80 | Aferall Artists: Ricardo Basbaum| 81

Te materialist doctrine that men

are products of circumstances and
upbringing, and that, therefore, changed
men are products of other circumstances
and changed upbringing, forgets that men
themselves change circumstances and that
the educator himself must be educated.
[] Te coincidence of the changing of
circumstances and of human activity can
be conceived and rationally understood
only as revolutionising practice.
Karl Marx
1

No intoxication is as intoxicating as
enjoying the freedom of others.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
2

We have no art, we do everything as well
as we can.
Sister Corita Kent
3

When the rst Portuguese explorers arrived
at the Guinea Coast in Western Africa in
the feenth century, they are said to have
been extremely surprised by the peculiar
relationship that, to their eyes, the natives
had to a certain type of objects, anthropom-
orphic or zoomorphic idols made of stone,
clay or wood that were venerated by them
as actual gods.
4
Asked by the Portuguese if
these idols had been manufactured by
them, the locals replied afrmatively;
asked if they were true divinities, they gave
the same response. Te explorers coined
a word to encapsulate this unsustainable
contradiction: the adjective feitio, coming
from feito, past participle of to do or
to make. Te term suggested form, gure
and conguration, but also something that
was articial and fabricated, and even
fascinated and enchanted, mapping a
semiotic eld in which fact, construction,
agency and truth combined together.
For the Portuguese, such fetishism had
to be either nave or cynical, the result of
a lack of awareness of the incompatibility
of human agency and objective truth,
or of a conscious attempt at obscuring that
awareness. For these anti-fetishist men,
the fetish hid the origin of the object the
human work of manipulation and thus
transformed the creator into the created.
Teir goal, as modern men, was to make
the fetishists realise it was their voices that
were speaking, not the objects, and so end
their alienation.
But the societies from which the
explorers originated also made objects
whose constructed or received status,
immanence or transcendence were
ambiguous. Te images of the Virgin
Mary, or later Louis Pasteurs experimental
setups,
5
likewise combined apparent
human agency with the contradictory
claim that they conveyed an objective truth.
Tat the Portuguese couldnt recognise
their own fetishistic practice is perhaps a
function of a strategic dispositive that frees
practice from theory, and that allows for
Ricardo Basbaum,
Or Tat Elusive Object
of Emancipation
Pablo Lafuente
In this analysis of the mediating object
of pedagogy and communication, Pablo
Lafuente sees icardo Basbaum's projects
as allowing agency for both the recipient
of information and the object itself.
1 Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical
Philosophy, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1976, pp.6165. Also available at
http://www.marx2mao.com/M&E/TF45.html (last accessed on 20 February 2011).
2 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Infabulation, Manifesto for a NewTheatre: Followed by Infabulation (trans. Thomas
Simpson), Toronto, Buffalo, Chicago and Lancaster: Guernica, 2008, p.54.
3 Motto of Immaculate Heart College, quoted in Corita Kent and Jan Steward, Learning by Heart: Teachings
to Free the Creative Spirit, NewYork, Toronto, London, Sydney and Auckland: Bantam Books, 1992, p.6.
4 For an account of this encounter, see Bruno Latour, Sur le Culte moderne des dieux faitiches, Sur le Culte
moderne des dieux faitiches, suivi de Iconoclash, Paris: Les Empcheurs de Penser en Rond/La Dcouverte,
2009, pp.15134. My argument, for the next fewparagraphs, follows Latours in this text.
5 In Pasteurs own formulation, the fermentation of lactic acid that he registers in his laboratory is real
because he has carefully set up, with his own hands, the scene where the fermentation reveals itself.
Ibid., p.44.
Ricardo Basbaum,
Would you like to
participate in an
artistic experience?,
1994ongoing,
painted steel object,
experience,
125 80 18cm.
Participation
Karin Schneider,
NewYork, 2010.
Photograph:
Karin Schneider.
Courtesy the artist
Previous spread:
me-you:
choreographies,
games and
exercises, 2007,
performed at
Lisson Gallery,
London.
Courtesy
the artist and
Lisson Gallery,
London
82 | Aferall Artists: Ricardo Basbaum| 83
agency to continue, independently from
theoretical intervention. Anti-fetishism,
as a theoretical perspective, doesnt quite
knowwhat to do with the agency involved
in the experience of the fetish: it is always
at pains to identify a subject to which it
can assign the force that by mistake is
attributed to the fetish object. Te moderns
couldnt testify to the strange efcacy of the
fetishs displacements of action precisely
because the distinction they maintained
between fact and construction grounded
another, more essential distinction
the distinction between knowledge and
illusion, or between a form of practical
life that doesnt make one see knowledge
as separate from illusion and a form of
theoretical life that does.
6
Tis displaced
junction of fact and ction is what
Bruno Latour denominates faitiche,
a portmanteau word combining fait
and ftiche to refer to the solid certitude
that allows practice to go into action
without ever believing in the distinction
between construction and contemplation,
immanence and transcendence.
7

