomena as tsunamis, hurricanes, Katrina, earthquakes, or terrible occurrences such as 9/11…those are events that make us aware of our mortal condition once again! Landmarks in our memory! The temporality of architectures, or “lives”, is speeded up by this kind of phenomena, which I relate to Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History: "violence of the storm is what we call progress." As this kind of events have the power to fasten temporality in things, so do my performances act as a metaphor, when I speed up the temporality of architectures with my own body. I don’t think of that as an end, but as the possibility of a new beginning.
My performances were also influenced by the avant-garde Group Gutai, created in 1954, when Japan, having lost the war, was plunged into a deep crisis at many levels. The Gutai artists managed to express in their performances and actions all that collective frustration. Murakami Saburo’s performance, in the series At the One Moment Opening Six Holes (1955), where he runs through six paper canvases creating six holes with his own body, made a huge impression on me. Lucio Fontana’s own work along similar lines is subsequent to this performance. It is more formalist, aesthetical and abiding to what is considered, or not, art. In painting, his spatial intention is formal. Murakami’s performance, predating Fontana’s pieces, takes the spatial gesture of painting farther. We are not dealing here with “formalisms” or the typical posture of a painter in his studio and accepted or referenced as the “father” of space in painting. Many artists considered pioneers in some movements could in fact be questioned as such – Jackson Pollock, for instance – especially after I got acquainted with the Gutai and many of their performances. I think they took things to the “limit”, transgressing boundaries, and taking a leap in a country reduced to a Ground Zero.I then began intervening on top of the ripped out pages of architecture magazines I had bought. This is my way of attempting to question the permanence of architecture at the same time as showing new spatial possibilities, both mental and physical. It is also interesting to have both painting and architecture combined in a single media (architecture magazine): Is architecture becoming increasingly questionable and “impermanent” or is it the wish to challenge the “architecture of power”? A new work entitled More Space for Other Constructions explores this scope. It is made of several drawings of architectural structures and there is also a video where my hand appears successively erasing the drawings. I wanted a diversified choice of buildings, structures and designs in both the video and the drawings. Is this action an erasing or a “destruction” of architecture? Or a desire to reveal its impermanence and the possibility of a new beginning? A friend of mine sent me a small quote by Duchamp that I am very fond of: "In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle towards realization is a series of efforts, pain, satisfactions, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the aesthetic plane. The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of." (Duchamp, The Creative Act.)
The creative process is a mix of emotions. We don’t always have answers to things. We have more doubts than answers, and those same doubts make us search, question and move forward. Impermanence is always active and allows that inquest on things. In an evermore complex world, a variety of things allowing the existence of “universes” –(inter)disciplinary, (multi)culturalism, (inter)net or multi(nationals)– to reach our ever-changing mutant world. In an effort to catalogue the work I have been doing, the many definitions used are almost always questionable. Abstract is regarded with suspicion and we may need standards to base things on and to be rationally accepted. Maybe the parentheses above are a possible definition, and “between” is also a strong candidate. Or just be what I am!
