Abstract

Leviathan-Toth, Ernesto Neto’s anti/counter-installation which could be seen hanging from the vaults of the Panthéon in autumn 2006 does not seek to exploit this national memorial as a space in which to stand as an exhibition. It responds to all of its surrounding factors – physical, aesthetic, political, and metaphysical, to attack the representative art whose constitutive-constitutional role in the republic, according to Hobbes, can be seen in Leviathan’s frontispiece. Setting up a sort of Critique et Clinique of Representation in all senses of the term beginning with the short-circuit between politics and aesthetics, Neto’s operation sets its sights on the expansive dis-organisation of the multitude living under the « democratic » regime of contractual representation of which the Panthéon is the temple. It provides a body for the rhizomatic-bioenergetic perversion of the Image of the State-Machine, of the Form-State, by projecting a new infra and supra-organic type of reality which draws its « energy » from the forces of the multitudo dissoluta whose radical and vital recomposition it advocates. This work or non-work, derived from a Brazilian political-aesthetic constructivism which is undergoing redefinition, can now only take place in the context of a practice of displacement which incorporates and is constituted of the spectator-participant