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Visitors to Clido Meireles' first North American retrospective bend iron with their eyes. In Meireles' exhibition at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art (his only U.S. venue), he presents the viewer with an open box containing two iron bars, one straight and one curved. The title of the work tells us they are "To be Bent with the Eyes." Beneath the bars, a graph paper background adds pseudo-scientific validity to the notion that over time our vision will exert some kind of material force on the art object. Here Meireles makes us his collaborator, and we can only wonder...
...Bent with the Eyes" (1970) is just one of the many pieces in the ICA's thoughtfully installed show which explicitly explore the viewer's relationship to the work of art by confounding normal perception. One of Brazil's most important contemporary artists, Meireles is often associated with Conceptual Art, which engages the viewer with an idea rather than an actual art object. Meireles, like the most famous Conceptual artists, including Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner, gained critical acclaim in the 1970s. Through the medium of language, Kosuth and Weiner examine such issues as the commodification of the art object...
...Meireles' use of specific materials and their symbolic associations allies him more closely with the German artist Joseph Beuys than with his American contemporaries. Although he clearly shows an interest in their theoretical concerns, his work depends on the viewer's physical experience of the actual work. For example, the show's most arresting installation, "Volatile," was conceived in 1980 but not executed until 1994, and I'm sure it didn't work on paper...
While they also demand viewer participation, Meireles' installation "Mission/Missions (How to build cathedrals)" (1987) and his series "Insertion into Ideological Circuits" (1970) are his most overtly political works. In "Mission," which was on display at Harvard's Carpenter Center until March 2, Meireles created an environment with a floor covered by 600,000 pennies beneath a ceiling of 2,000 bones. In the center of the room, a column of Catholic hosts connects the bones and pennies, setting off a chain of associations including colonial exploitation, charity, death and even cannibalism. In his "Insertion" series, Meireles stamped slogans and questions...
...simplicity, and Smith's photographs are proof of this. Large open spaces unfold in front of our eyes. A figure stands before us, often looking straight at us with penetrating eyes, sometimes contemplatively looking off into the distance. The whole composition is balanced with nothing to distract the viewer...