REGINA VATER
Recently, Funarte (the Brazilian NEA) sponsored the publication of my book of drawings for installations, titled “Penelope’s Mesh.” An edition of 1000 copies was produced by the very respected Aeroplanos Publishers. And each book comes in a finely hand-crafted box.
The introduction for my book was written by Linda Dalrymple Henderson, the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History and Regents' Outstanding Teaching Professor at the University of Texas in Austin.
The drawings are finely printed on heavy paper and resulting in a book that is very beautiful and comprehensive in its survey of my ideas for installations.
I brought 30 of these books to the USA. Unluckily the American luggage inspectors going through my things ruined 9 copies by ripping off the packaging containing them and 2 are missing...
So, now I only have 19 copies in good shape to sell.
I still didn’t find out how much postage would cost (mail container plus postage).
If you do not mind you could have one of the damaged books (what is damaged it is mainly the box/cover-the facsimiles are all right).
I am sending some images from the book and Linda Henderson’s text.
The introduction for my book was written by Linda Dalrymple Henderson, the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History and Regents' Outstanding Teaching Professor at the University of Texas in Austin.
The drawings are finely printed on heavy paper and resulting in a book that is very beautiful and comprehensive in its survey of my ideas for installations.
I brought 30 of these books to the USA. Unluckily the American luggage inspectors going through my things ruined 9 copies by ripping off the packaging containing them and 2 are missing...
So, now I only have 19 copies in good shape to sell.
I still didn’t find out how much postage would cost (mail container plus postage).
If you do not mind you could have one of the damaged books (what is damaged it is mainly the box/cover-the facsimiles are all right).
I am sending some images from the book and Linda Henderson’s text.
Regina Vater: An Appreciation
Linda Dalrymple Henderson
The work of Regina Vater is a rich synthesis grounded in a wide range of experiences and interests from the realms of culture and nature—as well as from the fusion of the two in the "archaic cosmologies" she so admires.(1)Brazilian by birth and attuned to Afro-Brazilian and Native American Brazilian belief systems, she is equally familiar with poetry ranging from the ancient Greeks (her great-great-grandfather translated Virgil and Homer into Portuguese) to Mallarmé and the Brazilian concrete poets, including her friend Augusto de Campos. Vater's sensitivity to poetic language and multilingual capabilities, along with her commitment to content in a work of art, has led her to a focus on ideas much like one of her heroes, Marcel Duchamp. At the same time, she has a profound reverence for nature that plays a central role in much of her artistic creation, including her pioneering interest in ecology. Indeed, culture and nature often fuse in her works with their goal, as she defines it herein, of "bring[ing] the public closer to the metaphysics of life and of the cosmos."
During her career Vater has shared friendships with a number of prominent cultural figures, including composer John Cage and fellow Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica. When she arrived in New York in 1973, she was already a prominent artist in Brazil with considerable exposure to filmmaking, which prepared her well for the art world she found. There, time was a major focus in the developing field of new media and film, often discussed in relation to the "space-time" of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It was at this moment that she met Cage, who had earlier embraced the space-time model, and who also shared with her his commitment to chance processes in composition.(2) That view had a direct effect upon Vater's conception of drawing, encouraging her to leave behind finish and precision in favor of a quick record of thoughts that can be recorded anywhere on any kind of material.
Time and its mysteries have remained a major thread throughout Vater's career, and she has read widely—from St. Augustine to Borges. Her works explore a multiplicity of times, ranging from her 1974 project of Paris metro platform photographs inspired by Einstein and his use of trains to the deep time of ancient myths, often evoked in ritual circular forms.(3)Vater regularly draws her materials from nature (e.g., seeds, stones, eggs), although that is not always the case. In her Black Installation for Silver Turtles of 1984-1986, for example, she uses manufactured materials to contrast the theme of time in Aesop's fable of "The Tortoise and the Hare" to the Amazonian legend of the turtle, who outwits the hare through the cooperation of other identical turtles. (Likewise, in Vater's 1981 installation Cinematic Drawing, twenty-four images of the turtle and of the rabbit are printed, respectively, on the upper and lower sides of a scroll; the mathematical progression of turtle images assures that, as the scroll is rolled up, the turtle is waiting for the hare.) Typical of Vater, too, is the fact that in the Black Installation project the hare is no ordinary rabbit, but rather the White Rabbit, pocket watch in hand, from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, a tale she greatly admires. Like Duchamp, Vater here creates subtle layers of analogy and identity to produce her commentary on time.
