Certain things burn people from the inside out. The eruption begins without an external source of ignition, appearing throughout a volatile mix of organic compounds. In the popular forensic mystery of spontaneous human combustion persons are reportedly annihilated by explosive flames that emerge inside the body, often while they do unspontaneous things like the dishes. What unstable combination of ingested substances is capable of such violent mutiny, inverting the consumer/consumed relation?

In this finite space for life that is Earth, ripened fruit and recently deceased layer continually onto each other. Inevitably the material pressurizes, coagulates into unexpected relations. From it we distill a slippery symbolic syntax through which material processes are categorized in increasingly complex systems of exchange: art, science, manufacturing. Perhaps this high culture complexity is only temporarily viable in a world with limited resources. It seems that repeatedly we cycle back to collapse as the pressure limit of the compressed base is reached and manifests, reducing language to onomatopoeic words: BOOOM, CRASSH, KRRACK.

The emergent re-organization that rebounds from collapse manifests new structure out of pelagic ooze, exposing a tether between thought and matter that does not distinguish between the two. It ruptures the possibility of the allegorical, metonymical, the metaphorical and symbolic as separate from the real.

Today we make art in a culture that is also one of hoarding, of the disposable and of dirty combustion. Means are separated from ends by a hierarchy that privileges the cheapness of a t-shirt (the ends) over the brutality of sweat-shop labor (the means). Our imminent potential annihilation by a radical, spontaneous re-organization of Nature is a consequence of this cultural hierarchy.

So then, I want to explore the slippery trail of a form of artwork that attempts to think through materials instead of about them. I do this as a means of questioning the structures that produce a self-destructive culture, and of considering attempts to shift this mode of thinking. I am an artist and I propose a very tactile exploration of three situations in which other artists have made works that challenged their control. These artworks either technically failed, disobeyed the intention of the artist, spontaneously re-organized their supposedly ‘finished’ form, or re-organized the artist themselves.

***

In the 1970’s the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark characterized the privileging of form – defined as formalism by Western art history – as “mortuistic”. He wrote: “Things die as they become formal…when a thing does not have any life at all, it seems to have a lot of manipulation for manipulation’s sake.”[1] Art that is driven formally often suffers from a high minded but uncritical dissociation from its non-formal environment, its relationships and economic context. In formalism, as in some other American cultural products, a hierarchy is established where the ends justify and overshadow the means.

Between 1969 and 1970 Matta-Clark produced the body of work called Agar, culminating in the exhibition Museum at Bykert Gallery in New York in 1970, on which I’d like to focus. These works were intended to literally insert life into artworks, letting them decay and lose form while on display.

Matta-Clark produced these works by brewing a blasphemous assortment of edible and inedible materials including yeast and milk into rectangular trays of agar. Agar is a gelatin derived from the red seaweed Rhodophyta, and used in microbiology as the ‘culture media’ in Petrie dishes. These materials fermented and interacted in trays about a meter long until they reached some sort of temporary stasis as smelly shriveled membranes, which were hung in lines that stretched across Bykert Gallery like clothes left to dry.

According to Matta-Clark they were: “skinlike fabrics of dormant life” [3]. The exhibition’s name, Museum, suggests the display of artifacts that are professionally preserved, helped to retain their form and protected from mold and bacteria. The Agar pieces worked against this imperative of art conservation, decaying in plain sight.

As Pamela M Lee describes: “On January 1, 1971, one of the ‘skins’ actually exploded for reasons not fully explained. This event forced the artist to ignite the remaining objects outside [the gallery] as a protective measure against any other accidents of this nature.”[4]

The hilarity of the artwork’s reawakening was probably not lost on Matta-Clark who intended the Agar pieces to question the domestication of matter, challenging the expectation of its subordination to ‘mortuistic’ form. The artwork’s explosion was insubordinate not only to its given form, but also to the artist and gallery’s expectation that it at least behave like art. These works did not slowly lose form and decaying as intended. They overenthusiastically asserted their otherness, self-organized and produced their own creation – some sort of explosive and flammable thing – expressing, if you like, their own ‘culture’.  Their instability was dangerous to their context but perhaps only because it was unexpected.

Matter has creative qualities indifferent to its given form. The programmed obsolescence cycle of manufactured goods and its accompanying trash pile makes clear that we are transitioning from a culture that values the durable, formally stable object, to a culture of liquid desire and the disposable, while still stuck on the idea of permanent solutions. Perhaps the tendency to not want fixed form is a cultural evolution (or return) that shouldn’t be resisted; the problem being the lingering culture of durability and with it the very concept of trash. Why not accelerate the development of a culture that values material by its innate unfaithfulness to form? A paste or clay that can be easily reconstituted, a biodegradable thread, an organic excretion like a wasp’s chewed up wood pulp or the spit of a mutating worm?

