Jens Hoffmann On João Maria Gusmão And Pedro Paivia
The two Portuguese artists João Mario Gusmão and Pedro Paivia have worked as
co-authors of numerous works, of which their work in film is the most
remarkable. They met for the first time while studying philosophy in Lisbon
in the late 1990s before eventually enrolling in visual art classes in later
years. Their fascination for philosophy is still apparent, not only in their
work as artists but also as editors of a small philosophical magazine that
they have published since 2005.
Gusmão and Paivia’s short black and white 16mm films allow for a large
variety of readings. This highly unique body of work stands less in a
lineage within the context of visual art but rather follows a particular
school of existentialist philosophy in which we define ourselves through our
own subjectivity while prevaricating between choice, freedom and existential
angst. While watching their films with their surreal cast of characters,
short and seemingly illogical narratives, one is reminded of 1920s silent
movies and their comical, nonsense elements. Like the early films of Bas Jan
Ader, they contain the tragi-comic and existentialist presence of Samuel
Beckett. But one can also detect traces of absurd theatre à la Eugene
Ionesco, fragments of what Sigmund Freud described as the uncanny, mid-19th
century pseudo-science, the eerie atmosphere of Grimm’s fairy tales, and the
work and symbolism of other literary existentialists such as Franz Kafka or
even Fyodor Dostoevsky, all finally combined with a postmodern reading of
the beliefs of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Despite this, Gusmão and Paivia’s films are visually minimal and simply
produced but are characterised by a precise selection of characters and
locations. All films are set either in the rural countryside — simple
grasslands or forests — or in semi-desert or prairie-like landscapes. It is
hard to place the time and location in which their actions take place or
where the characters come from. Sometimes one is reminded of scenes from
Italian Neo-Realist films from the 1940s or the landscapes and costal
regions of Scotland or Scandinavia. At other times there is simply a generic
looking middle-European field or wood. The artists carefully avoid any form
of signification that could reveal when and where the actions take place: we
hardly ever see a house, a car or any other form of building or machinery.
Everything feels and looks slightly underdeveloped and from a different
time, but in the end perhaps this is just what Portugal looks like to the
uninformed outsider.
Succinct descriptions of the films perhaps explain the above. In The
Invio-lable Stone (2004), set in an unidentifiable mountain region, we see
three men trying to move and split an enormous boulder with a bunch of small
sticks without any effect. The Ice Statue Sculpture (2004) presents a man
who is trying to make an ice sculpture but does not succeed and instead
decides to burn the ice block he is working on by pouring gasoline over it
and setting it on fire. Paramagnetism (2004) presents a character wandering
through a forest with a pendulum that moves back and forth until it stops
towards the end of the film, having apparently found a magnetic field,
pulling a tall tree in the far background to the ground. The Eel Hunter
(2004) is a movie about a man who can catch eels with his bare hands. We see
the man standing in a riverbed catching eels by simply grabbing into the
water as the fish swim by. In Throwing Blocks of Ice from the Boca de
Inferno (2004), we see two characters first carrying and later throwing two
large blocks of ice from the famous sea cliff that has formed a cave known
as the Boca de Inferno (Hell’s Mouth) into the water underneath. In How to
move the Earth’s Axis (2005), which is divided into three parts, we see a
man standing on a grass field slowly pushing a long stick through a metal
cylinder, before suddenly the image changes and we see the upside down image
of two other men that stand around the same metal cylinder in a desert, and
who begin to pull the other end of the long metal stick. In the second
sequence of the film the first man puts a stone on a string through the
metal cylinder that appears on the other side as well. In the third and
final sequence of the film the first man pushes the metal cylinder to the
left and the other two men (on the other side of the earth as we have come
to intuit) move accordingly to the left. Around the World (2005) is a film
about a man who shoots arrows around the world. Each arrow has a long string
attached to it with the other end attached to the man’s waist. Every time
the man shoots one arrow the arrow reappears after a while to hit the tree
behind the man as if he was in fact shooting around the world. Cinematic
(2006) features a man who, with the ability of a snake charmer, is capable
of hypnotising tree logs so that they fly through the air and eventually
line up on top of each other. In Columbus Egg (2006), we see a man trying to
build a tower out of eggs by placing one on top of the other. An achievement
which, like for Columbus, is only possible by smashing the eggs on one of
their ends to create a flat surface.
What characterises all the films are the deliberately simple special
effects: where the man catches an eel with his own hands the film is in fact
presented backwards, the man releasing an eel into the river rather than
catching one; or where the logs fly through the air we can see fragments of
cranes and ropes in some of the shots of the film; and the tower of eggs is
constructed with the help of fishing wire.
The films present irrational or absurd acts that revolve around the human
desire to create: in order to invent our own values and to form the very
terms under which we excel. The work tries to define the very nature of our
own existence. Fueled by scepticism towards the unique status of the
individual and the idea of progress, both of which are concepts that have
given order and meaning to Western thought during the last 500 years, Gusmão
and Paivia mistrust the idea of a universal narrative, instead emphasising
the irrational while seemingly applying instruments of reason.
JENS HOFFMANN IS THE DIRECTOR OF THE CCA WATTIS INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, SAN FRANCISCO