Self-Censorship as a Processual Poetic Agent in Sculpture Creation

Rute Rosas, 2016

 

Abstract

Methodological criteria is set to establish connections with my artistic thinking acting, by the need to recur to written language as a universally translatable tool associated with the need to articulate what we understand of language, discourse, narrative, denotative and connotative. The writing of letters – structuring – enhances all the process/action. It is the driving element or the Soul of a Body and justifies both the importance of the Share with Other in an exclusive degree and the Self-censorship – a private performative writing.

In the Creative Processes that imply an umbilical Art/Life, Body/Mind and Space/Time connections – in its experiential sense – consequently leads to a Self-representation and/or Autobiography, Self-censorship as a poetic agent can be:

Considering that Works of Arts are plastically formalized expressions – thought that lead to actions that are felt, activate sensations and can stimulate synesthesia by their autonomy and communicative capability – each individual will feel them accordingly to their living experience and their predisposition, which means that creators are the ones whose life is attentively focused on the expression of feeling through distinct processes and materializations.

In a combination between past experiences (due to the ephemerality of the moment) and the present ones, I am looking to expose creative processes, resorting to Memory through the Impulse of Creative Imagination, aware of our ability to recreate what naturally implies an inconclusive structure without a narrative.

 

Integral Text

To introduce the reader to the Self-censorship theme as a processual poetic agent in the artistic creating and on what concerns my living experience, I begin with a reading of the uncensored passages of Pensamento Alto[1] or, loud thought.

Well, I am in front of a machine because it would be complicated to write this fast, (…) while trying to have less time to think, stop being intuitive and becoming purer. No one asked me anything, no one asked me about anything. I question myself, I live and need to express what I feel and that is censurable, integrating the censorship, since this type of documents, some of them, cannot be presented at least while I'm alive. I’m going to stop now!

I’ve been realizing that there’s a sort of socially acquired value that determines that artists are free, or more free than any other human being – almost considered as characteristic. This truth or characteristic is fake although comfortable in many circumstances. “I cannot in fact understand the problem of an artist's so-called ‘freedom' or ‘lack of freedom'. An artist is never free. No group of people lacks freedom more”(TARKOVSKI, 1998). Even when we consider the existence of freedom in the way the artist expresses himself or relatively to the media he uses, these decisions imply a huge responsibility and awareness of socialization – the confrontation others will have regarding what the artist presents as a result of their seeing and feeling the surrounding reality or realities.

In the circumstances presented and determined by life there can be (in this case and in this context, there is) a special Other that acquires a place of intermediary exclusivity in the process, what may not be a synonym for freedom – the differentiation between the Other and the others can apparently be thin but it is key.

There inevitably is a censure associated with the creative process and intimacy or the "exclusive confidence to other" (FIGUEIREDO, 1998). However, we can say that the Other gradually conquered an almost minimum censure level, which does not invalidate self-censorship by its connection with the existential process and by the review of the need to share with all the possible others – the audience, the spectators or users.

Thereby, the continuous sharing[2] can allow awareness of unconscious processes of the Impulse of Creative Imagination, essential to recognise the location of the Self[3] (GOFFMAN, 1993) – and the Other as a partner.

The subject of self-censorship leads to the quest for a definition and a framework that are simple and easily understandable. Self-censorship is, in this context, the censure applied to my behaviour, my words, my writing for various reasons among moral, ethical, personal, professional and political reasons.

If in academic terms everything verbal is considered true and that this veracity is not scientific, it is not verifiable[4], then, on the other hand, the oral discourse has the characteristics of plastic expression – truthful and connotative.

This way, considering that written language is supposedly denotative, semantic, we search for its discourse inside its speciality or we'd have to understand distinct formats and possibilities or hypothesis.

The word is a target of the power exercise that controls it; powers don't only affect bodies, but also words, thus novelty is not be positioned on what is said but rather in the event or the "happening of its return" (FOUCAULT, 1971a).