***

In 1986 the British artist Helen Chadwick’s solo exhibition, Of Mutability, opened in London’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA). By this point in her life Chadwick had become known for her photographs and sculptures investigating the relationship between the human body and form. For the ICA’s largest space she produced a massive, blue, horizontal photo-collage of her body among the bodies of geese, lambs, fish, crustaceans and all forms of vegetable and organic matter – a Dionysian cornucopia of body-plans.

The piece that I’d like us to focus on though, is the companion piece to this extravaganza of life. In the room next door stood a 229cm tall, rectangular glass column, a piece titled “Carcass”. Here Chadwick dealt more directly with the reality that is disguised in the beautiful photographic collage, where all bodies except hers are dead.

In order to produce Carcass Chadwick spent 9 months collecting household organic waste from her neighbors. She then poured this decaying matter inside the half meter wide glass tower, producing a gigantic Winogradsky Column that within days had farted and bubbled its scent across the entire ICA. The organic material liquefied and compressed into a black pelagic goo, and the artist had to visit the ICA daily to tend to this living mass.

“I had to top it off every day. I hadn’t actually bargained for that but the weight of it, all the kind of layers, seems to just keep sinking.” Chadwick says in a video interview at the time. “…ironically it became more of a metaphor for life.”[5]

The new kitchen waste was fed into Carcass by the artist but its subsequent layered rot and liquefaction was co-authored by furious microbial activity. The excretion of methane and carbon dioxide tunneled upwards through the heavy organic mass leaving ant-hill architectures against the glass, emergent arteries and veins of gas. The pressure of this breathing rot eventually sprung a leak in one of the artwork’s seams.

In an attempt to keep the work from bursting during open hours the ICA staff decided to lay the column on its side. The glass structure to burst open, releasing a Cthulu of steaming organic material, a microbiologist’s dream of bacteria and fungus that splashed against the gallery walls and, according to one of Chadwick’s co-workers, had to be “scrubbed off the ceiling”.

This sudden unexpected rupture transformed the artwork from quasi-minimalist Vanitas into something beyond the theme that Chadwick had originally hoped to broach. She aimed for an icon of life’s descent into death, and ended up instead with a self-organizing alterity, a hungry emergent life system, powerful enough to break its frame.

Chadwick appears to have had a relatively conventional semiological relationship to materials up to that point. Carcass was heavily influenced by the Vanitas genre with its protestant allegories of wilting nature and the frivolity of earthly pleasure. What strikes me as most relevant is the misbehavior of the piece. Both Agar and Carcass, by manipulating material un-scientifically, opened the ground for accident and growth. Like early alchemists who accidentally poisoned, burned and occasionally blinded themselves, these artists perhaps saw materials as somehow more predictable and intimately connected with their cultural representations than they truly are.

As waste is hurried out of sight in the urban environment and buried in landfill it remains thought of as something finished. This physical removal hides the crossfade of deformation, making the relation of the new to the old a rough cut. In real life, the microbes that perform formal deconstructions are not foreign invaders taking over the unwanted. They are essential for life and always already present. Carcasses for example begin decomposition from the inside out as life supporting bacteria turn on the malfunctioning mothership. In the long scheme of things there is perhaps no such thing as being put to rest.

***

The final artwork I’d like to bring into this investigation was produced by the late Brazilian artist Celeida Tostes. Tostes used ceramics non-formally as a means to approach and experiment with memory, feminism, community, ritual, transformation and decay. She often produced collaborative works from her position as an educator in Rio de Janeiro’s EAV Parque Lage school where she taught from 1975 until her death in 1995. Tostes ran a highly oversubscribed course called ‘Workshop for the Arts of Fire and the Transformation of Materials’. In this class she developed “highly sensorial, experimental research projects, and meticulous investigation and manipulation of the materials of ceramics, pigments, and also materials that today would be classified as recycled….”[6]

Painter and EAV professor Luiz Áquila sent uptight students to Celeida’s class: “There they would get their hands dirty with clay, produce these absurd clay bodies that Celeida would make, taking waste from the trash cans and letting this ferment, and from this fermented trash making a plastic clay…(…) Or urinating over a certain thing to bring about its oxidation. I mean, no juice, no liquid, no material had a hierarchy as far as Celeida was concerned. She had no hierarchy. Everything had a quality.” [7]

In 1979 Celeida inverted her relationship with clay in a non-public but documented performance. She produced a round clay pot large enough to hold a human body, like an Amerindian ceramic funerary urn. With the help of two female assistants Celeida covered her body in clay slip – a muddy mix of clay and water used in ceramics to fuse two pieces of clay together.

