Cildo Meireles

I recently visited the Cildo Meireles exhibition on the 4th floor of the Tate Modern. Cildo is a Brazilian conceptual artist with a think tank full of exceptionally quirky, humorous and powerful ideas. The exhibition itself was hugely impressive, possibly the most being the Mission/Missions (How to Build Cathedrals) (1987) where 600,000 pennies lay underneath a ceiling of 2,000 hanging bones, connected by a column of 800 communion wafers. The idea behind it is the connection of material power, spiritual power, and the inevitable consequence of the conjunction of them both - tragedy, represented by the bones. I found it quite worrying that i was instantly drawn to the sea of coins, however 600,000 small, round, shiny pieces of metal worth anything are bound to ensnare the interest of anybody over a few discs comprising of wheat flour and water.

Room one was possibly my favourite, certainly the room that contained the highest density of realised ideas. It contained pieces like Money tree (1969), a stack of Brazilian banknotes with an asking price of twenty times that of the actual monetary value, after having been objectified as an art piece by being placed upon a plinth by the artist. This piece along with the 'zero dollar bill' and 'zero cent' coin were all explorations of the idea of value, and how we perceive material object's worth. In the same room were a series of drawings backed up by four sculptures exploring space, with hallucinatory alterations to the corner at the meeting of two walls.

One thing i really enjoyed about the exhibition was the interactive ability the viewer has with many of the installations. Fontes (1992/2008) is a room with a spiral walkway whose path becomes more and more narrow as the viewer progresses inward until you reach the central area where the path dissolves into nothing and you are entirely consumed by some of the 6,000 room-height hanging rulers that make up the 'walls' or 'sides' to the path. It's fairly difficult to describe but when inside the room the is some sense of complete disorientation, as the definitions of time and space are removed. To explain, 1,000 clocks line the walls, however the numbers on the clocks are laid out at unequal and random intervals, making it impossible to tell the time. The ruler's measurements are similarly spread out and confusing, with no logical underlying structure to the placement of each increment of measurement. The idea of the room is therefore to remove any sense of time or space, and connected with the fact that you have the physical ability to become almost lost within the hanging rulers of the room, it is not only an interesting idea but an entertaining experience.

I walked into room three to find a spotlight highlighting an area of the floor in an apparently otherwise empty room. As is walked closer i saw something small and rectangular placed on the floor bathing in the spotlight and it was only when i knelt down to get a really good look at it that i saw what it actually was. A small 9mm by 9mm cube consisting of two pieces of wood somehow joined together was literally the only thing in the room. Not only was this a wonderfully intimate experience with a piece of art, that being a work of immensely small scale, there is also some very interesting ideas behind it. The inspiration for Southern Cross (1969-70) comes from Meireles' understanding of a problem in his home country.

He describes how the piece represents "the oversimplification imposed by the proselytising missionaries (essentially the Jesuits) on the cosmology of the Tupi Indians. (Who reside in southern Brazil) They reduced an indigenous divinity to the god of thunder when in reality their system of belief was much more complex, poetic and concrete matter, emerging through mediation of their sacred trees, oak and pine. Through the (rubbing together of) these two timbers the divinity would manifest its presence." The piece 'Southern Cross' is indeed fabricated from these two woods, and so the story and plight of the Tupi Indians is revealed through the viewer's inquiring interest upon finding a sculpture so small. I also like the idea that this little sculpture has the conceptual ability to burn down the entirety of its surroundings. Good stuff.