To prove and having proof are science requirements and, considering that time is linear, we would only need to demonstrate once each of the examples/questions by applying the rule of its functioning, but… what is true today may not be true tomorrow. Regardless of the freedom and dynamism these considerations imply, the scientific method, as we know it, results from a sustenance of our allegations and this consequently seems to remove most of the value of the opinions from individuals who live the experience, reflect about it and write about it – the normalization of a method doesn’t value the truthful experiential knowledge independently of the intensity or quality.

The differentiation between what is true and what is truthful in writing, for example, goes through the referential, the quotation of several authors that sustain a thought or idea. This is a question of comfort and passivity when, on the contrary, we could say that knowledge is dynamic and not pacific.

According to Michel Foucalt, when someone composes an oral discourse they are on what we call truthful and, therefore, isn't necessarily true because it cannot be verifiable and consequently doesn't adapt to the scientific method. On the other hand, and in psychic terms, the discourse needs to be truthful to be credible regardless of being a lie or true. This is why Foucault stated that what we say is much more than what we say or that “the same group of words can give rise to several meanings, and to several possible constructions” (FOUCAULT, 1972).

It's in this context that we find similarities with what happens in the artistic practice since it is also open and susceptible to various interpretations. This allows us to conclude the oral discourse has similar characteristics to the ones of the processual poetic agent of the plastic creation – it is truthful and connotative.

We need to emphasize that verbal language involves certain characteristics that distinguish it from art. Oral language, just like written language, has a grammar, a system to order contents that condition and regulates it – we are conditioned by the limits of semantics.

In addition, verbal language allows us to focus directly to the idea while in art the verbalization can be used as a media to reach an idea: it can be used to describe, explain techniques, operative processes or frameworks without leaving its connotative character – the reality of Art exists because of its very own existence.

It was in a Skype conversation with Enric Tormo Ballester, addressed in the letter of Sunday, July 9th of 2006, Re: depois do Skype, that I’ve realized the necessity for total openness and trust, without fearing weakness, surrounding problems, laughing or crying.

In a process like this, we trust the Other, we look to understand the Other, respecting his ideas, sharing our own.

From this moment on the interiorization of a path’s enunciating processes became clear and we were both aware of the necessary predisposition and also that it would be often a painful challenge – the dialogue reaches a primary form of expression of the thought as a value of human communication.

Over time and over a lot of reflective moments, overwriting, face-to-face and virtual conversations, over exchanges, the possibility and the responsibility of understanding creative processes became reliable because becoming aware and verbalizing or writing allowed the development of a great Body expressed by the will/need to understand other colleagues, other artists – what goes through us before and during the process of materialization of our ideas/thoughts, dreams, reveries or often what we perceive.

The connections between memory and recollection, senses, feelings and emotion are primary variables for the study and understanding of Creative process/Artistic Project that I call Artistic Impulse or Impulse of Creative Imagination.

These principles are defining for the design and conceptual structure which will develop during this work. Therefore, it’s essential to consider different time, social, political, geographical frameworks – the surrounding.

The artists, philosophers, pedagogues, …, creators in general and their works and/or projects that are referenced here are framed within a surrounding – fundamental question for the understanding of the reader/participant. This depends on us, on our ability to read considering the context with a flexible approach and, therefore, permeable to the distinction between a founded thought of the 13th century, a work of art of the 1950s, a letter of the first decade of the 20th century, an e-mail, a document or work of art of the first decade of the 21st century. The patterns and the differences need to be considered, even if the essential is about presuppositions that last in Time and the understanding of the essence of Life, of Values, the Human being and questions related to Art that we call Impulse of Creative Imagination, the creation as well as its poetics  – subjects that tend to transport us to intimacy.

“I’m not trying to convince you of anything – and I couldn’t convince you of anything. All I can do is to have these flashes of intense experience that are represented by this, and this, and this, and this. (...) This is a conception at a certain level – art is about life.” (BOURGEOIS, 1998). The creative process is not deductive, is intuitive.

