Meireles, Cildo

▪ 2009

born 1948, Rio de Janeiro, Braz.

      In winning the 2008 Ordway Prize, an unrestricted gift of $100,000, Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles won more than money—he won recognition as one of the foremost living artists of Latin America. The Ordway Prize, administered by the New Museum and the Creative Link for the Arts, in New York City, and named for naturalist and philanthropist Katherine Ordway, was awarded biennially and simultaneously to two individuals in mid-career, an artist and a curator.

      Meireles moved with his family to Goiana (north of Recife) before he was 4 years old and then relocated with them to the modernist capital of Brasília when he was 10. There he lived for nine years, with architect Oscar Niemeyer's new city rising around him. Meireles hoped to study filmmaking, but this dream eventually faded, and his involvement in the arts took a different turn. He was only 19 when he participated in his first art exhibit, at the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, in Salvador.

      During a time of military rule and political repression in Brazil, events such as the death by torture (officially reported as suicide) of the journalist Wladimir Herzog were commonplace. Meireles responded by producing his two-part Inserções em circuitos ideolõgicos (1970; Insertions into Ideological Circuits). For this project he stamped anonymous messages in English or Portuguese on Brazilian cruzeiros and Coca-Cola bottles and introduced them into circulation. His banknotes said such things as “Quem matou Herzog?” (“Who killed Herzog?”) and “Eleições Diretas” (“Direct Elections”)—and sometimes “Yankees Go Home.” Although these objects later were collected in museums, Meireles—who was influenced by the Brazilian critic Ferreira Gullar—insisted that the objects were not the art. “Remember that the work is not what we see in a museum exhibition. It's not the bank notes or the Coca-Cola bottles. These objects are only relics. The work itself has no materiality. And it is ephemeral. It only exists when someone is interacting with it. In this respect, it's much more connected with the concept of the antiobject or the nonobject.”

      Also at this time, Meireles made his first installation, Eureka/Blindhotland (1970–75), which by his own account “dealt with the difference between appearance and reality.” It consisted of 200 black balls having the same volume but different mass. Exhibition attendees were invited to interact with the balls, to meditate on the deceptiveness of appearance. Another of Meireles's installations, Missão/missões: como construir catedrais (1987; Mission/Missions: How to Build Cathedrals), was composed of 600,000 coins, a stack of 800 communion wafers, and 2,000 suspended cattle bones. According to the artist, it was about Europeans, particularly Jesuits, in the Americas, symbolizing “material power [and] spiritual power, and a kind of unavoidable, historically repeated consequence of this conjunction, which was tragedy.”

Kathleen Kuiper

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