When considering and reflecting on a contemporary art project, different challenges emerge, such as temporal proximity, impairing the required critical distance, difficult categorisation (or questioning its usefulness) and legitimisation as art not only by critics, but also as part of how it is perceived by the lay public. Faced with these challenges, and to better understand the conceptual scope of Lunotics, it is important to trace its affiliation with the cyclical movements of the historical avant-garde, neo-avant-garde and post-modernism, which progressively reconnected and/or put into tension art and life, challenging art’s autonomy and institutions, and promoting a de-sacralisation by breaking down conventions and ideas about art, making it “come down to earth” in a bid to dissolve its auratic character (a concept developed by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility). Three historical factors come together in this context and, in the particular case of Lunotics, they are of vital importance: the invention of photography as a revolutionary means of reproduction and its impact on the global nature of art, as well as its own validation as a work of art; the arrival of man on the moon and the photographic recording of these journeys; and the politicisation of art in certain currents, particularly in the field of conceptual art. The first phenomenon provided new technical possibilities to record images transcending what is apprehensible through natural optics, and its subsequent democratisation, today in tandem with that achieved by the digital revolution, made it easier to access information and art itself, influencing an evolution or change in artists’ and recipients’ sensory perception.

Moving from the cult/ritual quality of art to its exhibition value led to the third factor: following the focus on the means themselves and the pure forms of art, partially as a response to the emergence of technically reproducible media such as photography and cinema, and developed in currents such as Modernism, a turn towards the politicisation of art took place, restoring its social purpose. A prime example of this shift was the Fluxus group, whose premises and artistic endeavours seem to have something in common with João Henriques’ work: the cross-disciplinary and performative qualities of new artistic forms such as happening or lyricism and, above all, their deconstruction of art to merge it within the cultural, social and political revolutions, all brought together on the same battlefronts. This journey, started in the 1960s manifestos, was not sterile; quite the contrary, it took on new expressions at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. According to Hal Foster, the “war” between abstraction and representation with other media led to a return to the real, occurring in three ways: traumatic realism, illusionism (or super-realism) and appropriation art. The latter is especially relevant in this case, since it is the one most strongly associated with the Lunotics proposal, and its relationship with photography and image representation theories can help to “decipher” the installation together with the second historical factor mentioned above.

During the second half of the previous century, within a post-war atmosphere, a large part of art criticism on photography considered the image, in a reductive and dichotomous manner, as a referential or simulacrum, influencing interpretations of movements such as Pop Art, overlooking its critical approach to consumerism and its political endeavours, although not without contradictions. As a matter of fact, apart from the simulacrum, the superficial nature of repetition and the convergence with the society of the spectacle and mass culture, US-born Pop Art questioned this new reality, rather than just showing it with aloofness or fascination, and certain shortcomings in recording or colour can symbolise the mismatch with reality, emphasising the contradiction between accident/chance and the automatism of technology. This opposition touches on the optical unconscious, a term coined by Walter Benjamin to translate the subliminal effect of the new image technologies. A parallel can be drawn here with João Henriques’ photo-graphic installation – a hyphen deliberately used to combine the graphics of language and the photographic image – in two ways: an approach to pop art with sci-fi cinema inspiration (in a video, on a screen with textual graphics reminiscent of Star Wars and in the very setting of the exhibition venue), and the room’s ironically celebratory atmosphere (with mirror balls and disco lighting), plus the exploration of error in the 19 images taken from NASA’s digital archive, produced to document the Apollo mission’s voyages to the Moon (1961-1972).

This proposal may contain some reworking of the error aesthetic associated with technological failures (Glitch Art), but the most obvious connection to the Lunotics conceptual structure is that of appropriation art. In a period when globalisation and the new digital and media outlets are generating excessive information and posing questions about the authorship and truthfulness of images and language, increasingly threatened by phenomena such as the development of artificial intelligence, the artist uses the art of appropriation as a way of subverting memory and reflecting on its importance in building the world, using a certain symbolism of the error archive to debunk the archival, scientific and political power discourse of an institution like NASA. According to Hal Foster, this movement “either brings the photographic illusion to an implosion point (…) or turns that illusion on its head to question photography’s documentary truth, the referential value of representation, as in Barbara Kruger’s early photo-texts. This is why post-modern art is so overly critical of representation: a critique of artistic categories and documentary genres, of media myths” [1].

Roughly aligned with the three historical factors mentioned above, Jorge Reis, the curator of Lunotics, points to three ways of interpreting this installation: the decontextualisation and attribution of a new conceptual meaning to the appropriated images, as already explored earlier, conferring them an almost abstraction and the loss of a referential, revealing their potential plasticity with different scales, techniques and ways of displaying them; the conceptual exploration of language by making use of the double meaning of the word “lunatic” – the Latin origin of the concept, connected to neurological disorders such as epilepsy, and the more common meaning today, referring to someone alienated, out of touch with reality and with their “head on the moon” -, applying it to the plethora of phrases (also appropriated) spoken by well-known personalities in Portuguese politics and economics after the Carnation Revolution, lunatic both in what they say and in how their graphic occupation of space and collective memory is scattered; finally, the third sense is optical, associated here with the image and “representation as the construction of a power discourse” [2]. Also with regard to conceptual appropriation and language, we should mention the contradiction between removing the significance and referent of the spatial images, but using spatial metaphors when setting up the exhibition area, for instance the scenic disposition of the frames which cease to be used only as supports, the video at the entrance and the white flag in the centre of the gallery with Ricardo Salgado’s words about a purported lack of memory. These contradictions reflect the post-representational vagueness of post-modernist and post-structuralist art and, in this specific case, expose the human being’s incoherence and neoliberal objectification contained in the statements whose authors are identifiable and thereby encapsulate the representational power of language, as opposed to the loss of images’ representative ability.

The curator synthesises and explains this exercise, saying that “João Henriques intends to create a relational game with the visitor from all the surroundings where word and image are part of a simulated universal whole, where the irony of gravitational happenstance possesses the force of a black hole“, aligned with one of the central features of the artist’s career, exploring “the image in the gap between surface and depth, and as a mediation of the real and the imagination, projecting and constructing meaning in the world” (as can be read in his biography). The artist finally takes on the role of a spatial flaneur who questions his own authorial status in favour of creating new meanings, and the curator encourages the visitors’ active engagement by proposing a reflection exercise on the “lunoticism” inherent in the discourses scattered around Casa Azul, but also on the gravity of them being said by those who have governed us. Ultimately, we can all ask ourselves: who conquered and who was conquered, and where are we in the current state of art? To quote Andrei Tarkovsy: “Where am I when I’m not in reality or in my imagination?”

Lunotics, by João Henriques, is showing at EMERGE’s Casa Azul until 31 December, 2023.

[1] Foster, Hal. (1996). The Return of the Real, London: MIT Press, cap. 5, p. 174. Free translation.
[2] According to the curatorial text.