ORGAN DONATIONS, DONATIONS OF MEANING
Bianca Knaak*
Zenilda Cardozo does Organ Donation! Despite its title, Organ Donation, which refers to an extremely serious and delicate circumstance for society, this is an art project, not an advertising campaign for public health. However, this art project replicates in its meanderings the equally delicate and complex circumstance that involves every artist and his production in search of a space of projection and socio-cultural and artistic survival. In this tangle of actions, expectations, urgencies, politics and anxious hopes, the artist Zenilda Cardozo intends to discuss the creative impulse, (un)knowledge, (in)visibility, the procedures of social and artistic inscription and the games of power and legitimation proper to the world, which includes the world of art.
Well then, in this context, assuming herself to be a kind of "hunger artist" who, as Kafka described, is the only one who maintains conviction in what she does and yet is never truly satisfied, Zenilda Cardozo, "suffering in the flesh", keeps on working, insistently and endlessly. In her material repertoire (copper wire, beads, fabrics, stones), she finds the gesture and the artifices required for the flow of her need for symbolic production, for the search for meaning and records of life and, like every artist, she awaits recognition and the gaze of others for her achievements, where she inscribes her own approval. In this constancy, always by a thread, literally, she now presents part of her results in a project of multiple donations: donations of time, donations of organs, donations of work, donations of the body, donations of meaning and viable interpretations.
Her objects are free recreations of organs and tissues of the human body, sometimes privileging their anatomy, sometimes exploring their systemic function, or simply poetizing plastically her particular impressions on such elements. In these objects/organs there is no rigidity of conception and accidents are welcome, as much as insights for future advances. The rigidity is in the way this project comes to public and in each stage: through a personal electronic invitation, people (elected?) were forwarded to a blog: http://doacoesdocorpo.blogspot.com (available from 27 July to 15 September) where they could apply to receive as a donation an organ/object, created by the artist, thus participating in an artistic action baptised by the author as Doações do Corpo (Body Donations). This application required a justification for the desired option, as well as the reading and acceptance of the terms expressed in a long regulation which, on purpose, was written in a manner analogous to the regulations that accompany contemporary art exhibitions. A contractual situation that most artists know well and cannot escape (at least not completely) when they are required to prove an artistic curriculum. Historically, as a consequence of the autonomy of art (a process which began in the Renaissance), artists have been subjected to a tacit script of specialized mediations which select and indicate, so to speak, what responds, in each period of time, to what is conventionally called art. Thus, in Zenilda's work, the homology between the health system/art system is completed in the inclusion of a clause which provides for the irrevocable decision of a judging commission made up of specialists (unidentified until the end of the "contest") which will determine to whom the organs/prizes are destined.
In this warp of equivalences it is clear the artist's intention to link the need for visibility of a symbolic production as artistic production, under the plots/dramas of a system that legitimates by exclusion. Artistic circuits form a dynamic, polycentric and multifunctional gear system, accelerated in our time by information and communication technologies, which brings together academic studies, advertising strategies and public policies for the construction of institutional authority and, at the same time, the maintenance of the liberalism of a market of its own. However, with Doações do Corpo e Doação de Órgãos (Body Donations and Organ Donations), the artist does not engage in a critique of the negation of institutionalising processes, but rather uses the demonstration of this selective operation as a strategy of insertion from the "inside out", which has been very common in the art world, especially since the 1960s.
In a daily craft, full of tricks, skills and subtleties, Zenilda forges organs full of LIFE, in the endless process of creation and self-giving, from her sensitive perception of the world of living beings (including the world of arts). But to whom? Where to forward their "donations"? When artists no longer need to produce under official orders, as they once did for the State and the Church, given the difficulties of exhibition/acceptance/consumption of their work, professionally, after all, what will they produce for then, for whom?
Trying to answer this unavoidable premise, she, as a "hunger artist", finds in this weaving of meanings a whole science capable of reprogramming herself without abandoning her aesthetic nature, inapprehensible by conspicuous consumption. And, while she proceeds with her project of Organ Donation, the artist also raises questions that, among other possibilities, deal with bioscience, bioethics and biodiversity. However, being Donations of the Body and Donations of Organs, two moments of a work that results from the psychic artistic drive (FREUD), they also tangent and instigate greater reflections, in the extension of the concepts of BIOLOGY: LIFE = ART = ART of LIVING + ART = + LIFE.
*Adjunct Professor at the Department of Visual Arts of the Institute of Arts at UFRGS. PhD in History, between 1999 and 2002 she directed the State Institute of Visual Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rio Grande do Sul.