Art Object as FetishObject
Ricardo Basbaum began the project
Voc gostaria de participar de uma
experincia artstica? (Would you like to
participate in an artistic experience? ) in
Jpp, and it continues today. It operates by
ofering a painted steel object (J by 8c
by J8 centimetres) to be taken home by the
participant (individual, group or collective),
who will have a certain period of time
(around one month) to realise an artistic
experience with it.
8
During the time that
the participants have the object, they are
entitled to decide howto use it, if at all
where it should be taken, what should be
done with it on the condition that they
send documentation to be archived and
made accessible on the website www.nbp.
pro.br. Te rectangular-shaped object is
made of painted steel, with oblique edges
and a circular hole in the middle. Its bottom
(or top) is missing, giving it the appearance
of an oversize cake mould, or even an
oversize sandcastle mould (without
turrets). It is painted entirely white, except
for the upper (or bottom) rims, which are
navy. Te object itself, or its shape, has been
part of theatrical performances and dance
routines, displayed as outdoor sculpture,
incorporated as an instrument in a musical
performance and transformed into a
diferent artwork (titled NBP-B, or Novas
Bases para Personalidade Branco,
cco). It has also been used outside of
the cultural context (as a beach utensil,
the body of a childrens car, a cat bed,
a clothes basket, a sh tank and a water-
collection receptacle), and has been buried
underground for a moon cycle. Very ofen,
in one way or another, it has functioned
as a frame, a windowthrough which
participants have literally looked at the
world, with their eyes or their cameras.
9

Would you like to participate in an
artistic experience? originated in another
project by Basbaum, titled NBP, short
for Novas Bases para a Personalidade
(New Bases for Personality), begun four
years earlier. Te projects website denes
NBP as a sign, made of three letters, a sort
of general motivation or pretext for work
(almost a programme of action), a means
for impregnating space. Almost an atopic
common place.
10
Te project is, at the risk
of oversimplifying, an attempt at reecting
on contemporary art (both its practice
and its ideas) in relation to notions
and processes of communication and
subjectivation, through the production
of drawings, diagrams, installations
and writing. Te shape that, reproduced
recurrently, provides the visual basis
of the project is also the origin of the
object distributed in Would you like to
participate?, looked at from above (or
below). Tis sign, which resembles an eye,
11

is deliberately simple in its combination
of straight and round forms:
NBPs specic shape was designed to be
as easily memorisable as its sign: afer
experiencing any NBPwork the viewer
leaves with NBPand its specic shape
in his or her body a kind of implanted
or articial memory, as the result of
a subliminal sensorial contamination
strategy.
12

