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James ConcaghAn artist in touch with urban São PauloJames is an artist in dialogue with the city of São Paulo. As with all paulistanos, he maintains an ambiguous relationship of fascination and antagonism with the city. Daily life is, for him, a research opportunity, a chance to go to field and carry out an art case study - where the object is the peculiar precariousness of this metropolis. As a painter, he is aware not only of the surfaces and textures on offer in the infinite square metres of concrete, but also in the near-texts that sprawls all over on the walls.
Whitewashing is a traditional activity in inland Brazil and in many other cultures. This process can offer a key to James Concagh's work. Whitewash was very common before the advent of industrial paint: every year houses would receive a lick of lime mixed with water. The preparation and application rituals involved many phases akin to the act of painting the canvas: the slow mixing of lime and water, the brushing onto the walls with large gestures, the dripping, the thick layer obtained as the end-product, something between bread crust and custard skin. The function of lime is both decorative and aseptic, as it keeps insects away. The shelf life of a layer of whitewash is short - usually one year or one season cycle. At the appropriate time the houses are again painted, and the new layer cancels out the previous ones - until they re-emerge as one due to wear. Intensely white on application, whitewash withers and crackles with the passing of time. Whitewash, in the Brazilian urban context, is like sulpha sprinkled on the city's wounds and living flesh.
Perhaps this is a good summary of James' work process, represented by some of his recent works (Figs. 3, and 4). In this body of work, one can detect a few parallels with whitewashing: the mixing of powder to water, the application by means of thick wet brushstrokes or the crusty layers that end up covering the canvas or cloth. These processes are underlined by the use of building materials (such as rubble sacks). Thus, his painting can be seen as protection to the abode of memory, with cumulative renovation and a repeating ritual of addition and erasure.
Thus, what is recorded of city life in the paintings is scraping, the patch ups, the peeling offs, partial recovery, deterioration, crackling, sedimentation, disturbance... the layers now unrecognisable in a labyrinth. The tropical sun can bring life to colours, but it also makes them whither, it scorches the stone, causes the rock to crack... in short, the sun dries wounds up.
São Paulo can be likened to a picture-making machine. On its out-of-control surfaces - walls, blind building sides, pavements and tarmac - a infinity of forms and textures are fabricated daily, as if countless Rothkos or Newmans - or even Pollocks - materialised spontaneously on the city's skin, sufficing to the artist to collect and record them. James Concagh, if it is valid to make him part of this little fantasy, would have an eye for São Paulo in its Sol le Witt incarnation. Beyond pure textures, James is interested in the writing and in the more intensely human marks of the graffiti and the scribble.
Graphic marksA more sharply urban aspect of James' work is the graphic marks. The graffiti and tags that cover the city find expression in his work, appearing as nearly legible scribbles, also in layers, also continually scraped, covered up and re-inscribed. On the limit between legibility and abstract form, the graphic marks are presented as one additional riddle for the archaeologist of the present to muse about.
São Paulo tramples on any attempt of beautification or sentimental evocation, as attested by the many 'homages' paid to the city in 2004, by occasion of its 450th anniversary, which were all forgotten and made obsolete the moment they were uttered. What interests James is to read the city's layers in their schizophrenic relationship, to make notes on the contradictions and imbrications of the urban stage. This is done in aesthetic terms, as he is an artist, but importantly the focus is on the lived surface. To collect textures is not enough for him: he seeks to operate a topography of erasure, a kind of mapping encompassing simultaneously the panoramic and the aerial view, building and demolition, labour and waste.
James Concagh does not write texts, nor works with the word as such. It is more correct to say he works with language as graphic mark. The graphic marks that cover the city present themselves in various ways, from the dubious public commission murals of the city's tunnels to the somewhat desperate scribbles on building site walls or the buses' seats. What for some are illegible messages from the social ocean that surrounds them, for James, the almost-text could be likened not only to the more predictable biblical Belshazzar's feast -where the 'writing on the wall' appears as a divine warning before the dumbfounded guests. The scattered writing recalls the young Anchieta, a 1500s Portuguese Jesuit sent over to Brazil to convert the native populations and smooth the way to the European presence. On the same black sand that James has used for some of his paintings, Anchieta wrote poems in Latin for the Virgin Mary, by the sea. Sand, mud and lime are materials which the artist uses, and equally ponders on the fate of text written on such unstable support that is beach sand. As a Brazilian popular song goes, in the voice of Amazonian singer Nazaré Pereira: "On the sand of the beach, I wrote your name: a wicked wave rolled over, erased your name and I forgot you
1."
In the work of James Concagh, the sea appears as urban tides and waves, the waves of workers crossing the city every day, the violence waves, the ebb and tide of rubbish, dust, heavy metals in the air. The city, as his work, is a living process of self-eating, of instability and of a not completely resolved darkness. The city is in full process of disappearance, giving way to an amorphous and unmappable conurbation. Is a topography of flux possible?
