NEOCONCRETISM AND MINIMALISM 170 171

nails, etc. These elements are indicative of the presence of two opposing forces:
THEORY OF THE NON-OBJECT 1 one which attempts relentlessly to rid itself of all and any contamination with the
FERREIRA GULLAR object; the other is characteristic of the return of the object as sign, for which it is
necessary to maintain the space, the pictorial environment born out of the
representation of the object. The latter could be associated with the so-called
The expression ‘non-object’ does not intend to describe a negative object nor abstract painting, of sign and matter, which persists today in tachisme.
any other thing that may be opposite to material objects. The non-object is not Mondrian belongs to the most revolutionary aspect of cubism, giving it
an anti-object but a special object through which a synthesis of sensorial and continuity. He understood that the new painting, proposed in those pure planes,
mental experiences is intended to take place. It is a transparent body in terms of requires a radical attitude, a restart. Mondrian wipes clean the canvas, eliminates
phenomenological knowledge: while being entirely perceptible it leaves no trace. all vestiges of the object, not only the figure but also the colour, the matter and
It is a pure appearance.2 All true works of art are in fact non-objects, if this the space which constituted the representational universe: what is left is the white
denomination is now adopted it is to enable an emphasis on the problems of canvas. On it he will no longer represent the object: it is the space in which the
current art from a new angle.3 world reaches harmony according to the basic movements of the horizontal and
the vertical. With the elimination of the represented object, the canvas – as
material presence – becomes the new object of painting. The painter is required
The Death of Painting to organise the canvas in addition to giving it a transcendence that will distance it
This issue requires retrospection. When the impressionist painters, leaving the from the obscurity of the material object. The fight against the object continues.
studio for the outdoors, attempted to apprehend the object immersed in natural The problem Mondrian set himself could not be solved by theory. He attempted
luminosity, figurative painting began to die. In Monet’s paintings the objects to destroy the plane with the use of great black lines which cut the canvas from
dissolve themselves in colour and the usual appearance of things is pulverised one edge to the other – indicating that it relates to the external space – yet these
amongst luminous reflections. The fidelity towards the natural world transferred lines still oppose themselves to a background and the contradiction between
itself from objectivity to impression. With the rupture of the outlines which space and object reappears. Thus, the destruction of these lines begins, leading
maintained objects isolated in space, all possibility of controlling the pictorial to his last two paintings: Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie.
expression was limited to the internal coherence of the picture. But the contradiction in fact was not resolved, and if Mondrian had lived a few
Later, Maurice Denis would say, ‘a picture – before being a battle horse, a female more years, perhaps he would have returned once more to the white canvas from
nude or an anecdote – is essentially a flat surface covered by colours arranged in a which he began. Or, he would have left it favouring construction into space, as did
certain order’. Abstraction was not yet born but figurative painters, such as Denis, Malevich at the end of his parallel development.
already announced it. As far as they 4 were concerned, increasingly the represented
object lost its significance and consequently the picture, and similarly the object,
gained importance. With cubism the object is brutally removed from its natural The Work of Art and the Object
condition, it is transformed into cubes, virtually imposing upon it an idealised For the traditional painter, the white canvas was merely the material support
nature; it was emptied of its essential obscurity, that invincible opaqueness on to which he would sketch the suggestion of natural space. Subsequently, this
characteristic of the thing. However, the cube being three-dimensional still suggested space, this metaphor of the world, would be surrounded by a frame that
possesses a nucleus: an inside which was necessary to consume – and this was had as a fundamental function the positioning of the painting into the world. This
done by the so-called synthetic phase of the movement. Already, not much is frame was the mediator between fiction and reality, a bridge and barrier, protecting
left of the object. It was Mondrian and Malevich who would continue the the picture, the fictitious space, while also facilitating its communication with the
elimination of the object. external, real, space. Thus when painting radically abandons representation – as in
The object that is pulverised in the cubist picture is the painted object, the the case of Mondrian, Malevich and his followers – the frame loses its meaning.
represented object. In short, it is painting that lies dying there, dislocated in search The erection of a metaphorical space within a well-protected corner of the world
of a new structure, a new form of being, a new significance. Yet in these pictures no longer being necessary, it is now the case of establishing the work of art within
(synthetic phase, hermetic phase) there are not only dislocated cubes, abstract the space of reality, lending to this space, through the apparition of the work – this
planes: there are also signs, arabesques, collage, numbers, letters, sand, textiles, special object – significance and transcendence.
