In one of Leonilson’s works, his first name, José, is embroidered on a transparent voil stretched across a chassis. The name is the front face of the thread’s circulatory system, visible through the transparency. José floats alone in an empty portrait. There is no verb that shows any of José’s actions; there is no adjective that qualifies him; nor is there an adverb that gives him a circumstance or a conjunction that links José to something or someone. There are no syntactic relationships, only semantic load. Who is José? What does ‘José’ reveal about Leonilson?
José is a minimal, one-word text.¹ Minimal texts are recurrent in art. They have an imagistic appeal and adapt well to plastic forms. If art is the aesthetic expression of images, objects and physical and relational spaces, then minimal texts easily become images, objects or linguistic rifts in the physical and relational space.
José is a first name. In order to write a minimal autobiography, Leonilson chose the least defining, descriptive or narrative of his personal terms, even though it was one of the words he lived with the longest. The fact that the artist embroidered the name by which he was not publicly known reveals his desire for anonymity. Perhaps the public name ‘Leonilson’ would have failed to name his most intimate forum.
Words can fail. They often refer more to a public agreement of meaning than to a real correspondence with what they name. Naming imposes semiotic, narrative and historical systems on things. The series of posters in which Denilson Baniwa lists places as Indigenous Land shows language as a terrain of dispute where the winner has the power to name. Brasil, Terra Indígena [Brazil, Indigenous Land] hacks and inverts the act that, by replacing the Tupi sound ‘Pindorama’ with the Portuguese legal sign ‘Brazil’, imposed a language as part of the colonial machine of possession, looting, enslavement, genocide and murder.
Brasil, Terra Indígena is a minimal and concise text whose lack of a verb – Brazil is Indigenous Land – gives the statement the category of a proper name, which should be on the World Map. As a proper name, Brasil, Terra Indígena doesn’t argue or narrate about what it names: more than 500 years of history still to be written from the point of view of those whose land and lives were stolen. Because it is in Portuguese, the text is addressed to the colonizer who, as well as stealing the land, imposed his language and names on the Indigenous peoples, even calling them by the generalizing fiction ‘Indian’. From one moment to the next, a new power is installed and everything is renamed – including you.
Words establish not only narratives and hierarchies of power, but also fictions. Anyone who has crossed a border by land and seen the word Brazil on a sign in the middle of a landscape ‘empty of Brazil’ has felt the fragility of the name and the fictitious dimension of this minimal text – Brazil – amidst an immense landscape. Signs, signposts and visual communication make use of minimal texts to label reality. Perhaps this is the most bureaucratic role of language, that of being a naming, controlling, classifying system – I’m reminded here of Claudia Andujar’s Marcados [Marked] series.
At least in the last century, following the various conceptual poetics and their linguistic turns, art began to make use of communication strategies – such as the poster and graffiti – pichação – aesthetics in Brasil Terra Indígena – which, through concise text, informs, communicates, declares and names.
During the 25th Bienal de São Paulo in 2002, an illuminated sign by Carmela Gross labeled the building housing the exhibition as a ‘hotel’. The Bienal building is a non-place where curators and artworks stay for the short duration of the international exhibitions, which draw professionals from various places who travel around the city like tourists. In the interval between one Bienal and another, the building hosts a variety of events. But if the word ‘hotel’ held this dialogue with the function of the building, it also had a dialogue with those walking along Avenida Pedro Álvares Cabral, from where the sign was easily seen.
Most passersby going along the avenue are not connected to the field of art, have never entered the Bienal building or questioned its function. On reading the sign, some people may have thought that a private hotel in a public park is not a good thing. Others may have noticed how a topography of commercial attempts and failures constantly redesigns, gentrifies and privatizes São Paulo’s public space. Someone may have celebrated the development and gone to the Bienal reception looking for a double room.
Hotel is a minimal text, a noun. The word was inscribed – rather than written – on a building that stands in a park surrounded by a road complex that connects various areas of the city. From the urban tangle of verbal, physical, symbolic and experiential elements, Hotel emitted meaning by being one of the points in the web of graphic signs that discourses public space. Unlike verbal discourse, where syntax organizes the linearity and temporal succession of terms, urban space organizes its signs in a physical, simultaneous and constellated manner, under an often chaotic, unplanned logic that has resulted from disputes.
