Mira Schendel

The present work set out to examine how different experiences of displacement influenced the artistic output of Mira Schendel (1919-1988), a Swiss-born visual artist who migrated to Brazil in 1949 and became one of the most important figures in Latin American art of the twentieth century. Coming from a Jewish background, she was baptised a Catholic and raised in Italy, but she needed to flee the country in 1939 due to the Nazi persecution of Jews. Focusing on the body of work produced mostly during the sixties, this dissertation will argue that some recurrent visual elements are very much related with travels and Schendel’s life in exile. As such, three central aesthetic elements will be discussed: the use of text in painting and drawings, often mixing words in different languages; the spatial aspect of her work; and transparency, explored in works made with rice paper and plates of acrylic. Schendel’s engagement with writing will be correlated with a foreigner’s perception of language, and the use of different idioms as an attempt to create a universal vocabulary. The disorienting effect caused by the use of text in spatial installations will be read in parallel with her past displacement, as if she was lost between different lands and idioms. A crucial aspect in her work, transparency will be analysed alongside her attempt to depict different time-frames simultaneously, which is also correlated with a transitory aspect of the migrant’s life, who see themselves always between the present and the past.

The hungarian poet and performer Katalin Ladik (1942 Novi Sad, Serbia) and the brazilian postwar artist Mira Schendel (1919 Zürich, Switzerland – 1988 São Paulo, Brazil) show common interest in working with textual elements and poetry. The comparison of their works brings the attention into the re-reading of the Neo-Avantgarde canon and emphasizing the linguistic elements. The connection with poetry was central for the Neo-Avantgarde movement from its origins, since it was strongly engaged with textuality, including verbal dimension as well. Beside the Gesamtkunstwerk attitude, the dematerialised art conception underscores the importance of texts and artworks. The paper focuses on the analysis of artworks through literature the conceptual art theories. Mira Schendel (1919-1988) and Katalin Ladik (1942) does not seem to have common space. Schendel is a brazilian postwar artist, who emigrated from Italy to Brazil and painted oil paintings on canvas from the 1950's until her last series from 1987. This work, Battens 1 is painted on wood panel and a triangle like element is applicated on it so it resembles to the abstract expressionism, despite her early works which are rather modernist. Between the early paintings and the last work, Schendel did experiments from the 1960's with an easily

Este artigo tenta exemplificar a estreita relação entre artes literárias e plásticas brasileiras, algo que pode ser notado quando analisamos a história cultural do Brasil. Estas relações artísticas podem ser tão próximas, no caso brasileiro, que chegam mesmo a se mostrarem como rebatimentos. Este
artigo busca evidenciar os relacionamentos entre a obra literária da Poesia Concreta e a criação de monotipias pela artista plástica Mira Schendel. Através da análise relacional do poema concreto “Nascemorre” de Haroldo de Campos e de duas Monotipias da série dos “As” de Mira Schendel busco aspectos verbivocovisuais, tão característicos das experimentações concretas da época e que se notam também nas artes plásticas.

Este artigo busca investigar sobre como a poesia encontrada nos desenhos, letras e palavras das monotipias da artista plástica Mira Schendel (1919-1988). Esse texto coloca-se comoum ensaio analítico/reflexivo e de cunho bibliográfico. Verificamos que as ambivalências das imagens nas monotipias de Schendel colocam-se como campo fértil de exploração sensível e intelectual das mais diferentes linguagens, mostrando-nos que as imagens nunca cessam de apresentar seus múltiplos aspectos e paradoxos, deixando-nos perceber em suas "escritas" uma literatura poética de qualidade inusitada e multimodal.
Palavras-chave: Literatura visual; Visualidade poética; Monotipia; Mira Schendel.

Abstract This paper aims to investigate the poetry in the drawings, letters and words in the monotypes of visual artist Mira Schendel (1919-1988). This text is placed as an analytical/reflective one and of bibliographic nature. We verified that the ambivalences of images in Schendel's monotypes are a fertile field for sensitive and intellectual exploration of the most different languages, showing us that images never cease to present their multiple aspects and paradoxes, allowing us to perceive in her "writings" a poetic literature of unusual and multimodal quality.

Este artigo tem por objetivo realizar uma leitura da obra de Mira Schendel a partir de duas de suas monotipias da série Escritas únicas, de 1964-1965. Estas obras nos ajudarão a entender mais precisamente a relação entre “signo” e “sigilo”, palavras manuscritas nas referidas monotipias. Signo, sigilo são formas de orientação, primeiro por um tipo de materialidade praticamente indistinta da escrita e do traço que a artista desenvolveu com a técnica da monotipia; segundo, essa escrita é um fato que constitui a ética e a estética de Mira Schendel e talvez ela esteja atravessada pelo cruzamento de fronteiras entre países, linguagens, campos semânticos e pictóricos, mas sobretudo pelo que ela identificou como símbolo e vivência imediata.