6 See ibid., p.36.
7 Ibid., p.53.
8 http://www.nbp.pro.br/projeto.php (last accessed on 10 July 2011).
9 For a full list of experiences, including dates, participants names and visual documentation,
see http://www.nbp.pro.br/experiencia_data.php (last accessed on 10 July 2011).
10 http://www.nbp.pro.br/nbp.php (last accessed on 8 July 2011).
11 See Guy Brett, Art in the Plural, in Novas Direes (exh. cat.), Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte Moderna,
2002.
12 http://www.nbp.pro.br/projeto.php (last accessed on 8 July 2011).
Ricardo Basbaum,
Would you like to
participate in an
artistic experience?,
1994ongoing,
painted steel object,
experience,
125 80 18cm.
Participation
grupo Laranjas
Porto Alegre, 2003.
Photograph:
grupo Laranjas.
Courtesy the artist
84 | Aferall Artists: Ricardo Basbaum| 85
this experience the statue acquires a subject
quality), but also, importantly, being looked
at by it/her. And, in the NBP objects ability
to set up a situation in which it is possible
to reect not only on that experience,
but also on what it enables (namely,
the discursive apparatus and the social
structures of the art system), Basbaums
project extends the self-reective character
of the modern artwork, as dened since
early Romanticism, to a remarkable degree.
Te work of art, this time, sees its visual
character decreased, but only in order to
give occasion to an experience that makes
whoever enters into contact with it enter
a newsensorial space and a recongured
social space, in which newprocesses of
subjectivation may occur. Basbaum has
said, in discussing his installation me-you +
system-cinema+passageway (NBP), shown
at the th Shanghai Biennial in cc8:
Te installation space proposes an
experience which can only be held
by subjects and this is a proper
efect of the artwork who accept
to locate themselves at the realm of
a transformation process (a premise
for any art piece but one which only
a few are interested in providing).
14
An Instrument of Mediation
Proposing an experience that wants to
give form to subjects in order to begin
a transformation process is, in essence,
what pedagogy is about. So again, like
in Schiller, the aesthetic experience leads
to a pedagogical programme one with
a typically modern emancipatory goal.
But if in Schiller in the passing from
(individual) aesthetic experience to
(collective) aesthetic education the object-
art (Juno Ludovisi) is lost on the way,
in Basbaum the object-art (the NBP object
and sign) very much remains. It is as
an object that might be used for whatever
(for art or for something else), as a sign
that gives form to thoughts ever present
in Basbaums work. Te process of
education, of the formation of subjects
in search of transformation, is always
mediated by this object, as the fundamental
support for the social relations that are
eventually generated.
Te object of mediation within the
process of pedagogy is important not
just because it is the vessel that contains
the content to be taught. On the contrary,
its relevance resides in the type of social
relationships it shapes between the
teacher position, the student position
and the context in which the pedagogical
process takes place. Asimple look at two
theories of pedagogy as emancipation may
showhowdiferent conceptualisations of
such an object can result in diverse social
relations, alternative behaviours and,
possibly, diverging results that might not
full the initial emancipatory goal.
In Te Ignorant Schoolmaster (Jp8),
Jacques Rancire recounts the story of
Jean-Joseph Jacotot, a pedagogue who
became a reader in French literature at
the university of Leuven at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. Because many
of his students could not speak French
and Jacotot could not speak Flemish,
there was a need to establish between them
the minimal connection of a common
thing.
15
Tis thing became the bilingual
version of Les Aventures de Tlmaque,
a book written by Fnelon in Jopp.
Jacotot made the students adopt the book
as an interpreter, asking them to learn the
French text with the help of the translation.
To his surprise, the students learnt the
language without the need for a transmis-
sion of knowledge from the teacher,
disrupting conventional conceptions of the
pedagogical process as one of transfer. By
not transferring and not explaining, by not
proposing a method but concentrating only
on working on the students will to learn,
the master, Jacotot, established a relation
that had as a consequence an entirely
free relationship of the intelligence of
the student with that of the book the
intelligence of the book which was also the
shared thing, the egalitarian intellectual
connection between master and student.
16

