A NUDEZ DA CÓPIA IMPERFEITA
 
Uma performance de um artista no Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo em 2017 torna-se motivo de comoção e violência. Enquanto apresentava uma releitura da obra Bichos, de Lygia Clark, na qual punha o próprio corpo nu à disposição do espectador para ser manipulado, Wagner Schwartz teve seu corpo (sua obra) relado por uma criança, a filha de uma grande amiga sua, que estava no recinto no momento da apresentação. Um vídeo do momento foi capturado, retirado completamente de seu contexto e disseminado internet afora. Rapidamente uma enxurrada de ódio, violência e selvageria passou a ser direcionada ao artista. Nem perto de poucas foram as ameaças de morte que Schwartz sofreu.

A situação toda compõe uma triste parábola: o Brasil odioso, odiento, marcadamente fanático que passamos a ser a partir de 2016 já se afigurava ali, na inocente sala de um museu. O corpo masculino reduzido à impotência, a arte dessacralizada, tornada objeto prosaico, uma série de fatores identificados com a descolonização do pensamento dominante, geraram uma reação coletiva criminosa, marcada pela perseguição, pelo assédio psicológico, por ameaças explícitas nas redes sociais e, principalmente, pela desenfreada repetição de um covarde encadeamento de fake news em veículos e grupos identificados com a extrema direita brasileira — que até mesmo a morte do artista elucubravam.

Neste relato visceral e experimental, no qual se fundem instalação e texto, performance e palavra, obra e autobiografia, Wagner Schwartz oferece um testemunho inigualável do artista vitimado pelo autoritarismo, pela sombra perene da violência, por um engenhoso e dissimulado mecanismo de censura que mesmo nos espaços (e países) ditos democráticos vige.

Sobrevivente em mais de um sentido do regime autoritário que tomou de assalto o Brasil a partir de 2016, Wagner Schwartz demonstra, neste romance sem paralelos, a formação do modo-de-ser da arte e do artista que desejam, ainda que resfolegantes, sufocados, oprimidos, sempre mais um sopro de vida.

Editora Nós

THE BODY IS THE BEGINNING AND THE END OF EVERYTHING
Michel Laub, Valor Econômico, November 3rd, 2023
 
No doubt, more books will be published attempting to explain the moral crisis that Brazil has experienced in recent years, but The Nakedness of the Imperfect Copy by the choreographer Wagner Schwartz will continue to be necessary reading.

It’s important that we remember, in detail, what the author has suffered. After receiving hundreds of hostile comments, both publicly and privately, many of them accompanied by calls for his imprisonment and death threats, the artist subsequently experienced panic attacks, falling into a deep depression. Invitations to perform his work were suddenly cancelled, and the show of solidarity he’d received wasn’t enough to bring to a halt the advancing horror. After the worst had passed, he understood that, nevertheless, for the rest of his life he’d be connected to the incident: “There was no burial of the dead, and there never would be. The internet invented eternity… This is the trick of the 21st century, to make you believe a body could simply disappear.”

But The Nakedness is not a book focused on vengeance. Schwartz is an artist, so much so that he is able to give language to his trauma, crafting it as a counterpoint to what his tormenters represent. Instead of using the literal language of the accusations leveled against him, the author creates a text with multiple meanings, a text composed of fragments of real and invented news, so that the book’s structure — alternating between text, photography and illustration, moving between memoir, essay, interview and theater — emulates the multiple subjectivities of memory.

As in the case of his performance at MAM, the aesthetic experience arises from a physical experience. Everything begins and ends with the body, which continued producing certain effects while Schwartz remained at the mercy of the mob’s fury (effects such as “floods of panic,” for instance, whenever the artist was compelled to speak on the subject). How does one write about this experience from a point of view that is and isn’t unique, that is and isn’t mediated? “It wasn’t my art that needed protection, it was I. But in addition to having to speak with a collective voice, I couldn’t let art descend from its status as Art. I had to respond to the questions put to me as an artist, not as the victim of an attack.”

[Translation: Johnny Lorenz]

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Michel Laub was born in Porto Alegre in 1973. A writer and journalist, he has published four novels, all through Companhia das Letras: Música Anterior (Anterior Music), 2001; Longe da Água (Far from the Water), 2004, also released in Argentina; O Segundo Tempo (The Second Half), 2006; and O Gato Diz Adeus (Cat's Farewell), 2009. He is a winner of the Erico Verissimo/Revelation prize, conferred by the Brazilian Writers’ Union, and was twice short-listed for the Jabuti and Portugal Telecom awards, among others. His works have been published in Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Israel, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the UK.
Books in English: A Poison Apple, Diary of the Fall: A Novel