Arma Branca, 2011
Still: Courtesy the artist | Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo & Rio de Janeiro
Collection
Single-channel video installation, color, sound
18 min
Arma Branca (2011) is a video work by the Brazilian artist Rodrigo Cass. In films that have been described as reversals of the still life tradition, Cass activates an economy of materials by engaging them in simple, repetitive gestures.[1] In Arma Branca, we see a white plastic bag hung on a brown wall. Incrementally, knives are placed into the bag, causing the bag to gradually split until its contents falls to the ground. The scene breaks, repeats, and the film continues in this vein, with each new plastic bag signaling another attempt to test the bag’s capacity, and the inevitable result always failure.
This sense of predictability transforms the viewing experience by organizing our focus around the moment of the bag’s rupture. At the same time, the drama of this rupture is diminished by its repetition to the point of banality. As Luisa Duarte has written, the drive towards this condition in all of his works yields “an aestheticism that implies an ethics against the regime of the spectacle.” She continues, “the fact that the body and the face never appear, but only the hands, at most the arms too, contributes to the absence of drama and expression. There is no subjective ballast here. But hands that work methodically and repeatedly over material.”[2] Indeed, Cass’s videos are rhythmic and meditative, eliciting signs of the influence of Carmelite philosophy on his practice (between 2000 and 2008, Cass joined the order of Carmel, living in convents in Itu, Mogi das Cruzes, Barretos, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte). In his own work, Cass combines the Carmelite philosophy of contemplation with the legacy of minimalism in movements in Brazil’s art history, resulting in the spartan tone which characterizes works like Arma Branca. Indeed, the looped format of Cass’s video works is reflective of tenets of the Neo-Concrete manifesto, particularly where “by spatialization of the work is meant the fact that it [the work of art] is continually making itself present, it is always regaining the impulse that generated it and of which it was, in turn, the origin.”[3]
The film derives from of a larger body produced during Cass’s year long residency at the Pampulha Art Museum in Belo Horizonte. Cass has described the relation of Arma Branca to his observations of the city during his stay there: “I frequented the Municipal Market and the New Market a lot; there are a lot of disposable stores there, and I started buying packaging papers, plastic bags and knives, and working with them on video. The flux of the big city caught my attention, so little space for so many people. The city can no longer support its population. This relationship with the city appears in Arma Branca, in the short time that the bag can contain the knives I deposit.”[4] The theme of containment, which runs throughout Cass’s films, offers Arma Branca a conceptual significance which is rooted in, but transcends its minimal physical content. The operation of the knives in slicing through the plastic bag has an art historical antecedent: citing Lucio Fontana’s spatial concept paintings as a major influence, Cass speaks of the way that they enable us “to look at the space beyond painting, to the other side” … “A simple operation reveals a complexity of actions,” he says.[5]Similarly, it is in the intrusions which the knives make into the bag and their subsequent fall that Arma Branca’s communication of the relation between containment and violence can be found. –Elsa Gray
[1] Luisa Duarte, “Rodrigo Cass.” 2014. Available at https://www.rodrigocass.com/luisa-duarte
[2] ibid
[3] See Ferreira Gullar’s Neo-Concrete Manifesto, originally published 22 March, 1959 in Journal do Brazil
[4] Interview between the artist and Ana Paula Cohen. Available at https://www.rodrigocass.com/ana-paula-cohen
[5] Quoted from an interview with the artist. Available at https://www.conceptualfinearts.com/cfa/2015/05/27/qa-with-rodrigo-cass/
18 min
Arma Branca (2011) is a video work by the Brazilian artist Rodrigo Cass. In films that have been described as reversals of the still life tradition, Cass activates an economy of materials by engaging them in simple, repetitive gestures.[1] In Arma Branca, we see a white plastic bag hung on a brown wall. Incrementally, knives are placed into the bag, causing the bag to gradually split until its contents falls to the ground. The scene breaks, repeats, and the film continues in this vein, with each new plastic bag signaling another attempt to test the bag’s capacity, and the inevitable result always failure.
This sense of predictability transforms the viewing experience by organizing our focus around the moment of the bag’s rupture. At the same time, the drama of this rupture is diminished by its repetition to the point of banality. As Luisa Duarte has written, the drive towards this condition in all of his works yields “an aestheticism that implies an ethics against the regime of the spectacle.” She continues, “the fact that the body and the face never appear, but only the hands, at most the arms too, contributes to the absence of drama and expression. There is no subjective ballast here. But hands that work methodically and repeatedly over material.”[2] Indeed, Cass’s videos are rhythmic and meditative, eliciting signs of the influence of Carmelite philosophy on his practice (between 2000 and 2008, Cass joined the order of Carmel, living in convents in Itu, Mogi das Cruzes, Barretos, São Paulo and Belo Horizonte). In his own work, Cass combines the Carmelite philosophy of contemplation with the legacy of minimalism in movements in Brazil’s art history, resulting in the spartan tone which characterizes works like Arma Branca. Indeed, the looped format of Cass’s video works is reflective of tenets of the Neo-Concrete manifesto, particularly where “by spatialization of the work is meant the fact that it [the work of art] is continually making itself present, it is always regaining the impulse that generated it and of which it was, in turn, the origin.”[3]
The film derives from of a larger body produced during Cass’s year long residency at the Pampulha Art Museum in Belo Horizonte. Cass has described the relation of Arma Branca to his observations of the city during his stay there: “I frequented the Municipal Market and the New Market a lot; there are a lot of disposable stores there, and I started buying packaging papers, plastic bags and knives, and working with them on video. The flux of the big city caught my attention, so little space for so many people. The city can no longer support its population. This relationship with the city appears in Arma Branca, in the short time that the bag can contain the knives I deposit.”[4] The theme of containment, which runs throughout Cass’s films, offers Arma Branca a conceptual significance which is rooted in, but transcends its minimal physical content. The operation of the knives in slicing through the plastic bag has an art historical antecedent: citing Lucio Fontana’s spatial concept paintings as a major influence, Cass speaks of the way that they enable us “to look at the space beyond painting, to the other side” … “A simple operation reveals a complexity of actions,” he says.[5]Similarly, it is in the intrusions which the knives make into the bag and their subsequent fall that Arma Branca’s communication of the relation between containment and violence can be found. –Elsa Gray
[1] Luisa Duarte, “Rodrigo Cass.” 2014. Available at https://www.rodrigocass.com/luisa-duarte
[2] ibid
[3] See Ferreira Gullar’s Neo-Concrete Manifesto, originally published 22 March, 1959 in Journal do Brazil
[4] Interview between the artist and Ana Paula Cohen. Available at https://www.rodrigocass.com/ana-paula-cohen
[5] Quoted from an interview with the artist. Available at https://www.conceptualfinearts.com/cfa/2015/05/27/qa-with-rodrigo-cass/