This dual retrospective of Mira Schendel (Brazilian, b. Switzerland, 1919–1988) and Léon Ferrari (Argentine, b. 1920) was without a doubt a major contribution to the expanding canon of experimental art from the sixties. Spanning Schendel’s career from the late 1950s through the late 1980s and Ferrari’s production from the late 1950s through 2007, the two hundred pieces in a variety of media, but predominantly on paper, assembled in the exhibition and exquisitely installed by MoMA curator Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas pleased non-specialized audiences as well as connoisseurs. Upon entering the Renne de Harnoncourt galleries of the museum, viewers could see a chronological arrangement that mixed works by both artists, creating clusters of visually strong formal affinities that resonated with each other. Line, language, and abstract space were some of the issues explored in the first galleries through works that tend to be small in scale; the last gallery featured pieces that were more materially imposing and sculptural in nature.

Both Schendel and Ferrari came of age during a period of feverish experimentation in the visual arts in Brazil and Argentina. While Schendel was in dialogue with personal philosophical interests (theosophy, linguistics, poetry) as well as the interdisciplinary and phenomenological explorations of such Neo-concrete artists as Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, Ferrari was part of a group of Argentine avant-garde artists engaged in non-conventional investigations of a conceptual and political nature. Because the core of these artists’ oeuvres utilizes language as foundational, there has been a tendency, especially in Ferrari’s case, to associate them with Conceptual art. There was a clear effort, manifested in the exhibition and also in the catalogue, to unfold the specificity of these bodies of work. The problem is that in distancing Schendel and Ferrari from conventional movement-based categories (an effort I applaud), their art has been braided together through complex theoretical precepts that failed to manifest clearly in the exhibition space (Roland Barthes’s “scription,” Derrida’s “pharmakon,” Judaic theology, and Paul Celan’s poetry are some of the references deftly handled in Oramas’s essay).

Also missing from the exhibition was material evidence or didactic support explicating the curator’s suggestion, made in the catalogue, that the work of Schendel and Ferrari was influenced by the mostly French linguistic theoretical models developed during the sixties that were instrumental to the European and American conceptualists, but to radically different effect. In other words, more historical context could have been provided in the catalogue and in the exhibition to give nuance to a pairing that functioned in the installation only as long as formal considerations were privileged—and there, too, only to a limited extent. Toward the end of the show, when Ferrari’s later collage and assemblage work was featured, the entanglement becomes an exemplary opposition and the clear differences between both artists shone brightly.

Oramas assertion that Schendel’s and Ferrari’s works from the sixties “describe an ingrown, interconnected language, a written materiality . . . a language that voices an idiosyncratic, irreplaceable subject” (15) effectively illuminates the gap that separates these artists from canonical language-users such as Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth, whose engagement with the latter is more cerebral, systematic, and explicitly bound to the communicative functions of the written word. In both Schendel and Ferrari, this communicative imperative is undermined—profoundly weakened by Schendel, merely (and temporarily) distorted in Ferrari’s case. Ultimately, despite its linguistic disguises and twists, it is evident that Ferrari’s work “constitutes,” as Andrea Giunta writes in the catalogue, “a persistent, continuous investigation into the limits and powers of language. An archive of different ways of saying new things, or of saying the same thing in new ways, it deals with the necessity and urgency of communicating, of making understandable what is not accepted, understood, or easy to accept” (47). That is, with meaning, which is something that Schendel’s work evades. As the artist wrote in a non-dated text on the Monotypes, her drawings on Japanese paper: “Immediate life, the kind I suffer and within which I act, is mine alone, incommunicable and therefore devoid of meaning or purpose” (quoted in the catalogue, 60).

Take for example some of Ferrari’s most paradigmatic drawings of the sixties, Untitled (Sermon of the Blood) (1962), Letter to a General, June 18 (1963), and Written Painting, December 17 (1964) along with Schendel’s Monotypes and Graphic Objects produced from the mid-sixties until the end of the decade, all of which were featured in the middle section of the exhibition space. Ferrari’s works generally propose the formal configuration of a written text: suggested left to right layout, white margins, consistent doodling, traces that emulate a secret code, and classic techniques of inscription (ink on paper predominates). When all-over composition and the delicate line that weaves the surfaces of the most abstract works overrides the textual format, as in Untitled (Sermon of the Blood), content is suggested by a subtitle that invites a metaphorical reading: “The composition comprises two planes of lines . . . the network of blood vessels appearing on top of the field of hair,” writes Oramas in the catalogue (23).

