Page 8 - as margens dos mares

A Taste for Experimentation

The project As Margens dos Mares celebrates the encounter between cultures and
languages, between the visual arts and music. Here, the exhibition of a broad range
of artwork takes place alongside musical presentations involving the sharing of
musical traditions, instruments, and timbres of distinct origins with the aim of
underscoring the intense and fertile interchange which, since the beginning of
the 20th century, has become established between music and the visual arts.
Especially since the advent of modernism, the visual arts have desired the freedom
of music, its indifference to any commitment to representing the world. One proof of
this is found in the correspondence between Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, the
introducer of abstract art, and Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, the master of
the dodecaphonic musical method that threw the tonal system into crisis.
Musician John Cage’s lessons concerning the understanding of noise and the
incorporation of ambient sound as musical raw material continued and enlarged the
exchange between the realms of music and the visual arts. In this sense, the invention
of the happening, a sort of multidisciplinary artistic product that shook the art world in
the early 1950s—a work by Cage, by choreographer Mercy Cunningham, and by visual
artist Robert Rauschenberg—decisively catalyzed the process of the reinvention of arts
through the overlapping of its boundaries.
In the ultimate analysis, the visual-arts show proposed by As Margens dos Mares
arises from the decisive action of music in the context of artistic production as a whole.
The inclusion of the environment in the musical sphere corresponded to the desire
for painting to project into space and for sculpture to transform into penetrable
structures, while also—in various cases, as takes place in our exhibition—combining
elements derived from distinct languages, such as cinema, photography, drawing,
and the object. The holding of this exhibition, therefore, takes on a special meaning:
celebrating a time that fosters the intertwining of languages; exploring this possibility
through artwork and artists who momentarily leave the margins of the communities
they belong to in order to find themselves among us, the Brazilian public.

Agnaldo Farias
Curator

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