As geography is not just made up of landscape and objects in space, art is also not made only from objects-art work. As Milton Santos remembers, from a more complex and generous analyses of both fields, it is necessary “to point out the inseparability between object and action,” considering them together. It is necessary, however, to analyse the parts in the context of the whole, the whole face to the parts. It is necessary to situate, contextualize, and recognise specificities and act, at the same time, on them and beyond them. As Edgar Morin affirms, “the sum of the parts is less than the whole;” and the effort to see this “invisible matter” that passes the touchable matter is more and more valid, configuring a system that goes well beyond its contained and apparent objects or parts, in a way of making the sum of the parts not equal to the whole.

As Milton Santos affirms, “in today’s world, it is frequently impossible for man to clearly distinguish the works of nature and the works of man and indicate where the purely technical ends and the purely social begins”. Purity comes to the front, however, solely as an ideological construct, notably of modern origins. A complete, total autonomy, is unachievable and, within certain ideological models, can be even considered as apolitical or, in a much more decisive interpretation, as anti-ethical. To suppose that a painting, like a square, or a landscape, have absolute autonomous existences would be to close our eyes to the various imbrications of life in its multiply natural, social, spatial, cognitive, semantic connections – in a general way, cultural.

According to what Milton Santos argues, point out the casual, relational and content senses of forms constitutes, then, a starting platform to think and to act on the world. In art, such a premise is rooted with a very strong force. Always acting in the ambit of the form, the 20^th Century, however, brought to art an intense self criticism on this action. Which could be, in present times, the possible forms for art?

And even more: how could we think of “possible forms” without sheltering under an easy permissiveness of “the whole” – on the part of a comfortable, post-modern “pre-project” that commemorates the reunion of all the possibilities by closing its eyes to the contexts (and possible impediments) of the parts? How can we keep alert, in the discussion of the possible, a “non-fabulous” – to use the terms of Milton Santos – political character? That because, as Milton points out on the discourse of globalization, also great part of the political discourse of art can be considered as a fable.

In addition, the political action of art is, today, much different from that of 60 or 50 years ago. If such a practice was engagement, after becoming counterculture, today it acts in a more micro-political way. It seems to me that a big part of the western world has passed through a way of thinking and acting which is more linked to the idea of counterculture for, more recently, act in a different way – dialogical, relational, micro-political. Generalizing even more, I try an example: even though Cildo Meirles has burned living chickens in 1970 (Totem), in a clear political-moral etc challenge, the artist opts for a more “subversive” tactic with his Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos (Insertions in Ideological Circuits). Now, in his exhibition at the Tate Gallery (between 2008 and 2009), he acts in a very diverse manner, neither challenging nor subverting – he invites people to take part in his work (fourth version of Malhas da Liberdade, initially from 1977) that becomes, repeating the terms that I quoted previously, “dialogical, relational, micro-political.” Even though it is obvious that each of his mentioned works keep specificities of interest and approach, and thus, simultaneity occur with others (different), I think that putting them side by side makes clearer the emphatic transformation experienced by Cildo, by art, by society, in our manner of existing and acting. The space has changed: retroactively, the strategies of action in this space also change.

It seems to me that, facing such diversification of communicational space in its new and incredible technologies, many artists become closer to this space and, feeling free to put aside the weight of the ideology of autonomy, start to put in contact, to dialogue. Literally, to dialogue. It is increasingly less present the desire to promote a rupture from the social space, thus emphasizing the need to talk, to share. It is not by chance, for example, that the Coletivo Mergulho, whose work is originally focused on the body and its physical relation with space, edited the Document: A Zona with “conversations and exchanges of the group through images, writing and virtual dialogue, choosing the challenge of making the artistic experience shared.” And, in one of the parts of the document, in capital letters and with exclamation, is stamped “I-NEED- TO-FEEL-CON-NEC-TED!”.

The model of action of the counterculture, however, was not totally substituted by one relational and less violently combative. What appears to me is that such forms of action have been more or less associated with art. The still intense valuing of the “subversive” character of artistic production seems to me to be symptomatic of the non-substitution of one model by another. No few artists bring, to the discourse about art works, the idea of the work as a subversive element of the social system. Also, no few critics and curators avoid it. I believe that the counterculture co-habits in our epistemological formation. We are in a moment of passing, of transition. The forms of art are modified through each one of us – now, here and a lot.

Within this desire to dialogue of art that throws itself “open-chested,” in social space, there exist very different challenges and forms of action. I would like to bring some examples that, I believe, rise problems about the place of art in face to the social space and, specifically, the communicational one.