Vater also responded to Duchamp in her 1998 drawing and installation ART é MIS à NoUs, with its poetic play on the latter's La Mariée mis à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Large Glass) of 1915-23 (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Following Octavio Paz's association of the Bride of the Large Glass to Artemis, the moon goddess caught bathing by Acteon, Vater evokes Artemis here by means of a water-filled urn, in which an overhead projection of the moon's reflection is "bathing." (4)Mirror reflections were central to Duchamp's Large Glass project, like Carroll's Alice, and related directly to the popular concept of an unseen fourth dimension of space. In writing about ART é MIS à NoUs, Vater suggests her own interest in such a metaphysical realm, speaking of "that dimension which we never seem to be able to touch or to reach in our lifetime. We can only have a glimpse of it through its reflections mirrored in some fragments of outer reality (like art itself) or in our dreams."(5)
Vater has said of the mythology that is so important to her: "It is a reservoir for a great deal of the fragile imponderable incognito—the unconscious knowledge that links us all."(6) Grounded in Tibetan Buddhism as well as the other cosmologies noted above, Vater's poetic art operates in the realm of the visionary and the sacred, seeking to transform the viewers who encounter it. The drawings in Penelope's Mesh clarify this goal and explain why Cage was such an admirer of Vater and her art. A firm believer in the transformative power of art, Cage once suggested of contemporary Happenings, “I would like happenings to be arranged in such a way that I could at least see through the happening to something that wasn’t it. . . . [Then] we’d be in the Duchamp-Fuller-Mies van der Rohe business of seeing through.”(7) It is that positive effect of "seeing through" to the sacredness of nature that Vater's works, grounded in the cultures of the world, accomplish so profoundly.
[1] Vater celebrated the "deference for nature" of such societies in a lecture delivered at her London exhibition in 2009. Biographical information herein was communicated to the author in e-mail conversations with the artist.
[2] On the impact of Einstein on Cage and other artists, see L. D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
[3]That project resulted in an artist's book, Christmas Underground or Time Travelogue.
[4] Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare (New York: Viking Press, 1978).
[5] Regina Vater, Statement for installation of ART é MIS à NoUs, Artpace Foundation, San Antonio, Texas, 1999.
[6] Vater, as quoted by Amalia Mesa-Bains, "Curatorial Statement," Ceremony of Spirit, Traveling exh. (San Francisco: The Mexican Museum, 1993), pp. 16-17.
[7] John Cage, quoted in Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York: Dial Press, 1968), pp. 55-56.
The work of Regina Vater is a rich synthesis grounded in a wide range of experiences and interests from the realms of culture and nature—as well as from the fusion of the two in the "archaic cosmologies" she so admires.(1)Brazilian by birth and attuned to Afro-Brazilian and Native American Brazilian belief systems, she is equally familiar with poetry ranging from the ancient Greeks (her great-great-grandfather translated Virgil and Homer into Portuguese) to Mallarmé and the Brazilian concrete poets, including her friend Augusto de Campos. Vater's sensitivity to poetic language and multilingual capabilities, along with her commitment to content in a work of art, has led her to a focus on ideas much like one of her heroes, Marcel Duchamp. At the same time, she has a profound reverence for nature that plays a central role in much of her artistic creation, including her pioneering interest in ecology. Indeed, culture and nature often fuse in her works with their goal, as she defines it herein, of "bring[ing] the public closer to the metaphysics of life and of the cosmos."
During her career Vater has shared friendships with a number of prominent cultural figures, including composer John Cage and fellow Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica. When she arrived in New York in 1973, she was already a prominent artist in Brazil with considerable exposure to filmmaking, which prepared her well for the art world she found. There, time was a major focus in the developing field of new media and film, often discussed in relation to the "space-time" of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It was at this moment that she met Cage, who had earlier embraced the space-time model, and who also shared with her his commitment to chance processes in composition.(2) That view had a direct effect upon Vater's conception of drawing, encouraging her to leave behind finish and precision in favor of a quick record of thoughts that can be recorded anywhere on any kind of material.
Time and its mysteries have remained a major thread throughout Vater's career, and she has read widely—from St. Augustine to Borges. Her works explore a multiplicity of times, ranging from her 1974 project of Paris metro platform photographs inspired by Einstein and his use of trains to the deep time of ancient myths, often evoked in ritual circular forms.(3)Vater regularly draws her materials from nature (e.g., seeds, stones, eggs), although that is not always the case. In her Black Installation for Silver Turtles of 1984-1986, for example, she uses manufactured materials to contrast the theme of time in Aesop's fable of "The Tortoise and the Hare" to the Amazonian legend of the turtle, who outwits the hare through the cooperation of other identical turtles. (Likewise, in Vater's 1981 installation Cinematic Drawing, twenty-four images of the turtle and of the rabbit are printed, respectively, on the upper and lower sides of a scroll; the mathematical progression of turtle images assures that, as the scroll is rolled up, the turtle is waiting for the hare.) Typical of Vater, too, is the fact that in the Black Installation project the hare is no ordinary rabbit, but rather the White Rabbit, pocket watch in hand, from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, a tale she greatly admires. Like Duchamp, Vater here creates subtle layers of analogy and identity to produce her commentary on time.