If in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein (2010, p. 90) writes that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, as it somehow summarized the purpose of the book, he makes it clear, afterwards, that his work consists of what it presents and everything else he didn’t write – what he understands as the part that matters. It may be relevant that we understand that, in a logic/ethics division, the idea to look for the essence of purpose in the logic domain – indicative – is diverse in a relationship between ethics/aesthetics because of the inability to use objective rules or criteria in Fine Arts – these are in ethics and aesthetics domain, which means they are transcendental or connotative.

Wittgenstein (2007b) emphasizes the need to hide, compelling us to make a reflection about the limits of language – between what can be said and what it cannot. Thus, “even if someone could be able to express everything that it’s on their interior, we would not understand it”.

One of the most remarkable artists of the 20th century, Louise Bourgeois, may help us understand the use of the word, the discourse because she had written diaries, notes, given interviews, that supported and led to publications. In a first approach, this may seem antonymic, but it isn’t, considering no matter how much Louise Bourgeois wrote or spoke, she always kept a distrust and unsatisfaction for words. Words didn’t interest her because they wore out.

As a long-distance communication medium, regardless of their differentiation, motivations or intentions, letters – writings relative to the private sphere or private writing – have a common characteristic that establishes them as a writing modality. This characteristic can be defined by a complex feeling of complementarity where there is both absence and presence.

In the peculiar Fernando Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego, signed by his semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, we can read, in one of the letters addressed to Mário de Sá-Carneiro[5] in March 14th of 1916, the following words: “I write you today for a sentimental need – an afflicted urge to speak with you. You can deduce I have nothing to tell you. Only this – today I am at the bottom of an endless depression. The absurd of the sentence will speak for me. (...) What colour would feeling be?” (1982, pp. 43-47)

With no acknowledgement of the answer, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, great poet and novelist, writes to his friend, announcing his suicide. The hundreds of letters for Fernando Pessoa, written between October of 1912 and April of 1916, are valuable historical testimonies and document their confessional relationship as well as their psychological portrait. They are proof of an intense friendship: “Your letters, my dear Fernando, they are, (…) something profoundly good that comforts, uplifts, delights me – for a moment they make me, happy” (SÁ-CARNEIRO, 2001).

The intimacy and confidence in these letters are equally felt in the correspondence between the artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica published in the book Lygia Clark – Hélio Oiticica: Cartas, 1964-74 where many aspects beyond the work of art are revealed.

When reading the correspondence organized by Luciano Figueiredo, we are aware of this affection[6] and complicity between them both which is, inclusively, announced in the exchange of their ideas, in their creative process or their mutual help in the promotion of their work of art. This small book begins with a 1986’s quote of Lygia Clark, six years after the death of her friend, revealing their profound connection and their high degree of dedication and intimacy: “Hélio was the outside of a glove, a connection to the exterior world. Me, the inside. We both exist the moment there is a hand wearing the glove (1998, s/p.)

Perhaps there is no greater testimony of life and work of many authors than their writings and/or correspondence they exchanged with friends and family. Based on this documents and their works, we can know better who they are, who they were, what and why they did specific things, specific works, situations they experienced, how they thought, what they felt.

One of the questions we raise, which has also become a motivation, is the one about the guarantee regarding the willingness and autonomy of decision to publish certain writings – letters and diaries, for example – by who wrote them.

Regardless of its documental value, it seems relevant to make a distinction between what is private and what becomes public – should it be the artist’s responsibility and their individual freedom to allow their process to be exposed or published?

Roland Barthes understood the textual analysis implies a predisposition and attention for the fact that a text is like a fabric, as a ball of voices, that uses a lot of codes simultaneously interconnected and unfinished, thus the process in the language is never transparent (Barthes, 1981). Can we speak about unique “truth” or“reality”?

Decisions drift in a self-censorship process as well as the issue regarding the media used for their presentation and their relation with time: media changes the time and the time changes with the media.

