The artist as a frame, Art as subartes
by Sérgio Tavares Filho.
Text written for the project Art Book.

So present in this encyclopedia, the cataloging of artists was to me a subject of study since 2010, when I started a project quite comprehensive documentation of artists in video. My intention was to produce a series of interviews and with the material, raising questions Theoretical to discuss, explore and to question their work. For almost three years, I realized the amount of artists that we currently have in the world: from A to Z, 0 to zillions. The finding of excess scared me. And since then, my main thought about art is closely allied to the creation of subdivisions.

The first of the artists of my project cataloging was Juha Arvid Helminen, who met in a pub in Helsinki next to the train station. With almost two meters tall, it was like a black hole absorbing the light around. It was peculiar to him: the long leather boots, the jodhpurs, Coca-Cola he drank euphorically. We speak of genocide, militia and Black Wedding, his last work. He said that his main theme is not in absolute darkness. I have seen the contrast: Contrast speak in his work, looking for others. The snow and the night of six months, the sun of midnight, Somali refugees, the laurels. And the border situation that would capture on film their work. Costume design, set design, photography, performance? Subdivisions began to appear clearly.

The non-membership in a category, and at the same time, the need for creating uninterrupted niches artistic issues are also raised when thinking about Edmund Harry, Tracey Emin or Marie Thompson. I speak not of technical reproducibility of aura. But the limits of representation, the filter inevitable, internal and external, and the meanings that change with the popularization of the DSLR, with photographic practice, with the expansion of the culture of Instagram. The frame frame frame - all neutral, supposedly neutral as possible, as in the Guggenheim (who arrived in Helsinki, under license of € 23.3 million and the annual cost of € 14.4 million), neutral frames, but proprietary, white walls more white. Phatic function, such as the print in contrast to the spectrum, the book contrasting the feuilleton, the artist counteracting the copy.

If the aura touch empties, fills up the soul of the artist. And, interestingly, is something symbiotic: the writer of the source code, the window of the photographer, the soul of the bike. The geist is the purse. So, being the soul that animates the work geist (and its connection with the soul of the artist), all the more should be frame, including the artist. We pause, however, the slopes easier than it could in person, compose a spirit: detect signs worldly, tangible, universal as far. The school of fine arts X, Y or poor background, New Yorker or the origin of the African country in a civil war. It’s a counterpoint to the frame of the book or the museum, the past, present, but with the intention of absence; artist, absent, with the intention of presence. Fills up, then the space predefined by a vanguard, autocratically, ontologically, is a kind of isotope itself.

Once while attending a seminar in Berlin in Manteuffelstraße, saw some of the street signs signed by Anonymous So and So. Thought, but the works in question could not be also Barbara Kruger? Or even Keith Walker? Were artvertising, that tradition of Americans contractions neologísticas. I soon realized I was wrong.

The signature of So and So was above any other city - which, days later, I found to be an artist from Amsterdam who had written it before going away forever. It seems clear to conclude that, by multiplying dessenfreada niche art, the problem of authorship is partially solved. An artist may be an inside generalizing art history of the past. However, in a subdivision still smelling fresh paint, it can easily pass as a demigod of originality.

* Sergio Tavares Filho a doctorate in contemporary culture. His artwork and theorists have been screened at festivals in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berlin, Sao Paulo and other cities. His research on the text and contemporary image has been published at conferences in Austria, England, Scandinavia and the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), USA. Lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.