Te book is then the means by which
Jacotots students achieve the goal of the
pedagogical process, the tool that allows
them to learn when they have decided
or perhaps have had their wills forced by
Jacotot to do so. Tlmaque, as Rancire
says, is not a masterpiece, just a simply
written book in French, with a varied
Or, using a diferent set of images, NBPs
shape is a constructed form, designed by
Basbaum, that contradictorily presents
itself as an elemental form a fact of
nature, a simple, geometrical given,
akin to a universal category. Te shape
is, therefore, both a fact and a ction.
Te object/sign that is at the basis of NBP
and Would you like to participate?
is, arguably, a form of faitiche, one that
has allowed Basbaum, for the last two
decades, to develop an artistic practice
that reects the concepts, mechanisms
and functions of art, understood not just
as a set of objects but as a set of social
relations and discourses with a specic
history and materiality. Tis insightfulness
is due to the fact that not only are the NBP
sign and the resulting object faitiches, but
that art objects in general, at least since the
time of Romanticism at the turn of the
nineteenth century, are also conceived of as
a combination of (subjective) manufacture
and (objective) autonomy that dees the
principle of contradiction. What makes
this painted steel object peculiar is not
only its awareness of that fact, but also its
programmatic attempt to function as a
vessel that replicates that combination.
Moreover, the project it gives occasion
to thinks through both its principles and
what it makes possible. As Basbaum has
written, Would you like to participate
in an artistic experience?
was developed basically as a project to
encounter possibilities of movement of
some lines of ight in the art circuit
composed as a set of protocols regulating
it along the standards of a basic dialogical
structure involving artist, object and
participant. Te public or general
audience only accesses the project later,
at the documentation or archive level.
13