In a lot of cases, the poetic of the creative processes are intimately connected to ontology and anthropology – the Being (existing) in Time.

Writing electronic letters is only possible recently and this factor only distinguishes all the relationships established with the time. Thus, the expression electronic letter acquires a different meaning of email or letter.

Narrative issues are treated chronologically, without the concern of the Aristotelian narrativity. Therefore, the non-linear textual construction is valued: it exists in casualty, in the circumstance that is registered at that moment – the act of writing as a performative action. It is an epistolary, chronological and ontological narrative, in which the disposition for delivery is defining of the results that arise from a need of constant contact and with characteristics related to everyday life, the experiences, or confessional aspects that activate memory and recollection – what seems similar to the process of waking up from a numb state.

This means that, when we remember something, when we explicitly express what was implicit, we emotionally change ourselves as well as the thing itself. Each time we activate a memory we create a reformulation of it, thus we can speak about re-memory, or memory of the memory, successively distinct.

If the development of knowledge naturally transforms and changes a few of our references and opinions, there is, in parallel, a characterizing personality in our mind that persists in order to guide us to research, to knowledge and to question more, meeting other or new refutations about themes that motivate us, even when we wonder about solutions and/or replies.

I consider the artistic expression as an extension of life, structuring of conscience, and an instrument that modifies sensitivity.

If objects, actions or surroundings I create change me, I’m motivated to think they can transform who enjoys them, leaving them a record in their memory or reactivating recollections, moments and lived experiences of the past, in a different context or in another way, in a reunion with what’s hidden or asleep, which always remained close without being flared or glorified. In an interlacing of Time with Space, between the tangible and the visible, in and out of myself, I proceed with the discovery of other times and spaces, where each individual can find their own, electing them.

Consequently, in my artistic realizations and materializations, there may be a tendency to wait something that refers to the Other, even if it will never be known.

Assuming the dispositional knowledge to remember is indispensable, I first start to confront with myself, with what I am through self-knowledge, allowing me to understand the relationship I establish with the society I am in, with the Others.

One of the greatest educators for the use of senses, one of the most influential artists of the 1970s and a reference of the art of the 20th century – putting Rudolf Steiner’s philosophical and educational ideas into practice – was the German Joseph Beuys.

Beuys defended that training and education failures are originated in childhood. The 1968’s sound work Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja, Nee Nee Nee Nee Nee[7], is so unique in the reply by children or by adults. This implies a basic, formation and information educational problem, in which artists can attempt to influence with their actions – a serious task for art that can result in an appealing stimulus, especially “when something is difficult, it cannot be abandoned solely because it is too difficult. (…) It is precisely what should stimulate us. If it were easy, I could be now resting” (BEUYS, 1995).

In the conducted research, in conversation with several artists, correspondence exchange, audio recorded testimonies, readings of works, letters or interviews, I’ve noticed the repletion of the words obsession, necessity, intuition, intensity or flash, regarding the attempt to describe the Impulse of Creative Imagination.

In my case, and in agreement with a lot what the artists mentioned above stated, there is an idea selection at many moments in life and that feels good, better than good, it is a fantastic feeling of anxiety and helplessness because it leaves the mouth-watering and simultaneously a sensation of inner richness. It’s with almost no explanation that there’s selection, which I consider intuitive, and from that moment on it becomes obsessive to have, to finish it, because there’s almost everything within me, or even everything already finished, and the time until its fulfilment always seems too much.

I work with representations, reflections of my most recent experiences or my almost hidden past, with no concerns for narrativity or sequence. They can also be mixtures of situations, experiences on the same subject, observations of what surrounds me and what may be enjoyed by layers, each more opaque and dense than the last, in a likely growing difficulty to understand them. It’s in the first layers and depicting experiences, supposedly common to all, that an immediate “wild” (MERLEAU-PONTY, 1994) perception can detect general phenomena experimented or known to everyone. The characters, spaces and times changes, but love is love, sex is sex, fear is fear, anger is anger, pain is pain, disappointment is disappointment, loss is loss, warmth is warmth and it doesn’t seem there is someone who hasn’t lived any of these emotions, sensations or feelings.

