pierre by pierre
Introduction to Rio Negro Journal by Pierre Restany
The diary begins on July 14 and ends on August 15, 1978. It is handwritten, almost without erasure, aboard the ship during the ascent of the Rio Negro river, and it mixes personal considerations with historical and philosophical reflections. Restany always finds a moment to write while traveling, despite the difficult and uncomfortable conditions of the crossing river, such as humidity, heat and mosquitoes, as well his injured foot that makes him suffer.
"Life on board, given the rustic conditions of comfort, is a matter of freely given discipline. There is in this self-control an existential dimension that manifests itself in addition to the moral exercise of respect for the other. (p. 47)" As in the diaries of anthropologists such as Malinowski or Leiris, there are still moments of despair when he feels nostalgia for the acient Europe: "It is 3:30 p.m. and a limitless drowsiness seizes me ... After all, why? For nothing..." To then recover himself: "The technological Humanism of which I became a defender in my theory of New Realism rests in the sense of a modern nature of industrial and urban essence." Loving nature could constitute a kind of dialectical counterpoint within the center of urban nature. Although we have not learned to love the modern city enough, we have already learned to respect nature, to love it in itself "
Excerpts from the Rio Negro Journal by Pierre Restany - Regina Jehá’s Selection
July 14, 1978
14 hours - Flight Paris-Cayenne-Manaus
This is the fourth logbook I write, and second referring to Brazil.
Wednesday, July 19. South of the Urubianu Islands, in front of Moura
"The storm and the wind made the temperature drop sharply last night. The cold dampness penetrates our bones. I'm happy, very happy to bring my waterproof coat: it's colder than in Paris on the worst days of last spring. And to say that we are almost equal to the equator. (...)"
"Frans and André (Palluch) left with their motorized canoe to shoot the sunset over the river, whose riverbed is majestic in this place. The fascination of the Amazon rainforest on this ascent to the Rio Negro river is almost magical. Hard to believe that I left Paris only 6 days ago, such is the feeling of being transported to an electrifying and sweeping environment. Seen from the river, the forest is a continuous and changeable spectacle, in all gradations of daylight, from dawn to dusk, and from night to moonlight. Yesterday was a full moon night. Magic night, a little crazy... who could exactly define the effects of our satellite's attraction on our psychology? I think of Serge Hutin and I die of a mental laugh. I imagine his talk about indigenous shamanism or the rites of full moon on Rio Negro river nights. What paradox this nature at the same time so strong and so weak, so spectacular and so hostile. (...)"
“A empreitada do pintor Sepp e do escultor Frans não poderia ser mais louca. Testemunhar a Amazônia tentando escapar do círculo vicioso do provincialismo, confiando na universalidade da linguagem da arte e no valor de belas imagens, expressão de uma realidade intensamente vivida no plano físico e emocional.”
"The work of the painter Sepp and the sculptor Frans could not be crazier. Witness the Amazon Rainforest trying to escape the vicious circle of provincialism, relying on the universality of art language and the value of beautiful images, expression of a reality intensely lived on the physical and emotional plane.
Thursday, July 20. Moura-Carvoeiro
"It's 8 o'clock in the morning and we just crossed the village of Moura. An anchorage, a church and some 20 houses scattered along the river. This relative population density is surprising. The river seems abruptly inhabited, we are no longer alone, we must share with others. In 5 minutes, the city of Moura disappears from our gaze.
Life on board, given the rustic conditions of comfort, is a matter of freely given discipline. There is in this self-control an existential dimension that manifests itself in addition to the moral exercise of respect for the other.
“I remember a discussion with Dino Buzzati about the army at the time of the first scandals about the Italian information services. Buzzati confided to me: ‘One of the most harmonious times of my life was during my military service, where I end up as a reserve lieutenant". And he explained the balance that gives individual consciousness the practice of discipline, understanding, acceptance and the application of collective rules. (...)’
"When I speak of nature as a discipline, I understand this from the way Buzzati loved and accepted military discipline. Not as servitude, but as a sensitive revealer, a vision catalyst."
Saturday, July 22. Maporé-Tomar Island
"During breakfast, Frans contemplates the panoramic landscape of the forest that unfolds in front of us on the river's edge. The landscape changes, the trees become larger. The structure of the trunks and the branches emerge more and more full of foliage. ‘How can Mondrian pass from the tree to the verticality-horizontality of the square', he asks, refering to Otterlo's paintings of the Kröller-Müller museum which illustrate the evolution of the neoplastic painter. It was Mondrian's relentless power of analysis that pushed the perceptual system to its extreme consequences: nature as the point of reference for an invariant structure. I feel that Frans is constantly attracted and repelled by this manifestation of the system spirit. He fights analytical temptation through emotional openness, opposes the sensitive ecstasy to the spirit of geometry. Frans met Maria Martins, Brazilian surrealist sculptor, Brazillian ambassador in Paris and New York, who introduced Mondrian to America during the war. This great lady was the artisan behind the recognition in extremis (Mondrian dies in 1944 in NY) for the neoplasticism theorist work, ignored during its twenty years of his Parisian existence. Frans tells me of the pressures that Maria Martins had to make on Alfred Barr so that he would not only accept a Mondrian, but still have him hang on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (...) "
"Innside, Frans knows very well why Mondrian has gone from tree to square. If he proposes to me the question is because he must somehow exorcise the problem, the analytic temptation. I think of the sensation I had yesterday of participating, as a witness, chosen by virtue of deep elective affinities, in an initiation journey of perceptive consciousness level."