If all the above is the case, the NBP sign
and NBP object can be considered the
ideal modern work of art. Tis is perhaps
a counterintuitive, even perverse,
maybe grandiose statement, given the fact
that Basbaums projects, through their
engagement in participatory dynamics and
discursive practice, seem designed to step
out of the modern canon. However, the
NBP objects combination of autonomy
and heteronomy brings its experience
close to that which Friedrich Schiller,
in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man
in a Series of Letters (Jp), described as
the quintessential aesthetic experience
that of standing in front of the statue of
Juno Ludovisi, looking at it (or her, as in
13 Ricardo Basbaum, Would you like to participate in an artistic experience, Art &Research, vol.2, no.2,
Spring 2009, available at http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/basbaum.html (last accessed on
13 July 2011).
14 R. Basbaum, me-you + system-cinema + pasageway (NBP), in Annette Balkema, Li Ning and Xiang
Liping (ed.), The Shanghai Papers, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2008, available at http://rbtxt.files.
wordpress.com/2009/09/shanghai_papers_txt2_.pdf (last accessed on 10 July 2011).
15 Jacques Rancire, Le Matre ignorant: Cinq leons sur lmancipation intellectuelle, Paris: Fayard,
1987, p.8. Translation the authors.
16 Ibid., p.25.
Ricardo Basbaum,
[small operatic event]
Would you like to
participate in an artistic
experience?, 2010,
with Joyce Gyimah,
Dance Physics and
Bruce Nockles,
press-on vinyl
diagram, monochrome
wall painting,
painted, metal
object, dance, sound,
reading event at
The Showroom,
London.
Photograph:
Daniela Mattos.
Courtesy the artist
86 | Aferall
Te circles began with the search
for a vocabulary for the groups, selecting
generative words words phonemically
rich, and with a pragmatic tone. Words
like rain, land, bicycle, brick or
work were used as generators of sounds
through their syllables, which, recombined,
resulted in newwords and sentences that
contributed to progress in literacy and
simultaneously incited debate on local
and national problems. Te pedagogical
process generated in this manner learning
content within and throughout itself.
As well as the generative words,
the groups used a series of ten gurative
drawings by Francisco Brenand that were
meant to spark a discussion of what culture
and civilisation might be,
21
depicting
situations such as the unlettered hunter,
a drawing of an indigenous hunter shooting
birds with arrows; the lettered hunter
(lettered culture), a man in hat and boots
shooting at birds, but this time with a rie;
or the hunter and the cat, a cat chasing
two mice. Te last drawing showed
the culture circle itself: the group, and
the teacher, all looking at one of the
illustrations, seeing themselves as part of
the pedagogical process.
Like in Rancires example of Jacotot,
the goal here is emancipation, and because
of that transmission of knowledge (and
therefore of hierarchies) is avoided. But,
unlike in Te Ignorant Schoolmaster,
context comes to the fore, and the object of
mediation must speak directly to it. So while
Tlmaque was an abstract object of medi-
ation, Brenands images and the generative
words must to be concrete: to guarantee
that those entering the process of education
actually care about learning, the pedagogue
must ensure that the starting point is some-
thing close to them and that they see them-
selves as an originating part of that process.
Basbaums NBP object is also, perhaps,
concrete in this manner in its awareness
that participation within an art project
(Would you like to participate in an artistic
experience?) could involve a specic size
and a specic shape that primes interaction,
as well as implying, perhaps, a familiarity
with a certain set of codes and forms that
are the result of a historical development.
Ahistorical development that, in his case,
might be traced back to Lygia Clarks work
of the late Jpcs and early ocs with abstract
forms susceptible to manipulation
a characteristic that turned them into the
material support for social relations. Te
abstract form of the NBP project becomes
concrete through the familiarisation,
within an art environment, of the language
of abstraction abstraction as a mere form
and as an art-historical language and
vocabulary and a severe moral charac-
teristics that are too generic to justify the
choice of the title. Tlmaque is, in fact, an
abstract object of mediation: it is a mere
bilingual book, one that is the product of
human intelligence, and that, precisely
because of this, can serve as amediating tool
that posits the equality of all intelligences,
including those of Jacotot and his students.
Te NBP object is perhaps like
Tlmaque in this sense: it is an abstract
object, one that doesnt in the rst instance
relate to those who eventually are in touch
with it. It comes from elsewhere: in the
case of Tlmaque, from over a hundred
years earlier, from a diferent country and
a diferent language. NBP, taken from a
ready-made design by an artist, similarly
comes with a minimal set of demands and
expectations, and, because of this, in order
for any type of pedagogical process to take
place, it is necessary that those who come
into contact with it have already decided
this is what they want to spend their time
and energy with. Te education of wills is,
then, a prior, necessary condition for any
pedagogical engagement and any potential
emancipatory process.
But, as Te Ignorant Schoolmaster
shows, when the pedagogical process is
mediated by an abstract object, something
needs to be lef behind. While Rancire tells
us Jacotots story, we never learn who his
students are, where they come from and
why have they decided to be his students.
Speculating on who could attend courses
at the university of Leuven in the J8Jcs is
not necessary it is enough to point out
that they could attend the university, and
dedicate themselves to studying a bilingual
text of which one of the languages was
alien to them. Te abstraction of the object
of pedagogical mediation, it seems, is
accompanied by an abstraction of the socio-
political conditions in which the pedagogi-
cal process takes place. For Rancire,
this is amatter of principle: those conditions
need to be rendered abstract in order to
make sure emancipation is not denied by
the context. But, in avoiding this, something
is risked: by attempting to universalise
an abstracted object of mediation (and not
considering the possibility of contextual
determinations), material inequality might
remain untouched, and, because of this,
equal access to the process of emancipation
become impossible.
In Paulo Freires Education as Practice
of Freedom (Jp) a very diferent object
of mediation leads the pedagogical
process.
17
Te text proposes an educational
model that lays its emphasis on the concrete
situation of the students, on the perception
of matters afecting daily life as ones
own matters, and on the realisation that
intervention into context and even its
transformation is possible:
Te education our situation demanded
would enable men to discuss courageously
the problems of their context and to
intervene in that context; it would warn
men of the dangers of the time and ofer
them the condence and the strength to
confront those dangers.
18