The first brings up to date certain precepts of the counterculture, whose present appearance emphasizes not its eminent affronting character (as Totem of Cildo Meirles), but its subversive one. It is the Ouvidoria installation of Lourival Cuquinha, in partnership with the pair Hrönir. This installation mixes up in real time, in the exhibition ambient, telephone calls made outside of it. The project offers the possibility of making free telephone calls in exchange for the right to deviate them to the exhibition space, spatializing sonorously the originally private content of the conversations.

The work constitutes a provocation in the same sense of what Hélio Oiticica called convi-conivência¹, neologism that evidences a superficial and counterproductive conniving social life, in which distinctions and exchanges are put down in name of an “abstract purity.” Following the example of Oiticica, the artists are conscious that “it is necessary to understand that a critical position implies in inevitable ambivalence; to be able to judge, judge yourself, opt, create, is to be open to ambivalences, seeing that absolute values tend to castrate any one of those liberties. (…) To assume ambivalences does not signify accepting resignedly all this state of things, in the contrary it aspires then to question it. That is the question”. ²

To pose the question collectively, through exchange relations, could be an appropriate strategy for thinking critically of the social space and its cohabiting dynamics. By offering free phone calls in exchange for the right to publish the private phone conversations, more than promoting the “interaction” of the public, Ouvidoria transforms it into co-author and accomplice of the work. There is not, however, an ingenious version of the idea of complicity: those who phone, although they assume the co-responsibility for the apparent transgressive character of the work when compared to the traditional limits between public and private space, are not those who regulate it totally. Even though the public, by means of their phone calls, suggest timbre, time and subjects for Ouvidoria, it is the artists who, by means of its software and, therefore, under “random protection,” rearticulate these information in a way that brings their autonomy into negotiation in the midst of the so-called “autonomy” of work. The centre of power of the work is maintained with the artists, who launch an action in the social space in such a way as to put all of us, citizens, in check. Participate in the work? Give up my private information? Accept the exchange? What for?

Another possible form of action before the same preoccupation is the work of the artist Jens Haaning, who, according to Nicolas Bourriaud in his book Relational Aesthetics, “transmits funny stories in Turkish, through a megaphone in a square in Copenhagen (Turkish Jokes, 1994), creating an instant micro-community – that of immigrants united by a collective laugh that subverts their condition of exiled – formed in the work and in relation to the work.” Different to what occurs in Ouvidoria, there is no relatively authoritarian manipulation (relatively because it is authorized) of the dialogue of the other, but it is activated a communicational condition of the people who, in that specific social space, are muffled by the situation of immigration. Even if one negotiates, in the intervention of Haaning, a social space – noticing that his work continually invades public space by means of sound – his “subversive” character is not the result of combative affront to this space and its configurations (as occurs more directly in the Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos of Cildo Meirles, for example), but of a strategy which, in the last instance, aims at creating a space with a difference and “without territory” (because it is marked differently to that of the physical geography). It is an action that activates heterogeneousness in a collective and public form, keeping opened the possibility of the sharing of experience also with the illiterate in Turkish, by means of laughter.

The contextual conscience of this intervention is immense. The work of Haaning does not only consider the specificities of the location where it happened, but more profoundly, exists only because of these specificities, detaching itself from the desire to exist autonomously and, moreover, not even existing materially. As Milton Santos says, “when society acts on the space, it does not do it on objects truly physical, but as a social reality, on content-forms.” Art, when it deliberately builds on social ambiences, seeks to act critically on their content-forms in such an ambivalent that it questions their configurations, acting, as Hélio Oiticica provokes, against the “coni-convivência”. To cohabit does not mean to be accomplice. There is a “third bank of the river” as, in the same way, according to Milton Santos, there is a possibility of another globalization, as different from the discourse-fable as that which is revealed perverse. For this reason, the non-autonomous discourse of art has been more and more referenced by different artists, who gradually investigate present day forms of social (political) action, forms that inheriting the conceptions of engagement and counterculture, are up-dated by means of what seems to have been so well pointed out, an active “desire to live together.”

Really active. Or we will be waiting for a happy yellow reality, as the GIA Group provokes in its action/video Nobody!, in which they appear holding yellow cards in a train station in Europe, waiting for someone who probably will identify themselves as the one who is being called. As the title of the video indicates, several trains arrive but nobody thinks of themselves as being the one represented, waited for, demanded. The artists who held the cards were clearly intimidated, embarrassed, in that foreign land. The interfaces of contact are there all the time being created and divulgated by multiple instances of society – technology, media, sports, geography… The old and good monochrome square of art, it seems, really does not work anymore. Even when it is of a yellow-sun-colour-of-Bahia in the midst of a cold German ambience where almost everyone wears black.