"As we speak, Frans and I, our gaze rests on Sepp who photographs: his expression is of dazzled ecstasy, a rapture that gives a naive and youthful spirit to his work. This joy of perception is the fruit of method. In such a practice of perceptual availability, each instant counts, both the waiting and the click. Frans and Sepp live in affective symbiosis with their cameras. They never miss their gadgets, from dawn to dusk. During meals, the camera is always within reach. (...) "
"The systematic and repetitive gesture reveals its meaning insofar as, as a part, identifies itself with the Whole.
Pierre Restany, Journal du Rio Negro - Vers le Naturalisme Integral, Editions Wild Project
About Restany, Preface by Gilles A. Tiberghien
"Pierre Restany (1930-2003) is the most important post-war art critic in France. In 1960, together with Yves Klein, Arman and others, turned the theoretician-propeller of the New Realists group. In the summer of 1978, Pierre Restany embarks to the heart of the Amazon with Brazilian artists Frans Krajcberg and Sepp Baendereck. This boat expedition along the Rio Negro river reveals a disturbing human and sensory experience and will be for Restany the occasion of a theoretical revolution.
The Rio Negro journal results in Integral Naturalism Manifesto. Returning to the founding principles of New Realism, Restany states that is nature what now stands at the heart of artistic and cultural bets. Facing mosquitoes and hangovers, it invites the West from the 21st century to a "Second Renaissance."
Three decades later, this prophetic and entertaining text imposes itself as a classic, which Restany reveals to us "au naturel."
biografia
Pierre Restany, bon in 1930, spent his childhood in Morocco and went to university in France, Italy and Ireland. He graduated in literatura (aesthetics and history of art). Twenty-five years off passionate, often polemical activity make him an out-of-the-ordinary figure on the arte scene, known all over the world through his many contribution to art journals and audiovisual media, numerous lecture tours at universities and museums, and through his membership of the juries of countless international art shows.
His meeting with Yves Klein in 1955 was of capital importance to him. Klein gave him the opportunity for a total reconsideration of the values of language. Sensing the openings and limitations of American abstract expressionism and European, lyrical abstraction, he was to draw his own conclusions in a book < Lyrisme et Abstraction >. This reflection led him gradually to build up his theory of Nouveau Réalism - the discovery of a modern sense of nature, and a return to a humanism of the industrial object. The group of Nouveaux Réalistes (Arman, César, Christo, Deschamps, Dufrêne, Hains, Klein, Raysse, Rotella, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Spoerri, Tinguely, Villeglé) which Restany founded in Paris and in Milan in 1960, illustrates this < révolution du regard >, this new approach to contemporary world of city, factory or street.
1968 afforded him the opportunity for a critical and perspective reflection on the sociological framework of contemporary art. The < Petit Livre Rouge de la Révolution Picturale > and the < Livre Blanc de I’Art Total > illustrate the preoccupations in the instantaneousness of the moment.
Ten years later he wrote < L’Autre Face de I’Arte>, an essay published in monthly instalments in Domus from January to September 1978. In this work he again outlines the story of the deviatory function in contemporary art, from Futurism and Dada up to the problematics of conceptual art, through the expressive adventure of the art-object, from the conquest of its significant autonomy to its steady dematerialization.
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Japan, United States, Iran, Amazonia, Australia, etc… Pierre Restany is an indefatigable traveller across the world from East to West, drawn by his curiosity towards everything which is being done or attempted anywhere.
In July and August 1978, with Sepp Baendereck and Frans Krajcberg, he sailed up the Rio Negro, the principal northern tributary of the Amazon, from Manaus to the Venezuelan frontier. The experience was a profound emotional shock to him, whilst widening his reflection on the modern sense of nature. In the Rio Negro Manifesto, drafted in the heart of the Amazon forest, reference is made to an integral naturalism, a fundamental discipline of thought and a method for the affective recharging of sensibility: an objective, synthetic and planetary response to the questions posed by art today concerning its existence and purpose; a key with which to try to see things better in today’s conceptual chaos, to attempt to tackle positively the twofold conclusion gathering on the immediate horizon of our consciousness - the summing up of a century and of a millenium.