THE BRONX MUSEUM OF THE ARTS
Corporeal Intelligence
January 27 to April 17, 2005
Corporeal Intelligence is a concise exhibition of seminal works of geometric abstraction and related contemporary art.
Joseph Albers, Lygia Clark, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Piet Mondrian, Helio Oiticica, and Joaquin Torres Garda were artist-thinkers who presented phenomenological, ludic, and ethical impulses (which are often scoffed at) through rationalist forms that imply discipline and command respect. The implicit corporeality of geometric abstraction is made explicit through their work as it is through the related arts of architecture, music, and dance, whose shared mathematical substructure tends to make spectator-participants take their content seriously. The works in this exhibition embody and influence theoretical discourse, giving way to the concept of "corporeal intelligence."
Architects are recognized for their intelligence, but they are not just brainy. Architectural know-how is rooted in sophisticated and thoughtful physicality. They come to understand the built environment first through physical experience before being able to translate that physical experience into numbers and words. According to Barbara Browning, NYU Professor of Performance Studies: "there are things I learned in Brazil with my body, and some of these things it has taken me years to learn to articulate in writing. But that is not to say that they were without meaning when I could only speak them through dance." As dancers embody complex geopolitical dynamics and math equations in the form of rhythmic compositions, some viewers think about geometric abstraction through a memory of dancing or architecture, of a physically embodied intelligence.
In dance, "happiness and seriousness are one," as Mondrian wrote in an essay and suggested by painting Broadway Boogie Woogie, Victory Boogie Woogie, Fox Trot A, and Fox Trot B. Oiticica often wrote about Mondrian's work, clearly as an admirer, but also as a critic, explaining his and especially Clark's practices as strong misreadings of De Stijl. (Have Clark and Mondrian works been exhibited together before in New York?) With Parangoles, Oiticica made the implicit inclusion of the body in the rational framework of geometric abstraction explicit. In accompanying texts, Oiticica unfolded the ethical repercussions of artwork whose rigor was in equally analytical and physical: "The participator is shifted off his habitual field to a strange one that wakes up his internal fields of feeling and gives him conscience of some area of his Ego, where true values affirm themselves. If this does not happen, then participation has not taken place."
This selection of works addresses many overlapping discourses, concepts, and philosophical problems, including phenomenology, participation, the "universal," the cool, and the transnational politics of self-determination (beyond postcolonialism), among others. Naturally, the artists' sophisticated theoretical writings are as important as their objects. But the significance of the artworks' physicality as a visceral means to those concepts is often underestimated and is the crux of this project. Part of this curatorial proposal is to reconsider the possibility, in our post-Greenbergian context, that form can be content.
To counter geometric abstraction's reputation for being boring, cold, hyperrationalist, or even inhumane, Corporeal Intelligence will draw attention to the playful and ethicist elements of the monochrome tradition. Visitors to this exhibition will be able to touch Clark's Bicho and Gonzalez Torres' bead curtain. Oiticica will come alive not only through the artworks on view, but also via photographic and/or video documentation of people experiencing his Parangoles and Nests. Books will illustrate how kindergarten lessons with blocks and comparable Bauhaus exercises are both intellectual and essentially tied to the body. Visitors may see Mondrian's right angles in a new light, after reading his text about how dancing to Boogie Woogie was his favorite pastime. De Stijl can only maintain its Pythagorean purity if interpreters continue to erase the body that shaped it and the viewers' bodies it shapes.
The revisionist, transhistorical juxtapositions in this exhibition will reflect the artists' own historicizing impulses; they are also intended to lend historical weight to the more contemporary works while emphasizing the perennially renewed relevance of the earlier works. Gonzalez Torres' bead curtain is an outstanding representative of a large body of international contemporary art that cross-contaminates phenomenology and politics. Art historically speaking, he stood on the shoulders of the Argentinean avant-garde of the 1940s and the subsequent Brazilian Neo-concrete movement of the 1960s, whose members articulated radical philosophy and politics through their spin on the monochrome tradition. Or in United States terms, Gonzalez Torres sipped from both minimalism (associated principally with form and the body) and conceptualism (associated with content and the mind), collapsing these two legacies of the 1960s. Thus his work and this exhibition defy hegemonic art history, which insists on the irreconcilability of the two movements, and reunite body and mind.
Even though perception involves both the senses and the brain, the common assumption is that the mind is superior to and leads the body. But a growing number of scholars of neuroscience, as well as of art and theory, are questioning that idea and developing a less hierarchical concept that can be called "corporeal intelligence." This emerging body of theory-including Alain Berthoz's The Brain's Sense of Movement (Harvard University Press, 2002), Peter Sloterdijk's Sphere ("Spharen") trilogy (Suhrkamp, 1998), and Essays on Nonconceptual Content (York H. Gunther, ed., MIT Press, 2003)-builds on critical literature by thinkers like Oswald de Andrade, Edmund Husserl, Vicente Huidobro, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The macro-political problem of the mind-body hierarchy is that it has been projected onto a North-South geopolitical hierarchy. In the spirit of Torres Garda's Inverted Map, this project presents a conceptual strategy to upend the tired, old top-down paradigm.