Journal of Uncollectable Journeys: Edson Chagas's Found not Taken

As an artist who has been devoting his attention to urban spaces, abandoned objects, and faceless bodies—mostly through photography, although recently also in video—Edson Chagas (Luanda, 1977) does not necessarily share the material and the formal preoccupations of a sculptor, least of all, perhaps, a sculptor like Carl Andre (Quincy, Massachusetts, 1935). Andre envisaged his practice as "materialistic," he abhorred any interpretation going beyond the works' material literalness, and he considered his sculptures to be appropriately received by the viewer only when physically experienced, to the point of stating: "I hate photography; I hate photographs; I hate to take photographs; I hate to be photographed; I hate my works to be photographed."¹ Yet Chagas immediately, and coherently, advances the name Carl Andre when it comes to discussing the importance of space, matter, objects, and bodily movements (with objects) in space in his photographic practice. Despite photography's material nonliteralness and the never thoroughly abstract quality of his own work (though almost abstract at times), Chagas identifies with Andre's abstract and

Edson Chagas, Untitled (Newport, Wales, UK), 2013, from Found Not Taken series. Chromogenic color print, 120 × 80 cm. Courtesy the artist; Stevenson, Cape Town / Johannesburg; and A Palazzo, Brescia, Italy. © Edson Chagas

Desacelera o Mambo: Celebrating Life by Slowing Down Perception, 2015. Pigmented inkjet print on cotton rag paper, 40 × 60 cm. Courtesy the artist; Stevenson, Cape Town / Johannesburg; and A Palazzo, Brescia, Italy. © Edson Chagas

spatial nonidealism, often quoting him: "I'm not an idealist as an artist. … I try to discover my visions in the conditions of the world. It's the conditions which are important."² Indeed, regardless of the degree of abstraction attained, the specific spaces, matter, objects, and bodily movements (with objects) in space from and with which Chagas composes his photographic images are always concretely inscribed in, and concretely address, the conditions of the world. Looked at from the vantage point of the lived experience of a historical contemporary moment and geopolitical and cultural landscapes other than those of 1960s and 1970s New York, such conditions could not but be very different from Andre's.

Affinities on ideas about pacing down the accelerated rhythms of highly urbanized capitalist societies are also discernible through attention to the bodily, almost performative, and far from solely visual perception of spaces with ethicopolitical implications. Implicitly evoked in Chagas's most recent work, Celebrating Life by Slowing Down Perception (2015), I argue, is the idea of "experiencing art" as "ecstatic change of state" or "fierce calm," phrases Andre used, interspersed with references to Tao and Zen, to describe his affective response to the physical experience of visiting several kinds of gardens in Japan in the 1970s.³ I have elsewhere described Chagas's work as an aesthetics, ethics, and politics of deceleration.⁴ This decelerated inhabitation of urban space calls for nonconsumerist relationships with things—old, broken, with missing parts, and yet presented to us as the still functional, magnificent protagonists of a nocturnal narrative soon to unfold, it seems, on a quiet sea-and-sand stage. It arises from Chagas's own lived experience of seaside leisure spaces, where he encounters, and enhances photographically, a possibility of rest from the urban chaos of Luanda in post–Cold War, post-Marxist, and post–civil war Angola. As is well known but worth recalling at this juncture, Andre's materialism was a Marxist stance of resistance against what, by the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, was only the beginning of a major global trend of increasing commoditization and control of life and death under neoliberal capitalism.⁵ Though Chagas's critique departs from a different generational, geographical, and medium position than Andre's 1997 diagnosis that "stillness, silence, and peace are treasures our mass culture is endlessly trying to steal from us and destroy," this idea might be said to be at the heart of Chagas's critique through photography.⁶

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