A similar drawing from that same year is simply Untitled; it lacks the suggestive link between red ink and the word blood of a subtitle, but it is dated 21 November 1962, as if advancing the epistolary structure of which Ferrari will become so fond. Related works by Ferrari also on view—such as his Deformed Writings, Letters to a General, and the series of Manuscripts (all from the sixties)—embrace language and its communicative imperatives, as well as meaning and narrative, in ways that are antithetical to Schendel’s investigations and explorations. Hers were to attack structurally the ontology of language and drawing, to experiment with new configurations instead of simply hybridizing drawing and writing. Monotypes (started in 1964 and continued until late in the decade) were Schendel’s first works to systematically and directly engage with writing as she was developing modes of inscription that would defy the conventions of pictorial representation (earlier on her artistic production was characterized by mute still lifes set in a non-realistic space and time recalling the metaphysical canvases of the Italian Giorgio Morandi). To this end she utilized a fragile support, very thin Japanese paper, onto which she traced various types of marks, including writing. But the thin paper was not treated as mere support; it was the vehicle for an elaborate process that broke the boundaries between body, instrument, and trace. Schendel placed the paper on glass coated with ink and dusted with talc so that the ink would be absorbed through pressure—of the fingernail or some other sharp tool. This painstaking process betrays the impression of spontaneity conveyed by the doodle-like, multi-lingual, poetry-in-process imagery of the Monotypes, which as a series include approximately 2,000 units each measuring approximately 18” x 9”.

This numerical expansiveness and the irresolute marks of these works (here a toying, unruly line, there an incomplete poem) subsume writing to the muteness of the trace. Indeed, it is impossible to make sense of the series, to try to find the ultimate meaning, to recognize the voice of the subject who authored it. Unlike Ferrari, whose work, as it progresses, moves closer toward the conventional uses of language and writing, Schendel disrupts the hierarchies and categories, the positions and limits that facilitate identification and situate the subject of enunciation and reception. In the Monotypes, writing and drawing, word and object are fused and diffused into what amounts to a form of nothingness. Indeed in 1965 Schendel initiated a series of works that she entitled Droguinhas (Little nothings) and which consisted of the same Japanese paper of the Monotypes twisted and knotted into bundles that defy the conventions of sculpture. They were exhibited at MoMA close to her more sculptural Graphic Objects and some sculptures by Ferrari of enmeshed, thin stainless steel from the 1960s and 1970s. Unformed, limped, and delicate, the Droguinhas bypassed the anthropomorphic dimension of traditional sculpture to engage spatially the medium of the Monotypes.

Probably influenced by a turn toward the object in the Brazilian artistic milieu, Schendel further explored the materiality of language and writing in her Graphic Objects in which the transparency and flimsiness of the Japanese paper was counteracted by saturating the surface of the paper with a cacophony of letters, words, and traces (to the transferred handmade trace Schendel here added typewritten words and transfer type) as well as by suspending the paper between transparent acrylic sheets. The resulting objects moved in the exact opposite direction Ferrari’s work “progressed”—the latter toward legibility, the former toward opacity. Indeed, despite the fact that the Graphic Objects undo front and back and can be “read” from both sides, it is the density of surface, more than the works’ sculptural format, that confers an obdurate materiality to language, a concreteness and autonomy that erodes the implied subject of enunciation. “[These] works,” writes Oramas in describing this stubborn materiality, “are also windows, as transparent and perfectly squared off as any Alberti would have imagined at the moment of perspective’s first emergence, but their transparency . . . leads to no view through, no vision of anything beyond themselves” (35).

Ultimately, the gap that separates Ferrari and Schendel’s work has to do with referentiality and the functionality of language. Nowhere was this more visible than toward the end of the exhibition where viewers saw Ferrari’s turn toward collage (a political collage that relies heavily on recognition and communication) and assemblage as revealing a profound engagement with narrative. While Ferrari’s work seems to always refer to something else, Schendel’s is a profound exploration of the boundaries of languages, mediums, and the various constituent elements of the artistic event. To undo these boundaries and conventions, and reflect with material humbleness on the philosophical consequences of these crumbling of identities and hierarchies, was Schendel’s greatest achievement. By the end of the exhibition the contrast between both artists was palpable. In contradistinction to the fierce iconicity of Ferrari’s collages of the eighties, were he denounced the corrupted military and religious powers of the West, Schendel’s Splints from that decade—large, white monochromatic panels from which black beams emerge—evince silence and death: of the plane, of the story, of the subject.