This article aims to carry out a partial reading of Mira Schendel’s work from two of her monotypes of the Unique Writings series, from 1964-1965. These works will aid us to understand more precisely the relation between “sign” and “secrecy” handwritten in the respective monotypes. Sign, secrecy are forms of orientation, first by a type of materiality almost inseparable of the writing and the trace that the artist developed with the technique of monotype; second, this writing is a fact that constitutes the ethics and aesthetics of Mira Schendel and that may be crossing of borders between countries, languages, semantic and pictorial fields, but above all what she identified as a symbol and immedi-ate experience.

This paper looks at some of Mira Schendel’s minor works in relation to Pop art in Brazil in the 1960s. Considering her practice within the São Paulo cultural milieu, Schendel appears tangential to the major groups that emerged in the city (including the Concretists in the late 1950s). However, her dialogue with artists and intellectuals, such as Haroldo de Campos or Mario Schenberg, suggests an understanding of her work as a continuous semantic investigation, rather than a succession of ‘series’. Through an exploration of Schendel’s relationship with de Campos, this paper will assess her experimentation with collage and still life to determine her connection to Waldemar Cordeiro’s 1964 ‘Popcrete’ works.

Focussing on the text of Vilém Flusser's essay “The Gesture of Smoking a Pipe,” this paper proposes that at least some of Flusser’s writing can be usefully identified as protreptic.  Having arisen in ancient Greece as a form of speech or writing for the explicit purpose of persuading an audience, protreptic also served to display the author’s skills and attract students, persuading young men to take up philosophy.  It was never confined to a particular genre of writing, but always addressed its audience in a specified situation, that is, in circumstances shared by writer and reader.  Applied to Flusser’s writing, the “communicative purpose” becomes a way of examining both the compositional structure and the implicit dialogue between writer and reader that appears in the text. Questions about the implied identity of the reader and of her relationship to the writer lead to a conclusion that even as the text argues about the right way to classify the gesture of smoking a pipe, it is also performing a phenomenological inquiry. The reader plays the role of audience to the performance, and so becomes the object of persuasion at another level as well. The paper further suggests that study of rhetorical structures in Flusser’s writing may reveal a new level of coherence across its languages, disciplines and genres.

O artigo tece aproximações entre o trabalho de Mira Schendel e a psicanálise lacaniana, principalmente em torno da noção de vazio. Esta se desdobra tanto nas obras de Schendel como na clínica psicanalítica lacaniana, e seus contornos ganham diferentes formas e corpos. Tal preocupação os conduz ao zen-budismo, interesse pouco explorado, mas presente em passagens da obra de Jacques Lacan. Um recorte de um caso clínico e a análise de algumas monotipias de Mira Schendel mostram os encontros entre clínica psicanalítica e artes visuais.

Esta é uma tese que atravessa diversas matérias sem se deter em nenhuma delas. Um percurso vertiginoso que começa nos escombros da ruína discursiva de Haroldo de Campos no livro Galáxias, surpreende a imaginação hesitante de Manuel Bandeira no poema “A realidade e a imagem”, engajando-se então na perseguição ao escapista infalível do livro Quando não estou por perto, de Annita Costa Malufe, até perder-se entre uma nebulosa gráfica e nuvens esparsas na obra de Mira Schendel. Durante a caminhada suscitam-se pensamentos sobre o corpo e os sentidos, a imagem, o som, o silêncio. Esse périplo é acompanhado pelo barroco Prelúdio em Dó menor de Bach, ao sabor de uma expectativa de conclusão que por obra de uma intervenção diabólica jamais realizar-se-á. Tudo isso como uma tentativa de reconhecimento da sensação avassaladora que uma pequena aspirante a pianista certa vez experimentou sob o efeito delirante de seu instrumento. Um passeio poético por ambiências subjetivas, durante o qual o que se procura é o silêncio.

Der Essay befasst sich vor dem Hintergrund des noch viel zu wenig bekannten Werks der 1919 in Zürich geborenen und 1988 in São Paulo verstorbenen Lyrikerin und Künstlerin Mira Schendel mit der sinnlichen Beziehung zwischen dem Betrachter und der in bildlichen Werken dargebotenen Zeichen. Wie können wir Kunstwerken in unmittelbarem Erleben über unsere Sinne begegnen, anstatt ihnen Bedeutungen immer nur entlang der Trennung rational/ sinnlich zuzuschreiben? Ausgehend von zwei, während der Jahre 1964 und 1965 entstandenen Monotypien Schendels und deren spezifischer Materialität von Schrift und Strich analysiert der Autor das intime Aufeinanderbezogensein von Zeichen [signo] und Beschweigen [sigilo], in deren Komplizität sich sowohl Ästhetik wie Ethik der von Sprachgrenzen durchkreuzten Kunst Mira Schendels offenbart-einer Kunst, die es unternahm, von einer Migration der Buchstaben« zu einer »Potenz des Signifikanten« zu gelangen.