"To never again pose the question: how can the freedom of a subject be inserted within something and give it meaning, how can it animate, from the inside, the rules of a language and in this way make clear the designs which are proper to it? Posing, rather, the following questions: how, according to what conditions and in what forms, can something like a subject appear in the order of discourses? What place can the subject occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it carry out, obeying what rules? In short, it is a question of removing from the subject (or its substitute) its role as an original foundation and of analyzing it as a variable and complex function of the discourse."
(Michel Foucault)

[The exhibition/action "Last Paintings" by Pedro Portugal is part of the web of theoretical and formal premises shown in this statement, almost as old as I am. The legitimization of an authorial function seems more and more to depend on third parties, thus becoming the possibility of the authorial function. It is, deep down, a question of becoming fully aware of the fact that, as in political democracy, aesthetics and art are constantly under suffrage.   Concomitant with the gradual loss of faith in absolute truths, and without falling back onto an innocuous relativism, Habermas's hypothesis, which valorizes "communication as an intersubjective dimension which connects the fields of action of diverse individuals" (M. M. Carrilho), it seems, in spite of everything, more founded than simple "nominalism". To defend oneself with a "this is art" or "this is not art", slips dangerously into fascisizing authoritarianisms, which many critics, unfortunately, still use and abuse.   More than through any attempt at analysis of values intrinsic to this new project by Pedro Portugal, its validity will be gauged by its success with the general public (the inclusion of the portfolio on the Internet will vastly increase its field of action), by the stimulus it may give to heterodox critical readings, and fundamentally (amazing!), through its commercial success.]

"L’art est ce qui rend la vie plus interessante que l’art."
(Robert Filliou)

[Not being limited to a conventional life in the studio, Pedro Portugal has been looking for ways to diversify his artistic activity, carrying out and proposing projects for public art, such as the action "Eucalyptus - Homage" commissioned by the Lisbon Municipal Council for the 1991 Lisbon City Festivals (Portfolio), or the "Monument to the Gardunha Tunnel", which, according to the author, will be "ideally a funereal monument to underdevelopment", or, lastly, literally agricultural projects. He is also one of the coordinators of the Association for Ethno-Aesthetical Investigation of the Lisbon Cultural Centre. These multiple activities force him to take on the role of a compulsive negotiator. His works and interventions thus acquire a socially remarkable density, something which the current exhibition "Last Paintings" also demonstrates, in the sense that it tests the concept of the exhibition as it is traditionally understood, by only presenting the catalogue produced for the Internet. The confrontation is now not that of the work with the viewer, but of the latter with the potential work. Thus, and paraphrasing the slogan, Portugal fulfills his destiny, which is also the destiny of many of the most stimulating artists of the moment: making their (our) lives more interesting than art.]

To make a Dadaist poem:

Take one newspaper.
Take one pair of scissors.
Choose the newspaper article which has the size you intend to give your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then carefully cut out all the words in the article and put them in a bag.
Shake carefully.
Then take out the cuttings one by one.
Copy them down with care according to the order with in which they come out of the bag.
The poem will be like you.
And you have become an infinitely original and charmingly sensitive writer, although you are not understood by the common people.
(Tristan Tzara)

[Fine Dadaist sarcasm. Although distant from the Dadaists' throbbing, Pedro Portugal, with Fernando Brito, Joïo Paulo Feliciano and Manuel Vieira held an "Anti-Art exhibition/performance with a formal Dada matrix" in the Quadrum gallery in 1989, under the common name Palette Aces. It was, at the time, an apotheotical sign of the huge success of the pop-originated "anything goes" which was critically and commercially accepted in the eighties. The approximation with the Dadaist universe was made more through the formal manner, through the contempt shown for rules, through the cruel irony and through humour, rather than in the manner of an inner desire to subvert the "status quo", or through the Utopian search for an immaculate ethic of creativity which was characteristic of the agitators of the beginning of the century. Accepting that subversion should become subtle, gradual and manipulative in order to be efficient is one of the great tasks of contemporary creativity. That is, to recognize that contemporary societies cannot be seen through a dichotomic vision of reality, where the "good guys" are on one side and the "bad guys" on the other, presupposes a critical intelligence able to flee from what is politically correct, and to take on an interactive and reactive capacity in relation to the growing stupification and neo-conservatism of certain segments of western cultural life.]

