Funambilismo

A LITTLE IMBALANCETightrope walking is the domain of the wonderful. Not only when accomplished at great heights, faced with radical dangers (like Philippe Petit, who crossed between the ill-fated Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City on a high-tension cable in 1974), but also when we are asked to do this really close to the ground. The work by Leonor Antunes that is part of the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos is specifically that exercise in tightrope walking proposed for the spectator to perform. There is a beam on the floor and a bar for the visitor to use in order to test his ability to keep his balance. The exercise isn’t particularly difficult to do, but it is made discreetly difficult by its closeness to the walls, making it impossible to use the bar to help maintain balance. This is the major point of the work. It is not only a sculpture that calls for use, and manipulation, but it possesses a trap that transforms this process into a failure. A great deal of contemporary art, in keeping with the uncertainty and speed of change of the second half of the 20th century, is closer to disturbance and error than to success. The works are often devices that request participation from the spectator – they turn the beholder into a participant, as the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica used to say. This is the case of the first works by Leonor Antunes, often connected to architecture and to the physical structure of the place for which they had been conceived. The lack of balance that this sculpture/device provokes relativises our point of view and, without any need for a didactic discourse, makes us understand the frailty of the human condition, the difficulty of assertiveness and the proximity of error. Nevertheless, its great virtue lies in the fact that it grants us all this through a bodily sensation, from the experience of the slight insufficiency of the body. So it gives us what art should do: a better understanding of ourselves, an attention focused on our bodily condition and on our point of view through an experience that, in these controlled conditions, becomes an aesthetic experience. It looks easy.Delfim Sardo