<p>巴西雕塑家通過向現代主義大師致敬，從而更好地表達他們。</p>

Evan Moffitt

Erika Verzutti對藝術史的熱忱永無止境

<p>Nothing in the world is hungrier than a desiring gaze. At least that’s a precept of second-wave feminist art theory, which proposed that looking at art should be understood as a form of consumption. According to this view, the female nudes in baroque and Renaissance paintings are succulent&nbsp;meals cooked up by male artists for other, richer men to devour. There’s much truth to this version of history, though it tends to ignore that women have appetites, too. And&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7285/Erika-Verzutti">Erika Verzutti</a> is a very hungry artist. An omnivorous lover of art history, she metabolizes its many styles and references in her sculptures made of bronze, concrete, plaster, and papier-mâché.Verzutti makes the heaviest of these materials seem airy and weightless, in much the same way that she injects buoyant humor into her classical discipline. For her, the canon is both food and fertilizer: Her cast fruit and vegetables, arranged to resemble historical artworks, simultaneously muck up male-dominated narratives and revere the masters by imitating them.</p>

<p>Take, for instance, <em>Cocoa Tower </em>(2014), a slender totem of cacao pods that have been stacked, cast in bronze, and splattered with pink, white, and green paint. The work resembles&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8477/Constantin-Brancusi">Constantin Brâncuși</a>’s monumental <em>Endless Column</em> (1938), which rises over the Romanian city&nbsp;of Târgu&nbsp;Jiu. One could imagine Verzutti’s version at a larger scale, towering above the canopy of the Brazilian Amazon. Its seemingly edible arrangement, meanwhile, reflects the principle of anthropophagy, or cultural cannibalism, first theorized by Oswald de Andrade in his <em>Anthropophagic Manifesto </em>(1928). An essential Modernist text, the manifesto argues that, like the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon known to practice ritual cannibalism, Brazilian artists should consume as many cultural influences as they can in order to produce their work. De Andrade believed Brazil itself was a singular stew (or feijoada, perhaps) of those cultural influences, and that only the most voracious of appetites could channel this diversity into a new and uniquely Brazilian art. Verzutti takes up his charge with deadpan literalism, transforming the tropical fruit and vegetables of Brazilian markets into the forms that have shaped the country’s artistic and popular imagination. As the curator André Mesquita observed in <em>The Indiscipline of Sculpture</em>, the catalog for the artist’s eponymous 2021 survey at the Museu de arte&nbsp;de São Paulo, ‘Verzutti’s vital creation plays an anthropophagic role by devouring the canonized, undoing its code, and regurgitating it as something of a different nature.’</p>

<p>Harris’ original montage was a composition of hundreds of photographs and newspaper clippings, many of them sourced from his 2001 photographic essay on racism in Italian soccer for <em style="background-color: initial;">The New York Times Magazine </em>(Harris previously worked as a magazine photographer), interspersed with pictures of the artist’s own earlier works and artworks from the canon, such as <strong>Gustave Courbet</strong>’s <em style="background-color: initial;">L’Origine du monde</em> (1866). Between underwear ads, a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6731/Jean-Michel-Basquiat">Basquiat&nbsp;</a>painting, and a McDonald’s french fries container, these elements are joined mostly in incongruity, though seen through Harris’ eye for gendered and racial subtexts: how everyone in a stadium audience is white, for instance, and if soccer resembles bullfighting, with the players more bulls than matadors.</p><p>The dense network of content is organized around a striking centerpiece: an Adidas ad showing a young Black man giving French soccer player Zinedine Zidane a pedicure. Harris had come across this picture in another experience of frisson a few years earlier, when he recognized in it an uncanny resemblance to <strong>Édouard Manet</strong>’s painting <em>Olympia </em>(1863) of a Black female servant receding into the background of a portrait of a naked white woman. The ad contains the same element of fetishization, though here of white masculinity, accompanied by an unthinking exhibition of racial disparity. In Harris’ <em>Ready-Made </em>(2001) and several other works this image is punctuated with yellow jets of dried semen – always emphasizing and complicating the tensions of racial difference and sexual sameness barely disguised in the original.&nbsp;</p>

