Interview to Cildo Meireles

Cildo Meireles.  From May 24 to September 29, 2013.

"My job is the production, distribution and control of information. That is what it is about."

1970, Insertions into Ideological Circuits

I never liked this thing of the propagandistic art. It clearly had to have a moment of continuance, but I also wanted it to have some efficiency, to be something that could help the distribution of information that was, at that time, utterly controlled.

The project Insertions into Ideological Circuits is about the medium and the mode. The medium is always a circuit and the mode is an insertion, but that happens in painting, engraving… it does not matter what we show you, it is always an insertion in a medium.

The work is an attempt to show a circuit which does not have such an easy control. The radio, the papers, the TV… they all have a really wide audience, but at the same time they are easily controllable. What I sought was a kind of situation of freedom for the individual. In some way, I was interested in that, but also in other formal and structural things such as responsibility ¬– no one was going to sign the list of people who were dead or tortured at that time. The issue of anonymity, which was very important and closely related to responsibility, the issue of scale, too – at that time I was interested in how the solitary individual could come closer to a very big thing.

Installations
Large scale pieces were a bit like the opposite of insertions, in the sense that they were made for one person at a time, for as long as required, conveying also a sense of isolation.

In Brazil, we had to create our own… because we did not have a reference. In the 50’s, mostly with the Neo-Concretists, we began to set up a singularity in this area. One of the points of singularity was multisensoriality. It was very important placing sight at the same level as the rest of the senses, and it is characteristic to the Brazilian production in the 50’s.

I never liked the term ‘visual arts’, as it was used in America, because I thought it would not reflect the complexity of art profession in Brazil, with sound works, etc. I have always preferred to use the term ‘plastic arts’, because I think it is closer to this practice.