Vater also responded to Duchamp in her 1998 drawing and installation ART é MIS à NoUs, with its poetic play on the latter's La Mariée mis à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Large Glass) of 1915-23 (Philadelphia Museum of Art). Following Octavio Paz's association of the Bride of the Large Glass to Artemis, the moon goddess caught bathing by Acteon, Vater evokes Artemis here by means of a water-filled urn, in which an overhead projection of the moon's reflection is "bathing." (4)Mirror reflections were central to Duchamp's Large Glass project, like Carroll's Alice, and related directly to the popular concept of an unseen fourth dimension of space. In writing about ART é MIS à NoUs, Vater suggests her own interest in such a metaphysical realm, speaking of "that dimension which we never seem to be able to touch or to reach in our lifetime. We can only have a glimpse of it through its reflections mirrored in some fragments of outer reality (like art itself) or in our dreams."(5)
Vater has said of the mythology that is so important to her: "It is a reservoir for a great deal of the fragile imponderable incognito—the unconscious knowledge that links us all."(6) Grounded in Tibetan Buddhism as well as the other cosmologies noted above, Vater's poetic art operates in the realm of the visionary and the sacred, seeking to transform the viewers who encounter it. The drawings in Penelope's Mesh clarify this goal and explain why Cage was such an admirer of Vater and her art. A firm believer in the transformative power of art, Cage once suggested of contemporary Happenings, “I would like happenings to be arranged in such a way that I could at least see through the happening to something that wasn’t it. . . . [Then] we’d be in the Duchamp-Fuller-Mies van der Rohe business of seeing through.”(7) It is that positive effect of "seeing through" to the sacredness of nature that Vater's works, grounded in the cultures of the world, accomplish so profoundly.
[1] Vater celebrated the "deference for nature" of such societies in a lecture delivered at her London exhibition in 2009. Biographical information herein was communicated to the author in e-mail conversations with the artist.
[2] On the impact of Einstein on Cage and other artists, see L. D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
[3]That project resulted in an artist's book, Christmas Underground or Time Travelogue.
[4] Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare (New York: Viking Press, 1978).
[5] Regina Vater, Statement for installation of ART é MIS à NoUs, Artpace Foundation, San Antonio, Texas, 1999.
[6] Vater, as quoted by Amalia Mesa-Bains, "Curatorial Statement," Ceremony of Spirit, Traveling exh. (San Francisco: The Mexican Museum, 1993), pp. 16-17.
[7] John Cage, quoted in Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York: Dial Press, 1968), pp. 55-56.
[1] Vater celebrated the "deference for nature" of such societies in a lecture delivered at her London exhibition in 2009. Biographical information herein was communicated to the author in e-mail conversations with the artist.
[1] On the impact of Einstein on Cage and other artists, see L. D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
[1] That project resulted in an artist's book, Christmas Underground or Time Travelogue.
[1] Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare (New York: Viking Press, 1978).
[1] Regina Vater, Statement for installation of ART é MIS à NoUs, Artpace Foundation, San Antonio, Texas, 1999.
[1] Vater, as quoted by Amalia Mesa-Bains, "Curatorial Statement," Ceremony of Spirit, Traveling exh. (San Francisco: The Mexican Museum, 1993), pp. 16-17.[1] John Cage, quoted in Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York: Dial Press, 1968), pp. 55-56.
[1] On the impact of Einstein on Cage and other artists, see L. D. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
[1] That project resulted in an artist's book, Christmas Underground or Time Travelogue.
[1] Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare (New York: Viking Press, 1978).
[1] Regina Vater, Statement for installation of ART é MIS à NoUs, Artpace Foundation, San Antonio, Texas, 1999.
[1] Vater, as quoted by Amalia Mesa-Bains, "Curatorial Statement," Ceremony of Spirit, Traveling exh. (San Francisco: The Mexican Museum, 1993), pp. 16-17.[1] John Cage, quoted in Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York: Dial Press, 1968), pp. 55-56.
Regina Vater no Palavrarte:
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