Tunga: Alchemy of Words

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In an interview with P.S.1 Director Alanna Heiss, Tunga speaks about Brazilian influences, magical happenings and art's ability to transform reality, which can be seen in his installations Laminated Souls and At the Light of Both Worlds this summer.


Alanna Heiss: Tunga, Can you tell me about your background as an artist and what or who was most influential?

Tunga: Two components were certainly present in my background–Constructivism and Surrealism, and my Brazilian cultural background. Art was a way for me to investigate and experiment with theories that handle reality with good doses of poetry; this way I combined motivations of both movements.
The strong presence of Constructivism in Brazil in the 1950s and early '60s brought together the discovery of imaginary mechanics, psychoanalytical theories, and early Surrealist ideas. Both practices took local colors or, let's say, contributions as migratory theories. So the Constructive impetus, which would become Minimalism in North America, was assumed earlier in Brazil through phenomenology, and explored questions of the body through neo-concrete practices.

AH: Were you and the artists of your generation reacting to Brazilian Constructivists like Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica?

T: No, I really don't think so. Artists like Lygia and Helio are Constructivists; they expanded Constructivism, opening different languages and fields of exploration. My generation was concerned with this, but we were also concerned with structural psychoanalysis, the theory of language, and so on.

AH: Laminated Souls is being presented at P.S.1 this summer. The Brazilian tradition I'm most interested in is magic. In what ways are you interested in magic and how does this appear in your work?

T: Laminated Souls is more of a conceptual and structural work than a magical one. It has all the effects that make a poem or artwork magical, in the sense that it transforms reality or the meaning of reality. I don't think there is any connection between extraordinary things and the idea of magic.

AH: So there's no intervention of magical creatures?

T: The flies remain flies and the pseudoscientists remain pseudo-scientists. When scientists study the flies, they inadvertently become flies themselves, but this isn't a magical process. With language, we have the power to become other things, and this is the strength of poetry. Perhaps this can be considered the magic of language. In the same sense, Rimbaud used to talk about the alchemy of words. Yes it is alchemy, but it's Rimbaud's alchemy and not medieval magic.

AH: And the human gaze metamorphoses into a fly's gaze in your "hypersymmetric" lab...

T: Expanding the human gaze is a way of expanding experience and knowledge. Of course, it's not a matter of technically or chemically transforming the human eye, but of suggesting a metamorphosis by experimenting with the work. It is provoked by a series of effects such as activating the space by moir's, reflections, transparencies, projected shadows and so on, and leading to a reevaluation of what is seen.

AH: In a separate gallery, you will also be showing the large installation At the Light of Both Worlds. This work draws a lot from classical European works. For an artist like you who is a combination of so many geographical associations, what is this particular European connection?

T: The connection is to the European tradition of the museum . The imagery used in that sculpture isn't necessarily from Western culture, but is part of the collection of a Western museum. On one side of the installation, the dead skulls are in equilibrium with the beautiful "dead" heads, those cut from antique sculptures, thus creating a balance between European and non- European traditions.