Are the jokers wild? Sara & André between ritual and rupture

Alexandre Herculano was the first author to draw attention to a curious phrase with which several precepts in use in the curia of the first kings of Portugal began: “custom is, des i is law”. The curiosity of this phrase lies in the expression “dês i” and its meaning, which Herculano and, later, Gama Barros, interpret as meaning “therefore”, that is, something like “it is custom and, therefore, it is law”.

This sentence, whose context is a time – between the 12th and 13th centuries – when custom had extraordinary power as a source of law, nevertheless contains something that continues to be particularly significant for the times in which we live. Regardless of the underlying issue of legal philosophy and the evolution – or, rather, the loss of importance – that custom has had in the legal world, in the life of the most diverse institutions, practices often acquire a dimension of repetition that almost makes them obligatory or, at least, that leads us to take them as such.

Life in society, whether in parallel or independently of the legal framework that may surround it, spontaneously creates procedures. And these procedures, whether because they are spontaneous, because they originate from figures or positions of authority, or even because they foster a certain feeling of solidarity, acquire an almost normative status. Obviously, cultural institutions and their agents are not immune to this situation.

Although they are not the only ones to do so, it is important to highlight that, throughout their almost twenty years of work, the duo Sara & André (Lisbon, 1980/1979) have explored, questioned and investigated in a particularly original and significant way this dimension of practices, habits and ways of proceeding in the contemporary art world. Wild Card, the duo’s most recent exhibition at Balcony – Contemporary Art Gallery, continues and deepens their critical and incisive, but also deeply biting and sarcastic, analysis of the contemporary art system and their “systematic questioning of that which (…) persists in distinguishing and classifying (…) the artist as a being with apparently specific attributes”, as David Santos states in his essay Claim to fame, again and again (see A Palavra Imperfeita, 2018).

The title of the exhibition is inspired, according to the exhibition leaflet, by an expression from the sports lexicon, which corresponds to an invitation or place to participate in a tournament awarded to a person or team that does not meet the selection criteria. In some North American sports competitions, such as Major League Baseball (MLB) or the National Football League (NFL), “wild cards” are teams that qualify for the championship playoffs without winning their respective conference or division. In fact, “wild cards” can be awarded according to previously established rules, as is the case with MLB or NFL, or, in some sports, they can be freely awarded by the event organizers, as is the case with the Wimbledon tournament.

It is more in this last sense, that of invitation, that the title of this exhibition fits in, seeking to transform this invitation into a gesture that points to the implicit and explicit protocols of the contemporary art system, in particular, the access of artists to galleries and their selection and legitimization by the same.

Over time and on an almost daily basis, the gallery has been forwarding to Sara & André emails sent by artists, spontaneously, containing portfolios and proposals for exhibitions or collaborations that were not accepted. Wild Card is, therefore, an exhibition in which Sara & André appear, as curators, inviting a group of artists to exhibit. Although quite different from each other, they have one thing in common: they all, on their own initiative, decided to present themselves to the gallery in a kind of spontaneous application, which, until now, had not been successful.

This exhibition evokes, albeit implicitly, the Salon des Refusés of 1863, created by order of Napoleon III, which brought together works rejected by the official jury of the Salon de Paris, exhibiting them in an autonomous space, thus allowing the public access to what had previously been excluded. Not that Wild Card is a mere reenactment of that moment or a recovery of the “laisser le public juge” of the emperor’s decision, but it is impossible to consider the starting point of this exhibition without considering this historical episode and the way in which it became a catalyst for the discussion on the arbitrary mechanisms of acceptance and exclusion in the art world, playing a central role in the beginning of modernity.

In Wild Card, Sara & André transform what would be a solo exhibition into a group exhibition, with works by artists such as Chikki Chikki, Eduardo Antonio, Elmira Abolhassani, Hugo Castilho, Madalena Anjos, Osias André and VELOZ NARUA. With this starting point, the artist-curators materialize a symbolic inversion of institutional logic, which instead of ignoring the spontaneous manifestations of these artists, as would be usual and even expected, deliberately interrupts the rules of the game, giving them space, attention and context, in a lucid and provocative recreation of another idea contained in the expression “wild card”, that of a card outside the deck.

Attentive to and in dialogue with the procedures that underpin the artistic world, namely those that guide exhibition invitations – curriculum, institutional visibility, circulation in specialist circles, among many others –, Wild Card seeks to expose a certain arbitrariness of the boundaries between inside and outside the field and to dismantle the mechanisms of consecration that regulate this same field. The text of the exhibition sheet, essayistic, sarcastic and constructed almost entirely from quotations from others, is an excellent example of this approach, and together with the curatorial strategy, it is the fundamental aspect of what we could identify as the element of authorship of the duo in this exhibition.

Of course, this approach is not free from risks and dangers. On the one hand, due to the way in which the gallery exposes itself to what it normally tries to filter, displaying, to a certain extent, its inner seams and the relationships that other artists have freely wanted to establish with it. It is important not to forget that while the filters, oblivions, exclusions and forms of silence that structure the artistic field can and should be read as transversal, in this case it is those of the gallery itself that are exposed. On the other hand, it is important to remember that there is another meaning of the expression “wild card” that does not come from the sports lexicon, but rather from card games. In this lexicon, a “wild card” is a card that can be used to represent or replace any natural card, which is normally the case with jokers. This meaning of the expression poses a risk for curators, in that the invited artists effectively appear as jokers – pun intended – as cards whose value is to represent any other card.

Fortunately, this is not what happens in Wild Card. The curatorial approach of this exhibition does not suggest any didactic aspiration, nor does it suggest exemplary judgement. The selected works, their installation and, once again, the perspective suggested by the text on the exhibition flyer show that critical action does not take place at a distance from the selected works and artists, because the dialogues sought and the discourses on their inclusion and exclusion, on the market or on legitimation strategies, are not made against them, but rather from them.

In his introduction to The King’s Two Bodies, Kantorowicz states that “mysticism, when transposed from the cozy twilight of myth and fiction into the cold spotlight of fact and reason, generally has little to recommend it.” In a beautiful and timely comparison with Baudelaire’s Albatross, the historian explains that the most significant metaphors and images of mystical language, outside its own circle or context, are likely to seem “poor and even slightly silly.” Kantorowicz sought to explain in this introduction how the Christology of power inherent in the idea of ​​the king’s two bodies, so powerful in the context of medieval political theology, made little sense in Tudor times.

The artistic world has, so to speak, its own mystical language, its own metaphors and images. Sara & André are able, like few others, to expose to the artistic world both the cozy twilight of myth and fiction, and the cold incision of the spotlight of facts and reason. In this sense, Wild Card is not a wild card, as it is part of the duo's nearly two-decade journey, joining projects such as Sara & André (3+1 – Arte Contemporânea, 2008), Exercício de Estilo (MNAC, 2014), Curated Curators I, II and III (Zaratan Arte Contemporânea, 2017) or O Colecionador de Belas-Artes (Galeria Quadrum, 2022).