© Cildo Meireles

Cildo Meireles, "A Young Cildo Meireles" (1973)

© Cildo Meireles

"Glove Trotter" (1991). Steel mesh and balls of various sizes, materials, and colors, 17 ft x 13 ft x 6 in.

October 2008 Field Guide

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Le Futurisme a Paris

The Tropics: Views From The Middle of The Globe

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Projects such as Insertions into Ideological Circuits (1970), for which he stamped political slogans on money and soda bottles and put them back into general circulation, were pioneering in their clever conceptual heft. Since then, however, his works and installations have become more formally elaborate: Fontes (Fountains) (1992–2008) features a dense forest of 6,000 rulers hanging from the ceiling, all with incorrect markings, alongside thousands of clocks with the wrong numbers on their beguiling faces. A new version of this mysterious work will be installed at Tate Modern this month for the 60-year-old artist’s first UK retrospective. Here, Meireles talks to Modern Painters about using fear as an artistic tool, being politically engaged, and the ineffable influence of Borges on his life and work.

You once stated, “Fear is the material of many of my works.” Is this still the case?

I would say that some of my works use fear as a material: fear to look, to see. One’s senses multiply with fear. However, that is not the first goal of my works; it is only one of the materials that I use. The work itself is always changing and evolving.

The influence of Borges on your work has often been commented on—for example, in the labyrinthine environment of Através [Through; 1983–89] and in works that are direct responses to his stories. Do his literary works remain a touchstone for you?

He’s someone I met when I was almost a teenager, so he has been a part of who I am—part of my constitution— for a long time. I’m not obsessive about his work, but I think he is quite important. His work is very open, and yet he somehow belongs to a country that is very closed. Not geographically—I don’t even think I believe in geography or geopolitics anymore— but closed nonetheless.

The accumulation of objects in your works often plays a predominant role, as in the thousands of rulers, clocks, and numbers of 1992’s Fontes, which will be included in your survey at the Tate, and in the enormous stack of matchboxes in your Sermon on the Mount installation from 1979. How did you begin using objects in this way?

I think this way of working may have begun with the matchboxes I used in O Sermao da Montanha: Fiat Lux [Sermon on the Mount: Fiat Lux; 1978–79]. At the time, I was staying in a backwoods place in Brazil where there was a very small grocery. In this grocery, there were only matchboxes, hundreds of matchboxes, and in the backroom there was just kerosene, lots of kerosene. So the structure for the piece and my later works was there. In fact, I faced this situation in real life: I only had matchboxes and fear to work with.

The exhibition of Sermon on the Mount was canceled for political reasons by Brazil’s military dictatorship several times before it was finally shown in 1979. That work and famous pieces of yours like Insertions into Ideological Circuits directly responded to the political environment. What do you think of political art today?

I’ve always had a problem with political art when it becomes proselytizing. Even my political works, I think, are open—their structure is open. They make you deal with artistic, formal positions and questions as much as politics. In terms of making political art, it’s just a matter of getting politically involved or not.

Cildo Meireles's retrospective at London's Tate Modern runs from October 14, 2008 through January 11, 2009.  "Cildo Meireles's Dark Materials" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.