"It is important to realize that a signature is a device, a proven device.
Most people who are signature artists behave themselves. In our society there is a demand that work continue on a low-level gestalt, where ultimately one body of work blends into another. A certain familiarity makes it easy to fit into museum collections for instance."
(Dennis Oppenheim)

[These days, the connection between the institutions dedicated to contemporary art and the artists has developed towards a relationship which is not intermediated by external agents, given the establishing of the practice of direct commissions and site-specific creation. This situation represents a worrying sign of normalization and trivialisation of taste, as recent history has shown that the artistic preferences between institutions does not vary as much as between museologists and critics, given the habitual censorial action of the boards of administration and the sponsors as to uncomfortable artists and exhibitions. The "low-level gesalt" that Dennis Oppenheim cleverly refers to is a fearful weapon in the hands of established artists, who try to put their works in as many places as possible. Additionally, the recognizing of a signature or of an artistic trajectory is one of the presuppositions of competence of the activity of the art historian or critic, through which, in the absence of intellectual defences or through professional lack of zeal, this type of art is seen to be more docile, both on the level of its classification and distribution by trends, and on the level of its theoretical situating.
Paradoxically, in the case of Pedro Portugal, the stylistic instability would become the equivalent of a defensive or opportunistic position in the running of his career. In fact, in using methods of appropriation at a certain moment of his creative trajectory, the set of artists or works appropriated could vary infinitely, and thus his works would end up being drastically distanced from each other in formal terms. The finally demonstrated tendency towards works which are critical of socio-political facts and, in this exhibition, towards the way in which the receiving of the work of art is carried out, often with needs and anguishes which belong more to the field of decoration than to aesthetics, shows his distance in relation to the "signature artists".]

"You are, Athenians, a people of fools; when the delegates of the submitted cities wanted to fool you, they began by calling you the shining Athens, and you, on hearing this, opened your legs."
(Aristophanes)

[This quotation has to do with the unbelievable staying power which the reception of the artistic fact has shown throughout the so-called historical modernity and contemporary state. Duchamp could never have imagined the theoretical reverberation that his urinal would provoke. Manzoni did his work inside a can, labeled it, and today it is undoubtedly a work of reference in the historiography of art, coveted by private individuals and by institutions. One talks of art (written, preferably, with a capital) and we will be repeating the "shining Athens" effect.]

"No matter what city that I am taken to by chance, I am surprised by the fact that every day there are not uprisings, massacres, an unholy slaughter, a world-ending disorder. How, in such a small space, can so many men co-exist without killing each other, without hating each other to death? To tell the truth, they do hate each other, but they are not up to their hatred. This mediocrity, this impotence is what saves society, and guarantees its duration and stability."
(E. M. Cioran)

[The perspicacity of these words is truly amazing. I am more and more convinced that the much-vaunted "death to art" has not happened in the same sense that the massacres didn't happen in the cities visited by Cioran. The duration and stability of the system of arts is also based on mediocrity. Pedro Portugal discovered it very early. So he works and shuffles it with particular cunning by not committing himself as a creative genius in order to accept himself as an aesthetic manipulator.]

"As we have known for a long time, art offers us substitutional satisfactions in compensation for the most remote cultural renunciations, those most deeply felt, and in this it has no rival for the reconciling of man with the sacrifices he has made to civilization."
(Sigmund Freud)

[Commentary as a counter-quotation: "The realm of art and aesthetics consists of a conventional management of illusion, of a convention which circumscribes the delirious effects of the illusion, which circumscribes illusion as the extreme phenomenon. Aesthetics restores the command of the subject over the order of the world, it is a form of sublimation of the total illusion of the world which otherwise would overwhelm us.
Other civilizations have accepted the cruel obviousness of that total illusion of the world in trying to preserve a sacrificial equilibrium. Our modern civilization no longer believes in this illusion of the world, but in its reality (which is, no doubt, the last of these illusions); we have chosen to moderate the devastation caused by illusion through this cultivated, docile form of the simulacrum which is the form of aesthetics."]

(Jean Baudrillard)