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It is a fact that things occurred with a certain level of sluggishness, painting, freed from its representational intentions, tends to abandon the surface
equivocations and deviations. These were undoubtedly inevitable and necessary. to take place in space, thus approaching sculpture, the latter liberates itself from
The use of collage, sand and other elements taken from the real, already signal the figure, the base and of its mass, therefore maintaining very little affinity with
the necessity to substitute fiction by reality. When the dadaist Kurt Schwitters later what traditionally has been denominated as sculpture. In fact, there is more affinity
builds the Merzbau – made from objects and fragments he found in the streets – between a counter-relief by Tatlin and a sculpture by Pevsner than between a
it is once again the same intention which has further developed, now freed from Maillol and a Rodin or Fidias. The same could be said of a painting by Lygia Clark
the frame, and in real space. At this point it becomes difficult to distinguish the and a sculpture by Amílcar de Castro. From which we can conclude that current
work of art from the real objects. Indicative of this mutual overflow between the painting and sculpture are converging towards a common point, distancing
work of art and the object is Marcel Duchamp’s notorious blague, submitted to themselves from their origins. They become special objects – non-objects – for
the Independents’ Exhibition in New York in 1917, a fountain-urinal which the denominations painting and sculpture perhaps no longer apply.
of the kind used in bar toilets. The ready-made technique was adopted by the
surrealists. It consists of revealing the object, dislocated from its usual function,
thus establishing new relationships between it and the other objects. This process Primary Formulation
of transfiguration of the object is limited by the fact that it is grounded not so The problem of the frame and base, in painting and sculpture respectively, has
much in the formal qualities of the object but in its connection with the object’s never been examined by critics in terms of its significant implications as static.
quotidian use. Soon that obscurity that is characteristic of the thing returns to The phenomenon is registered but simply as a curious detail that escapes the
envelop the work, bringing it back to the common level. On this front, the artists problematics raised by the work of art. What had not been realised was that
were defeated by the object. the actual work of art posited new problems and that it attempted to escape
From this point of view some of today’s extravagant paintings pursued by the (to assure its own survival) the closed circuit of traditional aesthetics. To rupture
avant-garde appear in all their clarity or even naïveté. What are the cut canvases the frame and to eliminate the base are not in fact merely questions of a technical
of Fontana, exhibited in the V Biennial,5 if not a retarded attempt to destroy the or physical nature: they pertain to an effort by the artist to liberate himself from
fictitious pictorial space by means of introducing within it a real cut? What are the the conventional cultural frame, to retrieve that desert, mentioned by Malevich, in
pictures by Burri with kapok, wood or iron, if not a return – without the previous which the work of art appears for the first time freed from any signification outside
violence but transforming them into fine art – to the processes used by the the event of its own apparition. It could be said that all works of art tend towards
dadaists? The problem lies in the fact that these works only achieve the effect of the non-object and that this name is only precisely applicable to those that
a first contact, failing to achieve the permanent transcendent condition of a non- establish themselves outside the conventional limits of art: works that possess this
object. They are curious, bizarre and extravagant objects – but they are objects. necessary limitlessness as the fundamental intention behind their appearance.
The path followed by the Russian avant-garde has proved to be more profound. Putting the question in these terms demonstrates how the tachiste and
Tatlin’s and Rodchenko’s counter-reliefs, together with Malevich’s suprematist l’informel experiments in painting and sculpture are conservative and reactionary
architecture, are indicative of a coherent revolution from the represented space in nature. The artists of these tendencies continue – although in desperation –
towards real space, from represented forms towards created forms. to make use of those conventional supports. With them the process is contrary:
The same fight against the object can be seen in modern sculpture from rather than rupturing the frame so that the work can pour out into the world, they
cubism onwards. With Vantongerloo (De Stijl) the figure disappears completely; keep the frame, the picture, the conventional space, and put the world (its raw
with the Russian constructivists (Tatlin, Pevsner, Gabo), mass is eliminated and material) within it. They part from the supposition that what is within the frame is
the sculpture is divested of its condition of thing. Similarly, if non-representational the picture, the work of art. It is obvious that with this they also reveal the end of
painting is attracted towards the orbit of objects, this force is exerted with far such a convention, but without announcing a future path.
greater intensity amongst non-figurative sculpture. Transformed into object, This path could be in the creation of these special objects (non-objects) that
sculpture rids itself of its most common characteristic: mass. But this is not all. The are accomplished outside of all artistic conventions and reaffirm art as a primary
base – sculpture’s equivalent to the painting’s frame – is eliminated. Vantongerloo formulation of the world.
and Moholy-Nagy attempted to create sculptures that would inhabit space
without a support. They intended to eliminate weight from sculpture, another
fundamental characteristic of the object. What can be thus verified is that while