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work with an object, because the object would become a practice, something over which you
could have no kind of control or ownership. And it would try to raise other matters: firstly, it
would reach more people to the extent that you no longer needed to go to the information
because the information would come to you; and consequently there would be the right conditions
for “exploding” the notion of a sacred space. (...)
Insofar as museums, galleries or pictures form a sacred space for representation, they
become a Bermuda Triangle: anything you put there, any idea, is automatically going to be
neutralized. I think people tried primarily to make a commitment with the public. Not with
the purchaser of art (the market). But with the audience sitting out there in the stalls. The hazy
face, the most important element in the whole structure. Working with the wonderful possibility
that the plastic arts provide of creating a new language to express each new idea. Always
working with the possibility of transgression in terms of reality. In other words, making works
that do not simply exist in an approved, consecrated, sacred space; that do not happen simply
in terms of a canvas, a surface, a representation. No longer working with the metaphor of
gunpowder itself. You would no longer work with the object, because the object would be a
practice, something over which you could have no kind of control or ownership.
This text is taken from statements made by Meireles in a recorded interview with Antônio Manuel.
This extract was originally published in Ronaldo Brito and Eudoro Augusto Macieira de
Sousa, Cildo Meireles, arte brasileira contemporânea (Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE, 1981), and
more recently in Cildo Meireles: IVAM Centre del Carme, 2 febrero/23 abril 1995 (Barcelona:
Generalitat Valenciana, Conselleria de Cultura, 1995), p. 174, from which these extracts are
taken.