P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

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2007 Summer

Tunga: Alchemy of Words

Conversation between P.S.1 Director Alanna Heiss and Brazilian artist Tunga

Tunga

À la Lumière des Deux Mondes (At the Light of Both Worlds)

2005

Mixed media

Dimensions variable

Courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Galeria Millan, São Paulo

Tunga

Laminated Souls

2007

Resin, brass, lamps, steel nets, live flies, wood, polished steel

Dimensions variable

Courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Galeria Millan, São Paulo

In an interview with P.S.1 Director Alanna Heiss, Tunga speaks about Brazil­ian influences, magical happenings and art’s ability to transform reality, which can be seen in his installations Laminated Souls and At the Light of Both Worlds this summer.

Alanna Heiss: Tunga, Can you tell me about your background as an artist and what or who was most influential?

Tunga: Two components were certainly present in my background—Constructivism and Surrealism, and my Brazilian cultural background. Art was a way for me to investi­gate and experiment with theories that handle reality with good doses of poetry; this way I combined motivations of both movements.

The strong presence of Construc­tivism in Brazil in the 1950s and early ’60s brought together the discovery of imaginary mechanics, psychoanalytical theories, and early Surrealist ideas. Both practices took local colors or, let’s say, contributions as migratory theories. So the Constructive im­petus, which would become Minimalism in North America, was assumed earlier in Brazil through phenomenology, and explored ques­tions of the body through neo-concrete prac­tices.

AH: Were you and the artists of your generation reacting to Brazilian Constructiv­ists like Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica?

T: No, I really don’t think so. Artists like Lygia and Helio are Constructivists; they ex­panded Constructivism, opening different lan­guages and fields of exploration. My genera­tion was concerned with this, but we were also concerned with structural psychoanaly­sis, the theory of language, and so on.

AH: Laminated Souls is being presented at P.S.1 this summer. The Brazilian tradition I’m most interested in is magic. In what ways are you interested in magic and how does this appear in your work?

T: Laminated Souls is more of a concep­tual and structural work than a magical one. It has all the effects that make a poem or art­work magical, in the sense that it transforms reality or the meaning of reality. I don’t think there is any connection between extraordi­nary things and the idea of magic.

AH: So there’s no intervention of magi­cal creatures?

T: The flies remain flies and the pseudo-scientists remain pseudo-scientists. When scientists study the flies, they inadvertently become flies themselves, but this isn’t a magical process. With language, we have the power to become other things, and this is the strength of poetry. Perhaps this can be considered the magic of language. In the same sense, Rimbaud used to talk about the alchemy of words. Yes it is alchemy, but it’s Rimbaud’s alchemy and not medieval magic.

AH: And the human gaze metamorphoses into a fly’s gaze in your “hyper-symmetric” lab…

T: Expanding the hu­man gaze is a way of ex­panding experience and knowledge. Of course, it’s not a matter of technically or chemically transforming the human eye, but of sug­gesting a metamorphosis by experimenting with the work. It is provoked by a se­ries of effects such as acti­vating the space by moirés, reflections, transparencies, projected shadows and so on, and leading to a reevalu­ation of what is seen.

AH: In a separate gal­lery, you will also be show­ing the large installation At the Light of Both Worlds. This work draws a lot from classical European works. For an artist like you who is a combination of so many geographical associations, what is this particular European connection?

T: The connection is to the European tradition of the museum. The im­agery used in that sculpture isn’t necessarily from Western culture, but is part of the collection of a Western museum. On one side of the installation, the dead skulls are in equilibrium with the beautiful “dead” heads, those cut from antique sculptures, thus creating a balance between European and non-European traditions.