As a response to the four-million school-age
children who were not in school, and the
sixteen-million illiterates of fourteen years
and older that could be found in Brazil in
the Jpcs,
19
Freire, as coordinator of the
Adult Education Project of the Movement
of Popular Culture of Recife, launched a
model of education based on culture
circles discussion groups in which those
gathered attempted to clarify situations or
seek action arising from that clarication,
led by an individual acting in a teacher
position.
20
Te topics nationalism,
prot, remittances abroad, the political
evolution of Brazil, development, illiteracy,
sufrage for illiterates, democracy were
introduced by a discussion focusing on the
notion of culture and its distinction from
nature, leading to questions about agency in
the form of men and womens intervention
on the world around them.
Artists: Ricardo Basbaum| 87
NBP becomes concrete through
the familiarisation, within
an art environment, of the
language of abstraction
and through the creation
of a situation in which such
language can be practised
within a dynamic of play
and interaction.
Ricardo Basbaum,
me-you + system-
cinema + passageway
(NBP), 2008,
iron structure,
fabric cushions,
foam, closed-circuit
cameras, sequencer,
monitors, DVD,
headphones, press-on
vinyl diagrams and
text, monochrome
wall-painting
840 450 240cm
(structure), variable
dimensions
(diagrams and text),
7th Shanghai
Biennial.
Photograph: the
artist. Courtesy
the artist
17 Paulo Freire, Education as the Practice of Freedom (trans. Myra Bergman Ramos), Education for Critical
Consciousness, NewYork: The Seabury Press, 1973, pp.184.
18 Ibid., p.33.
19 Ibid., p.41.
20 Ibid., p.42.
21 The ones printed in the book are versions of those drawings by Vicente de Abreu, as the originals
were lost.
88 | Aferall Artists: Ricardo Basbaum| 89
through the creation of a situation in which
such language can be practised within
a dynamic of play and interaction. Te
possibility of suspending conventional
relations and uses (enacted by the statue
of Juno Ludovisi and, potentially, every
artwork since) is maintained, but this time
stressing the potential of transformation
that results from it.
A Sociology of Liberation
On J January Jp, Fred Forest published
in Le Monde a blank rectangle of Jc by J
centimetres with a footnote instructing
readers to express themselves through
writing or drawing within it, and to cut the
whole page of, frame it and send it to him.
Against the wishes of Forest, the newspaper
included the rectangle in the Arts section,
and didnt publish anyof the 8ccresponses,
which included cartoons, political
messages, insults, intended artworks,
proposals for meetings and even a note
from an intern in a psychiatric hospital
who claimed this was his only means
of contact with the outside world. Te
experience, called Space Media, was
repeated with newspapers in Switzerland,
Belgium, Sweden, Argentina and Brazil.
Forest was a member of the Collective
of Sociological Art, a group that, according
to its rst manifesto, published also in
Le Monde in Jp,
takes into account the traditional
ideological attitudes of the publics it
addresses. It makes use of the methods
of groupdynamic development, survey
and pedagogy. As well as putting art
in relationshipwith its sociological
context, it pays attention to the channels
of communication and distribution
a new theme within art history and one
which demands a new type of practice.
22
For the collective, which also included
Herv Fischer and Jean-Paul Tnot, the
role of the artist was to elucidate the real
nature of art, increasing awareness and
liberating him or her from the alienation to
which other approaches to artistic practice
led. Te object of the study of aesthetics and
art history could not be the artwork itself,
but the process of social circulation in
which its meanings are constituted, and
in which they change. Or, in Forests words:
For the sociological artist the problem
is not to know what to represent or how
to represent it, but how to provoke a
reection on the conditions of our social
environment and its mechanisms.
23

Afewmonths afer his empty newspaper
space, Forest organised a survey in
Val-de-Marne, near Paris, about the
nuclear family, titled Voulez-vous jouer
avec nous au portrait de famille? (Would
you like to play family portraits with us? ),
which involved engaging the local popula-
tion in an exercise of self-portraiture.
24