So James fixes nought to his own darkness. But in the process he keeps a kind of diary or record of the wear and tear, of erasure and the brushing over, of re-inscription. Under this light, it is possible to see Anchieta and his colonisation process as the primal sources for the later flourishing of unreconcilable social layers and the vast pouring of blood on the sand and on the plateau, as well as the origin of the truncated text that writes the history of Brazil, written on the unstable black mud of the seashore.
The close relationship that the artist establishes with the city is possible only on foot. In a crucial choice, James took not to drive a car in the city. São Paulo pavements only unveil themselves to the pedestrian. Only prolonged observation allows for some kind of reasonable knowledge about the moving tectonic crusts that are the city's sidewalks. This is the only way of changing the aggressive assaults of the city into research material. Maybe the a likely incarnation of a latter-day flaneur in São Paulo is that of the public transport passenger. In the course of chugging along in bus journeys and their very long itineraries, with countless stops and varied panoramas, the carbon monoxide high and the state of half sleep propitiates the bus passenger free hands and an enhanced observation alertness to engage the cityscape.
The seduction of pure texture or the embellishing of the 'popular' is a temptation of which James is aware. This would include heroicising poverty, aesthetise it and cover the scars up. Somehow it is important to James to devolve to the artwork the immediate urgency of the 'found text' of the streets, the human marks and the man-made textures. In short, include by absence the social and urban dimension, in the form of abstract traces of a real people in the labour of living.
DisplacementWhat has an Irishman to say to about São Paulo? Why bring the attention of the Brazilian public to the work of a foreign artist? Is there any meaning in throwing in the national variable?
It is tempting to start with similarities between Ireland and Brazil: both were distant outposts of colonial empires, both fruit of the Roman Catholic drive to convert all peoples on Earth... But differences are equally deep, the tenacious preservation of the native language in Ireland, lost in Brazil, to name but one.
Perhaps James feels at home in a city defined by displacement. The artist, originally from a country with a tradition of immigration - until very recently Ireland exported working hands to enterprises world-wide - seems to have participated in the contemporary international displacement circuits. His mother kept a guesthouse at home. This way, early in life James has shared his days with people from other lands, some of which were his childhood friends.
He has also been in some traditional Northern European displacement circuits. Like the young Goethe, he experimented as an eager artist the epiphany of Mediterranean light in Italy. He was also one of the many Irish workers in London.
A wider range of displacements, however, brought him to Brazil. Here, there were many visit circuits for him to pick from: the circuits of the tourist, the resident-in-foreign-currency, and the resident in local terms. The two former circuits are very much alike, where one basically spends and lives off foreign currency, staying over as long as the budget and exchange rates allow. The third circuit is certainly the hardest, but the more revealing. For it is in the daily grind for survival that one can really get to know a country beyond the postcard.
James picked the third circuit. On avoiding the Airport-Jardins-Airport itinerary, the artist was able to experiment the city in a manner different from many of his local fellow-artists: from the periphery inwards. A large slice of his work involves diving into the city, cutting through as much as possible of its spectrum, or at least seeking to play side B as well as side A.
In the daily struggle for survival in a Third World metropolis, James deployed resources he had already rehearsed before do as to dialogue with São Paulo. For instance his 'tour' of Dublin in 1982, when he drove through the city with his Fiat-cum-art gallery, "bringing art to the people". This may have been th first step towards forming a vocabulary with which to communicate with a cityscape. But he was also challenged in unexpected ways by São Paulo, such as when confronted by a different type of body language from the ones he had been used to describing up to then - with the Coldstream Method (London analytical method of drawing). The sheer variety of disarming (and alarming) scenarios he lived in during his long and erratic pilgrimage that ranged from distant neighbourhoods such as of Educandário to the very peculiar São Paulo Centro, in contrast with the elegant suburbs of Granja Vianna.
As I see it, the work of James Concagh derives from a personal attitude before life and before the city, which has placed him firmly in a position to repeatedly devolve to his public acute insights about the city where they live. His complete integration with urban life in São Paulo and his simultaneous outsider point of view, allow James to report valuable occuring aspects of this peculiar transformation of a city manifesting itself into a sprawling void.
1 "Na areia lá da praia, teu nome eu escrevi: veio uma onda malvada, apagou o teu nome e eu te esqueci."
Gavin Adams
(Gavin Adams is a practicing artist and has a Ph.D. in Arts (USP). Exhibitions include countries like Great Britain, Japan and Brazil. Has lived in London for 10 years, where he graduated and obtained an M.A. in Fine Arts (Oxford and RCA). Currently develops work around optics and develops collaboration technology with art collectives.)
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A origem dessa dança parece remontar ao tempo dos Druida, das Danças Circulares dos antigos povos Celtas que dançavam em rituais em honra ao sol e ao carvalho teriam sido os primeiros a praticar a dança celta e, traços das danças circulares estão presentes, ainda hoje, nas "Ring Dances". Ao que parece, as danças já eram muito apreciadas no final do século XV seja na versão Rinnce Fada ou Fading com duas filas de parceiros, olhando uma para a outra ou no Irish Hey (provavelmente em roda), jigs (emin grupo), Trenchmores ou a Dança de Espadas.
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