If the creative process is intimately related to what I live, my concerns, dreams, expectations, disappointments or fantasies, then I can consider that creation also comes from the need to try to resolve, give answers in cycles that intend to clarify – a sort of luminous grief.

“And so we transition from existential question to existential question, in an attempt to solve the world, starting with what’s bubbling inside my dome to issues that, in their core, touch the domes of others[8]”.

I consider it’s more important what brings us closer than what drives us apart and that artists who work on autobiography or self-representation sometimes face a big problem that is the lack of understanding of who analyses or translates, since they, in theory, “change the context and people may think: this is a story that only interests him or her. However, the big issue is, in fact, about creating contact points: with other people, with other cultures[9]”- a deep relation of dedication to themselves and the Other, of sharing.

We can look at Gaston Bachelard[10] (1884-1962), philosopher and poet, as a reference for many artists, especially sculptors. Who reads 1957’s Lá Poétique de L’espace or 1960’s Lá Poétique de rêverie can feel similar sensations to the ones expressed by Alberto Carneiro: "I found him through my experiences with the subject, an extension to my reflections, in the definition of a poetic that came to me more through the feeling and that found in it the theoretical formulation” (CARNEIRO, 2007).

This refers to formation and information, complements with no archetypes or doctrines to follow. Identification with formulation or expression of thought doesn’t imply neither compromises our position, but it may serve as a complement for opening any doctrine or even trend in opposition of closing or enclosure it. Perhaps it is because we should start the work from what is closer, to conquer the ability to leave and be open to what surrounds us.

As we’ve mentioned, it’s not supposed to decipher the artistic process neither create direct and objective relations between what the artist says or does. It's meant to present parallels or relations that should be deeply explored because they are not considered random since there are encounters in life experiences that determine a choice – a decision.

When individuals work the presented subject areas, particularly self-censorship during the creative process, having memory and past references in mind, there’s a deep unsatisfaction and helplessness.

Self-censorship in Creative processes is revealed through an ever unfinished and never absolute chain. A variation in connections is enough for our mind and organism to significantly change what we make of the world and the environments around us. Perception and reasoning are dependent on this in a body-mind, emotional-rational partnership. A direct involvement with memory, with the past and the interior.

Attempting to define Memory certainly is a subject for an interdisciplinary research group. Besides, there are other concepts associated with this big and broad one – recollection, reminder, reminiscence – that were approached and developed[11] throughout the history of humanity.

Regarding the focal theme of this communication, we presume there are diverse types of Memory and that these may or may not be associated with our own life experience, which means that Remembering may be different.

I will attempt to illustrate this with two examples: Do I have memories from World War II? It is impossible that any data of this period have occurred to me, but I keep in my memory what I learnt, read, listened, retained and I can bring it to the present moment. On the other hand, if I evoke a smell by saying: "it smells like bread fresh out of the oven”, the process will be different. We hold this smell in our memory and we can even feel it for a moment, but each one of us, as long as we know what freshly-baked bread is, will remember a distinct and individual moment, a lived episode, either more recent or more distant, one or several.

Creative processes will not allow a chronological perspective of time in the narrative sense, but they cannot be identified as complete abstractions. They certify richness in their possibilities to reinvent existence through their singularities and ability to remember. Through memory – which stores and is contaminated -, its constant update of what is lived – in a shuttle between various pasts of the living experience -, and through Imagination, we revisit spaces, objects, recreate concepts, make connections between the senses, that allows us to understand works of art and creative processes.

The rational knowledge and poetic invention are not essentially excluding. They are opposites in some instances but they both culminate in the moment of creation and imagination.