Basbaums similarly titled Would you like
to participate in an artistic experience?
doesnt include the word play in its
title, but this absence doesnt negate the
importance of the idea of a game to the
work itself. Te documentation of many
of the J artistic experiences shows
children as the protagonists, and when it is
adults who are pictured, they tend to reect
a youthful even childish joy. Entering
the context of art, the project seems to say,
is a game of sorts, a game in which normal
conditions are suspended, echoing the free
play of faculties that Schiller, afer Kant,
sawin the aesthetic experience (and which
Schiller identied as the promise for a
newpolitics).
In Basbaum, such play is ofen
regulated, as in Freire, by a series of loose
frames that are adapted to the diverse
contexts in which the event is to take place.
Te interactions are reected in diagrams
that capture the group dynamics, as well
as relationships between concepts, places,
actions and results. Tey function as both
cognitive maps and choreographies for
movements, like those Herbert Beyer drew
on the oor of the Museum of Modern Art
in NewYork in the Jpcs.
25
But words are
central to Basbaums play, especially the
pronouns me and you. Tese pronouns,
the relationships between them and their
transformations, mirror the processes of
subjectivation that Basbaum looks to give
occasion to in his games and installations.
As he writes, these pronouns
are addressed to the viewers, opening
upspaces where he/she can locate him
or herself. Tus the diagrams always
show a kind of me/you game, reinforced
by the presence of other words that stress
issues of time, space and action (instant,
here, play, stop, afection, etc.).
Its a kind of mental or psychological
game that relates to what the Situationists
used to call psychogeography
a particular state resulted from the
displacement and experimentation
of oneself.
26


Trough these mappings, the work
elaborates a sociology of art, exploring
the conditions (institutional, political,
social) that allowfor an object and a
practice to be seen as art. Te focus has
shifed from a more or less local, Brazilian
scale in the beginnings of Would you
like to participate? to a progressively
international one (it was, for example,
the rst project to be announced and
activated in advance to documenta J
in cc). But, as pointed out above,
the work also ofers a situation of
experimentation that transcends analysis
to propose transformation. Because of
that, it is exemplary in bringing together
two entities that are very diferent from
each other: a discourse that comes from
things themselves (from art objects and
the social relations that give occasion to
them, that are constructed around them
and perhaps through them) and a political
act that tries to enact a change in the
participating subjects and that therefore
needs to be independent of things. Astudy
of context, and a way to escape from it.
Te coming together of these two
elements is perhaps best visualised through
the notion of faitiche that this text began
with: the faitiche is, like the fetish in
Marxism, a materialisation of social
relations that are veiled by afect and
desire. But it is also what allows for a
mediation between the concrete and
the abstract, between theory and agency,
and it provides insight from its concrete-
ness into larger practices, processes and
structures. Te fetish, as a cultural fact that
is irresolvably made and given, becomes
a privileged site for both understanding
howthe world works, and imagining how
it could work diferently. And this makes
the NBP object, as a faitiche, in its both
concrete and abstract nature, almost the
perfect art object, simultaneously the
windowthrough which to see what art
objects are and a programme for activating
them in search of newways of being and
being together.
Ricardo Basbaum,
membranosa-entre
(NBP), 2009,
iron structure,
fabric cushions,
foam, press-on
vinyl diagram,
monochrome
wall painting,
press-on vinyl
texts, closed-circuit
cameras, sequencer,
video projector
470 900 240cm
(iron structure),
variable dimensions
(diagram, texts).
Photograph:
Romulo Fialdini.
Courtesy the artist
and Luciana Brito
Galeria, So Paulo
22 Herv Fischer, Fred Forest and Jean-Paul Thnot, Manifeste I de lart sociologique, Le Monde,
10 October 1974; reprinted in H. Fischer, Thorie de lart sociologique, Tournai: Casterman, 1977, p.25,
and F. Forest, Art sociologique, Paris: Union Gnral dEditions, 1977, p.15354. Translation the authors.
23 F. Forest, Art sociologique, op. cit., p.197. Translation the authors.
24 See ibid., p.71.
25 As shapes suggesting the flowon the floor of the exhibition Bauhaus 19191928, which took place
at MoMA from 7 December 1938 to 30 January 1939.
26 Ricardo Basbaum on Urban Tension, November 2002, available at http://rbtxt.files.wordpress.com/
2009/09/interview_urban-t_basbaum.pdf (last accessed on 8 July 2011).