Lute [Fight] (1967), by Rubens Gerchman, was also intended to contest the street and merge with the urban cacophony. The idea was for the human-scale sculpture to block Avenida Rio Branco in Rio de Janeiro, although this never happened. Many of Gerchman’s works between the 1960s and 1970s objectified minimal texts, such as the word-sculptures Lute, Ar [Air] and Terra [Earth] (all from 1967) or the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, which appear as scenic sculptures in his film Triunfo hermético [Hermetic Triumph] (1972). At the intersection of neoconcrete experimentation, marginal cinema and performative actions between art and poetry, concepts close to the idea of minimal text, such as ‘action word’, ‘physical word’, ‘scenario word’, ‘object word’, ‘movement word’, ‘box word’ and ‘verbimage’ circulated in the Rio de Janeiro art and cultural criticism of the time.²
Read by people who worked in the city center, the imperative verb in Lute might have been associated with the slogan ‘fight for life’. Critics of the political regime, on the other hand, might read it as something like ‘take up arms’. After all, it was a time when the civil-corporate-military dictatorship was intensifying and armed struggle was on the horizon. Both readings – and others – would have been correct. With no space to reflect, articulate arguments, narrate or dissertate in an extended way, minimal texts often don’t bother to have a unified meaning because, instead of persuading and building a directed discourse, they call for and accept the contingency of the narratives or arguments of those who read them.
Hotel and Lute were conceived as a linguistic rift in the intense roads of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In the complex system of circulation – of people, but also of signs – that links the two cities, Santiago Sierra’s minimal text No could also have circulated. But the metal word-sculpture traveled on trucks and ships only through the symbols of power of the hegemonic North – Europe and the US – stopping at industrial and mining areas, financial districts, oil refineries, military weapons factories, museums, art fairs and headquarters such as those of NATO, the UN and the European Parliament. The trip was documented in a film of the same name, currently hosted on YouTube, another power zone.
No – which means the same in both English and Spanish, Sierra’s native language – is an adverb. Adverbs inform circumstances and also modify the meaning of the verb. No, Global Tour is a negation in transit. It’s as if the word ‘no’ had the kinetic power to move through a text, contradicting the passage being read at every moment.
The choice of places that serve as a setting, or rather a phrase, for the word ‘no’ generates contradictions. The itinerancy of the work is a critique of the same capital that sustains the art market that captures, neutralizes, capitalizes on and sells the spectacle of this critique. If, as a matter of scientific principle, a theoretical text doesn’t involve contradiction or ambiguity, a one-word text doesn’t even have room to generate discursive contradictions, only contextual ones. But the inscription of ‘no’ in the public space goes beyond the world of art and its critical ambiguities and also leads us to think about other echoes of this mobile writing: what would the dockworker have thought when he saw the word ‘no’ being hoisted into a harbor? After transporting the word for hours, would the truck driver have felt that driving was writing? Did pedestrians read a political, unsubmissive or subjective ‘no’? Would workers have thought how difficult and labor-intensive it is to produce a ‘no’?
If each place Sierra’s work passed through was like a sentence that the adverb ‘no’ modified according to its different readings, the ‘no’ in No violarás [Thou Shalt Not Rape], by Regina José Galindo, leaves no room for errant interpretations: whether it’s a reading engaged in feminist struggles, or the reading of a patriarchy that feels offended, the understanding of the sentence is the same.
In Brazil, No violarás became Não estuprarás. Set in the public space, Galindo’s work forges biblical diction into a fictitious eleventh commandment, neglected by the male writing of the Bible. The notion of ownership over women, naturalized in ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife’, is mirrored in Não estuprarás, accentuating the strangeness of the existence of a masculine verb: no one can imagine a woman committing this crime. The work is a reminder of a law that is silently broken by the patriarchal connivance that infiltrates society, from the family to the courts. Although, at least in Brazil, it happens more often in the domestic space, rape is thematized by Galindo’s work in the streets, competing with simple ‘no parking’ or ‘do not turn right’, minimal texts that organize public life in the same way as ethical protocols, such as Não estuprarás.
Não estuprarás is a minimal text. An adverb of negation and a verb in the future. It’s striking to see a ‘no’ before a verb in the future, because the future, as a utopian archetype, is usually positive. It’s also strange to notice that, in this text, the verb in the future not only projects and foresees, but also remembers. It reminds us that history has been marked by violence and domination that has used rape as a weapon of war, colonisation and the imposition of male supremacy. Não estuprarás, such a short text, says a lot, including about the method of colonization through which the population of an entire continent was formed. That’s why it’s important for the work to be in the public arena: it also speaks to national Histories.