In an autobiographic work, the constant resource to recollection will define a continuous tissue in which doesn’t seem to make sense to establish an order directly related to the life story – it isn’t a diary.

Fear causes pain, that attracts and repels, that integrates and disintegrates. Pleasure and pain touch each other and are simultaneously divided by a very tenuous barrier, as in love and hate duality. Generated tensions can develop states of euphoria and apparent happiness.

I often say our biggest fear is acknowledging that we are alone and I had to make me feel in absolute solitude to learn to live better socially with determined realities.

In an umbilical Art/Life relation, in which “art is my form of knowledge of the world” (PAPE, s/p.), the artist and the work build each other mutually, they organize and communicate with each other – the artist’s subjects are “the emotions and the ideas” (BOURGEOIS, 1998), together in a commitment whereby the work offers the artist suggestions that can elevate their initial project as creator. From the creative process to the work of art, the artist is constantly receiving lessons.

When this moment happens, when what we imagined is materialized, we can feel strangeness… it seems it always existed or that was there, hidden, in a latent state, inside, and now it became independent, autonomous and communicant by itself.

Experimenting, including myself in the experience as my own Guinea pig in an exercise searching for awareness of unconscious processes, intensifies the self-analysis and self-knowledge process, allows one to recognize singularities – a simultaneous enrichment and defamiliarization. The exercise of attaining self-knowledge remains an arduous and methodical path but no less appealing or essential.

We should not overlook the experience that it is to live, not even in the moments we whisper or scream: “I feel as if I have been blinded for looking excessively to the world” (AL BERTO, 2009).

 

Bibliographic References

AL BERTO. O Medo – Trabalho poético 1974 – 1997. 4th Edition. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2009. Free translation.

BACHELARD, Gaston. A Poética do Espaço. Coleção Tópicos. São Paulo: Livraria Martins Fontes Editora, 1989.

BARTHES, Roland. Mitologias. Coleção Signos. Lisboa: Edições 70, 1988. Free translation.

BEUYS, Joseph, BODENMANN-RITTER, Clara. Joseph Beuys – Cada Hombre, un artista- conversaciones en Documenta 5 – 1972. Madrid: Editorial Visor, 1995. Free translation.

BOURGEOIS, Louise; BERNADAC, Marie-Laure; OBRIST, Hans-Ulrich. Louise Bourgeois - Destruction of the Father - Reconstruction of the father, Writings and Interviews 1923-1997. Londres: Violette Editions, 1998.

CARNEIRO, Alberto.Das Notas para um Diário e Outros Textos – antologia. ColeçãoArte e Produção. Lisboa:Assírio & Alvim, 2007. Free translation.

FIGUEIREDO, Luciano (Org.); CLARK, Lygia: OITICICA, Hélio. Lygia Clark – Hélio Oiticica: Cartas, 1964-74. 2ª Edição. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 1998.

FOUCAULT, Michel. L’Ordre du discours, Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1971a. Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/2520353/Michel-Foucault-A-Ordem-do-Discurso in August 10th of 2013. Free translation.

FOUCAULT, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. USA: Pantheon Books, 1972.

GOFFMAN, Erving. A Apresentação do Eu na Vida de Todos os Dias. Coleção Antropos. Lisboa: Relógio D’Água Editores Lda., 1993.

MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice. Fenomenologia da Percepção. Coleção Tópicos. São Paulo: Martins Fontes Editora, 1994.

PESSOA, Fernando. Livro do Desassossego por Bernardo Soares. Lisboa: Ática, 1982. Free translation.

SÁ-CARNEIRO, Mário de, Cartas de Mário de Sá-Carneiro a Fernando Pessoa. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 2001. Free translation.

TARKOVSKY, Andrei. HUNTER-BLAIR, Kitty. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. University of Texas Press, 1989.

WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig; OGDEN, C. K. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Project Gutenberg. 2010. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/5740-pdf.pdf

WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig. Últimos Escritos Sobre a Filosofia da Psicologia. Lisboa: Edição Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Serviço de Educação e Bolsas, 2007b. Free translation.