The two assistants in white outfits, the reed mat, and white curtained enclosure in which the performance took place, the absence of an audience, gave Passagem (Passage) an intentional aura of mystical ceremony, a home brewed ritual. As Celeida describes: “I disrobed and covered my body in clay and then I went. I got into the hollow bulge of the dark womb of the earth. Time lost its sense of time. I reached the amorphous. I might have been mineral, animal, vegetable. I don’t know what I was.” [8] The assistants molded the soft clay around Celeida’s head, leaving only the top of her muddy scalp visible from the outside. After spending some time completely enclosed Celeida burst out, collapsing through the material.

Speaking later of this piece Tostes described Passagem as subterranean, an experience of belonging to her material, to the clay. Her colleagues describe the transformative impact that this piece had on the artist by referring to her activities as ‘before Passagem’ and ‘after Passagem’. She touched a tether that connected her physically to her material, blurring the perceived separations and differences that structure the syntax of material use: “My own life process, the way back life process…. When I say way back I mean really waaay back in space, something I don’t know how to define and don’t know how to explain…it’s a very intimate experience. I think the clay and I fucked, you know? It’s like I had sex…with something that I wouldn’t know how to define.”[9]

I don’t personally think there is a direct parallel between Celeida’s experience and what has become popularized as Objectum Sexuality. Erika Eiffel and Edward Smith describe romantic relationships to specific and stable objects: the Eiffel Tower, a car named Vanilla. What Celeida describes is formless, tied to an experience with a material that is amorphous and one of the most abundant on Earth. I see her reference to sex as a means of explaining a deep and non-hierarachical loss of differentiation, a pleasurable confusion of boundaries.

I think of her description in relation to Anthropophagic ideas, which express the Brazilian tropical environment as capable of liquefying the colonizer. The sweating fertile breath of the jungle transforming him “into mere human material for the confection of the new man.”[10] For Celeida, being swalllowed by the earth was a truly exogamous experience, and produced a fusion beyond the original performative intent of the artwork. Having taught the manipulation of materials in her famous class, with Passagem Celeida shifted the site of transformation and placed herself in the position of the manipulated. I believe she found that she could also undergo a process of perhaps unexpected dissolution, and an emergent re-organization.

***

I’ll end with ripe fruit. In the rural areas north of São Paulo, picking and eating guava with family, I realized that the interior of the fruit was alive with movement. Looking closely at the bitten rosy flesh in the sun I could see that it was freckled with the tiny writhing bodies of miniscule worms. I spit the fruit on the grass twisting in repulsion. My grandmother, who had been raised in a poor rural village, was amazed at my big city disgust. As she continued to eat the bug infested fruit she laughed: “It’s born in the guava, it lives in the guava, eats and shits guava, well, then it’s just guava.”

***

In a spontaneously self-organizing system that emerges from heterogeneous mixtures like a chemical reaction, without static formal endpoint, or hierarchy of ends over means, the capitalist representative system loses its syntax. The perception of excess, eruptive energy is the result of a mis-understood but inherent transformative capacity.

There are revolutionary ideologies that share a relation to these artworks’ process-led de-stacking of material ends and means, which make me think of this art as inherently political. Yet the explosive here does not intend to wipe the slate permanently for a new order. It originates through creative liquefaction and the subsequent rupturing of the no longer relevant frame, always enthusiastically birthing an ambiguous new.

Notes:

1.) Walker, Scott. Gordon Matta-Clark: Art, Architecture and The Attack on Modernism. IB Tauris, 2009. p.37

2.) Lee, Pamela M.. Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, MIT Press, 2001 p.43

3.) Lee, Pamela M.. Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, MIT Press, 2001 p.43

5.) Helen Chadwick speaking in documentary film: The Art of Helen Chadwick, 2004, Illuminations Media, London, 50mins.

6.) Silva, Raquel Martins, O Relicário de Celeida Tostes, Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso apresentado ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em História, Política e Bens Culturais (PPHPBC) do Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil – CPDOC – para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Bens Culturais e Projetos Sociais. p.36

7.) Ibid, p.36

8.) Ibid, p.41

9.) Ibid, [Celeida Tostes em entrevista em 1990] p.42

10.) Revista Antropofágica em, Marques, Pedro Neves, Ed. The Forest and the School: Where to Sit at The Dinner Table? Archive Books, 2014. p.129