Almost verbal logos, minimal texts always say much more than the little verbal room for maneuver they have. When, at the Bienal da Bahia in 1966, the future governor Antônio Carlos Magalhães removed Waldemar Cordeiro’s Viva Maria [Long Live Maria] (1966) from the exhibition, it was because the solitary adjective ‘canalha’ [scoundrel] in the flag-shaped work said too much. Two years earlier, the then federal deputy Tancredo Neves had called the president of the Senate Auro Moura Andrade a ‘scoundrel’, who, in declaring the presidency of the Republic vacant, claimed that President João Goulart had abandoned the country. It was a lie – today it would be fake news – and the false vacancy paved the way for the 1964 coup.
Since 2017, Lívia Aquino has been running workshops to sew 2720 flags with the inscription ‘canalhas’, in the plural, mimicking Cordeiro’s work. The intention is to cover the gable of the building attached to the National Congress. The workshops-round table talks collectively repeat a minimum text that unpacks maximum texts and contexts: the dialog with history, via Waldemar Cordeiro; the conversations during the sewing – lived texts, rather than written texts; the cutting and sewing as physical, ritual and collective writing, different from the abstract-intellectual exercise of isolated writing in personal authorship. By echoing ‘scoundrels’ 2720 times, with the temporality required for each confection, Aquino emphasizes the industrial and collaborative side that writing as an object can have, in which manufacturing the sign is the same process that articulates the meaning. The repetition of the minimal text also highlights the repetitive patterns of history, such as the coups d’état that a country with a fragile democracy like Brazil seems fated to suffer. Since 1964, the adjective ‘scoundrel’ has been remembered as a term from Brazilian history, to be repeated as a fragile verbal counter-coup.
I end this text – which is anything but minimal – with ‘A fuga só acontece porque é impossível’ [Escape Only Happens Because It’s Impossible], from Pavimento nº1 [Pavement n. 1] (2021), by Jota Mombaça. Minimal writing also stretches out into syntaxes of greater durational development, which could be called minimal narratives. ‘A fuga só acontece porque é impossível’ sketches a scene by stringing together an article, a noun, an adverb, a verb, a conjunction, a verb and an adjective that can be a noun. The phrase was painted on the tarmac of a road in Sorocaba, with letters the width of the carriageway, on a much larger than human scale. To read it, you had to walk, so reading it took as long as walking across the text. The linguistic matter of the text was much shorter than its physical matter. In the middle of the sentence-walk, the angle made the beginning unreadable, so reading was also about dealing with parallax, memorizing what had been read and gradually piecing together the meaning. The walking-reading called on various actions of the body – just as running away would do.
This text is a journey through various written works. Throughout history – and today, as never before – artists seem to use words both to formally experiment with linguistic materialities as well as to break the verbal silence of plastic forms and, in this way, use a forceful and direct critical discourse. Undefined hybrids between slogans, information, watchwords, aphorisms, names, narratives and poems, these minimal texts communicate and affect instantaneously, using the seductive imagistic appeal of being verbal discourse and plastic form at the same time. This is the case with ‘‘A fuga só acontece porque é impossível’, whose SOS aesthetic materializes the text and merges reading, walking and air rescue into a single act.
¹ In this text, I use terms such as ‘minimal writing’ and ‘minimal text’ inspired by the book Absence of Clutter, Minimal Writing as Art and Literature, by Paul Stephens. The author analyzes the use of concise and reduced text in American literature and conceptual art from the 1960s onwards. At the end of the book, Stephens makes a list of one-word works (A Selected Bibliography of Oneworders), which he calls ‘one-word artworks’ and ‘one-word poems’. STEPHENS, Paul. Absence of Clutter, Minimal Writing as Art and Literature. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020.
² See Cinemateca, by Luiz Otávio Pimentel, published June 26, 1971, in the Plug column of the Correio da Manhã newspaper. In PIRES, Paulo Roberto (org). Torquato Neto, Torquatália (Geleia Geral). Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2003.
About the author
Fabio Morais (São Paulo, 1975) is a visual artist with a master’s degree and doctorate in the visual arts from UDESC. He is currently doing post-doctoral research at ECA-USP on video writing. His most recent solo show was Gráfico fágico (2024), at the Cabinet du Livre d’artiste (Rennes, France). He has held eight solo exhibitions at Galeria Vermelho and has also taken part in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Bienal de São Paulo and the Bienal do Mercosul (Porto Alegre), MAM-SP, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, among others. He has works in the collections of MAM-SP, Museu da Língua Portuguesa (São Paulo), Museu da Pampulha (Belo Horizonte) and CGAC (Santiago de Compostela) and art books in the collections of the Coleção de Livros de Artista da UFMG (Belo Horizonte), CCSP (São Paulo), the library at MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Tate Library and Archive (London) and Bibliothèque Kandinsky – Centre Pompidou (Paris), among others.