 

Other documents in digital format

BEUYS, Joseph. Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja, Nee Nee Nee Nee Nee. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0bukPRvxZQ&feature=related on August 10th of 2014.

PAPE, Lygia, Projeto Lygia Pape. Retrieved from http://www.lygiapape.org.br/pt/ on August 10th of 2011. Free translation.

 

[1] During the making of my PhD Thesis/Work I felt the need to verbally express thought and one day I decided to áudio record a few moments/thought. Aware of the incapability to verbally exteriorize thought in their entirety, I considered this a good exercise. Verbal expression recordings, rhythms, connections and the speeds of the mind are incompatible with the action of writing. I still do it to this day as an experiential time record and use it as a work instrument/tool. A valuable exercise that I never thought would be so hard and so enriching. In 2013, I conducted an individual exhibition called Pensamentos Altos in CAESV, Sever de Vouga, Portugal. You can access to a few photographic reproductions of the exhibited works and a lot of others in http://www.ruterosas.com.

[2] Touching only so briefly on the subject, I’m referring to Hegel’s proposition – among so many authors who wrote about language – whereby the symbolic world is only built through the interaction between two or more people. Realities merge through the individual interactions, or through what the Self does, regulated by what We socially build, perhaps because, although difficult, the self-knowledge is motivating, feeds the Other and others’ knowledge, fundamental to our existence as human beings and consequently as artists.

[3] Living in society implies a clear awareness of what is surrounding us and what is participating in the development of our Self of Erving Goffman. Between the Realities and Artifices, the Staging and the Self, it’s important to highlight the distance we give ourselves which derives from the process of burying ourselves in. The idea of a Deteriorated Identity or Stigma that are contagious as a bacteria or virus, a disease of the human being, is manifested by the inability to interact with the Other.

[4] In L’Ordre du Discours, for example, Foucault analyzes the specificities and specialities of the discourse.

[5]A Confissão de Lúcio and the poems collection, Dispersão, also reveal this confessional act in the writer’s work.

[6] The summary of this publication, organized by Luciano Figueiredo, lists a few ways of treatment used by the artists’ letters.

[7] The sound installation, a 64’53’’ audio, was created for Staatliche Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, where it was presented in December 14th of 1968. Work exhibited at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, DE.

[8] GUEDES, Ana, artist, in the e-mail exchange we conducted on August 18th of 2009.

[9] ALMEIDA, Efraín, artist, in a recorded conversation, July 2009.

[10] We have no doubts regarding the importance of Bachelard’s work. Recognized in the social sciences world due to his scientific production about the epistemological and methodological issues in contemporary philosophy, he was a nonconformist of rationalism – heritage from the 18th and 19th centuries -, valuing the poetic image of things – the imaginative at the service of the thought.

A lot of his Works contemplate concepts as: dream, reverie, poetic, alchemy, time, imagination. Bachelard’s richness fundamentallyconsists in bringing to his intellectual production a double project: nicknamed as diurnal aspect – where concepts mostly connected to epistemology can be found – and the nocturnal aspect – where we find the complementarity of the poetry’s axis (of the dream as well – and subsequently of the reverie) and the science’s. When bringing closer this aspects, Bachelard demonstrates that the division between reason and imagination is very clear when we use the rational way but, if we use the oneiric way, reason and imagination articulate, overlap and complement each other.

[11] How many authors would reflect on Memory? It will not be simple to list. From Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Leibniz, Locke, Descartes, Husserl, Hobbes, Wolff, Baumgarten, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, to Freud, or Bergson, we are aware of their presence in our memory. The essays they wrote demonstrate how close they were with each other and the different times and contexts they lived in.

 

In VI Congresso Internacional de Pesquisa (Auto)Biográfica, Modos de Viver, Narrar e Guardar. Rio de Janeiro. BIOgraph

ISSN 2178-60676