<p>We were joined by the writer and curator Fernanda Brenner, who organized Verzutti’s first solo institutional exhibition at Pivô, a São Paulo kunsthalle, in 2016. There, her&nbsp;hand-molded enormous plaster swans seemed to float through the sinuous galleries, unencumbered by the concrete architecture. <em>Nessie</em> (2008), a phallic form in clay, resembled the spectral head in alleged photos of the Loch Ness Monster. It also recalled Verzutti’s many ‘Tarsilas’ (2004–18), sculptures of varying sizes and mediums that honor the Brazilian Modernist painter&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/29439/Tarsila-do-Amaral">Tarsila do Amaral</a>. Inspired by a phallic green tendril in do Amaral’s 1929 painting <em>Sol Poente</em> <em>(Setting Sun) </em>– a work that inspired&nbsp;<em>The Anthropophagic Manifesto</em> – Verzutti’s&nbsp;‘Tarsilas’ are a legion of little monsters come to nibble at art history’s moldering foundations. In <em>Tarsila com Novo</em> (<em>Tarsila with New</em>, 2011), the creature duels with a cast bronze zucchini. For <em>Tarsila&nbsp;com&nbsp;Koons</em> (2015), Verzutti placed a single cast grapefruit, painted iridescent blue, at the base of the flaccid column. Resembling one of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/stories/meet-the-artists-jeff-koons">Jeff Koons</a>’ ‘Gazing Balls’, it’s a profoundly emasculating reference to the superstar male artist.</p>

<p>Dancehall originated in the late 1970s in Jamaica’s most marginalized spaces, particularly inner-city Kingston. Bengolea is keenly aware of her presence within these contexts in relation to cultural appropriation: ‘Only dancers from Jamaica can invent dancehall steps, but everyone can reenact them to spread their spirit. The dancers in Kingston are inclusive and great teachers, eager to share their dancehall culture with foreign dancers and to reach global recognition, often through social media.’ This, among other things, grants the genre its powerful socially transformative function. ‘It is a way of communicating deeply across levels and celebrating life and death – an infinite library of steps, like Babel.’</p><p>Transformation here also speaks to the body’s capacity to articulate sounds, move, and transcend its own matter. How did dance, choreography, and working with the body’s intelligence come to Bengolea and shape her practice? In Buenos Aires she found a teacher of anthropological dance, Guillermo Angelelli, who was affiliated with a community studying archaic ritual dances from South America and Asia. ‘I learned the dance of the wind from the Altiplano de Bolivia,’ says Bengolea. The three-rhythm dance uses hyperventilation to move at high altitudes, a technique necessary in the Bolivian high plains, which are more than 3,000 meters above sea level. ‘But Buenos Aires is at sea level, so we were hyperventilating more than expected,’ says Bengola. ‘We got into high, esoteric states of mind.’</p>

<p>Verzutti also evoked the urbanization and ecological destruction of Brazil’s natural landscape with ‘Brasilia’ (2010–19), her series of spiny jackfruit cast in bronze and incised with sharp, angular cuts painted white. The works’ shared title refers to the country’s capital, a city master-planned by the architect Oscar Niemeyer and carved from the dry outer regions of the Amazon in the late 1950s. With their wild, uneven rinds and smooth, perfect interiors, the sculptures embody both the beauty and violence of Modernism. </p><p>Spiky&nbsp;jackfruit are&nbsp;one of Verzutti’s&nbsp;favorite forms. Her ‘Venuses’ (2013–ongoing) stack enormous slices of the fruit, cast in concrete or bronze, with casts of pumpkin and soursop slices. Their rotund shapes recall the Venus of Willendorf, a Paleolithic fertility fetish. At such a powerful scale and material density, their voluptuous, organic bases disarm misogynistic stereotypes about women from the tropics. These Venuses are proudly erotic, unashamed of their hunger. Once again, Verzutti’s sly references celebrate the power of the creative appetite. If history can be consumed, she suggests, then we ought to be playing with our food.</p>

<p>Erika Verzutti is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1179/Andrew-Kreps-Gallery">Andrew Kreps Gallery</a>,&nbsp;New York City;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1162/Alison-Jacques">Alison Jacques</a>, London;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1125/Fortes-D-Aloia-Gabriel">Fortes D’Aloia &amp; Gabriel</a>,&nbsp;São Paulo and&nbsp;Rio de Janeiro;&nbsp;and Misako &amp; Rosen,&nbsp;Tokyo.</p><p>Evan Moffitt is a writer, editor, and critic based in New York City.</p>

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<p>Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1.&nbsp;Erika Verzutti,&nbsp;<em>Cultured Meat</em> (detail), 2019. 2. Installation view of Erika Verzutti's exhibition 'The Indiscipline of Sculpture', MASP, São Paulo, 2021. Photo by Isabella Matheus. 3a (desktop view): Erika Verzutti,&nbsp;<em>Mineral</em>, 2019. 3b (mobile view): Erika Verzutti,&nbsp;<em>Dinosaurs with Helmet</em>, 2017. Courtesy of the artist; Fortes D’Aloia &amp; Gabriel, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro; Alison Jacques, London; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York City; and Misako &amp; Rosen, Tokyo.</p>

巴西雕塑家通過向現代主義大師致敬，從而更好地表達他們。

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The Brazilian sculptor consumes Modernist masters to better regurgitate them, writes Evan Moffitt

Erika Verzutti’s insatiable appetite for art history 

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