Some Notes on the Contamination and Quarantine of Brazilian Art (original) (raw)
Related papers
Our Ghosts Have Come to Collect: Decolonial Turn in Contemporary Brazilian Art
2021
This text expands, deepens and comments on the essay "As Práticas Artísticas Contemporâneas no Contexto Ibero-Americano e o Pensamento Pós-Colonial e Decolonial" (Contemporary Artistic Practices in the Ibero-American Context and Postcolonial and Decolonial Thought; Sales & Cabrera, 2020), where we comment on the work of the artists Yonamine, Grada Kilomba, Jota Mombaça, and Daniela Ortiz. In the text cited, we work on the problematic discussion around the emergence of a field of thought called "post-colonial" and a decolonial project and how poetic practices interested in the discussion around the colonial legacy are configured in the Ibero-American space. From a historical approach, we try to understand how postcolonial studies produce influence in Brazil and the decolonial turn and thought consolidated in Latin America to understand how to produce responses from the Brazilian art field to decolonization issues. In postcolonial studies and the decolonial project, the decolonization of art is related to the questioning of a Eurocentric thought matrix from its racialized and subalternized world representation schemes deeply related to the performative character of the one who narrates. In other words, the decolonization of art and thought, and the ways of being and existing in the world, are not dissociated from the emergence of artists, writers, and intellectuals. These intellectuals dispute the right to self-representation, selfpresentation, and the creation of non-colonial narratives and images or those who stand completely outside the Eurocentric imaginary and worldview. This text establishes a deep interest in the Brazilian context, appropriating the important discussion around the constitution of a decolonial field of thought, analyzing the work of contemporary Brazilian artists such as
Leonardo, 2015
To anyone unfamiliar with the interventions made by avant-garde artists into the art world and occasionally wider society during the middle of the 20th century, this volume delivers a very readable account. The artists, the objects they made and the discussions they generated are selected here in relation to the particular practices and contexts emergent in Brazil following the chaos of World War II (during which the country remained neutral). In keeping with a historiographical approach-rather than an art historical account-the author introduces an initial group of Brazilian artists attracted to ideas concerned with the nature of the object in art and the abstraction of space and time in two and three dimensions.
Thoughts upon Brazilian art in the years 1960 and 1970
PORTO ARTE: Revista de Artes Visuais, 2013
This article is a reflection upon art in Brazil during the years 1960 and 1970, from avant-garde and neo-avant-garde concepts in the art of the 20th century, with comments on the situation of Brazilian neo-avant-garde movements, especially the actions of militant critics and artists in the cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte.
IX JORNADAS DE HISTORIA Y CULTURA DE AMERICA, Universidad de Montevideo (UM), MONTEVIDEO, 26-30 JULY, 2019
This paper explores how, on the one hand, the MoMA’s agenda on US cultural imperialism in Brazil triggered a war between aesthetic traditionalists and reformers on the occasions of ‘From Figurativism to Abstractionism’, the MAM-SP opening exhibition (1949), and of the first and the second São Paulo Biennials (1951 and 1953). These exhibitions promoted abstractionism as a prestigious banner of modernisation in Brazil fostered by Nelson Rockefeller, a symbol of US capitalism and the head of the American museum. Starting from this premise, the paper shows that the Brazilian Modernista establishment working with figurativism reacted to the arrival of abstractionism in Brazil by labelling it a type of degenerate art with no social engagement, anti-Brazilian, and compliant with US imperialism. The paper will therefore highlight how the MAM-SP pro-abstractionist campaign for aesthetic innovation, developed with the support of the MoMA and of Rockefeller, was rejected by the Brazilian cultural establishment engaging with the struggle of the masses against the national elite for being a clear evidence of foreign hegemony and capitalist interest. On the other hand, this paper will show how Concretismo, the abstract movement that emerged in Brazil around the MAM-SP above-mentioned exhibitions, was conceptually based on Gramscian Marxism, and, as opposed to the caustic opinion of the Modernista establishment, bore educative responsibilities with the masses. In fact, Waldemar Cordeiro, the leader of the Ruptura group that represented Concretismo in São Paulo, cited Gramsci and Marx as theoretical sources (merged with Fiedler’s theory of ‘Pure Visuality’ and the ‘Gestalt’) to respond to the local socio-political reality and to the dispute that was dividing the Brazilian artistic milieu. The paper will reveal that Cordeiro’s programme - even if he clearly sympathised with the forces of progress and modernisation that were recurrently associated with the Brazilian capitalist elite - aimed at serving the masses by means of manipulating the bourgeois order of distribution of culture, and by exploiting the exhibition opportunities that the Brazilian modern art museums owned by national figures compliant with the US geopolitical ambitions were offering to Ruptura.
Brazilian Colonial Art and the Decolonization of Art History
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2021
There are at least two ways to think about the term “Brazilian colonial art.” It can refer, in general, to the art produced in the region presently known as Brazil between 1500, when navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed the coastal territory for the Lusitanian crown, and the country’s independence in the early 19th century. It can also refer, more specifically, to the artistic manifestations produced in certain Brazilian regions—most notably Bahia, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro—over the 18th century and first decades of the 19th century. In other words, while denotatively it corresponds to the art produced in the period during which Brazil was a colony, it can also work as a metonym valid to indicate particular temporal and geographical arcs within this period. The reasons for its widespread metonymical use are related, on the one hand, to the survival of a relatively large number of art objects and buildings produced in these arcs, but also to a judicative value: at least since the 1920s, artists, historians, and cultivated Brazilians have tended to regard Brazilian colonial art—in its more specific meaning—as the greatest cultural product of those centuries. In this sense, Brazilian colonial art is often identified with the Baroque—to the extent that the terms “Brazilian Baroque,” “Brazilian colonial art,” and even “barroco mineiro” (i.e., Baroque produced in the province of Minas Gerais) may be used interchangeably by some scholars and, even more so, the general public. The study of Brazilian colonial art is currently intermingled with the question of what should be understood as Brazil in the early modern period. Just like some 20th- and 21st-century scholars have been questioning, for example, the term “Italian Renaissance”—given the fact that Italy, as a political entity, did not exist until the 19th century—so have researchers problematized the concept of a unified term to designate the whole artistic production of the territory that would later become the Federative Republic of Brazil between the 16th and 19th centuries. This territory, moreover, encompassed a myriad of very different societies and languages originating from at least three different continents. Should the production, for example, of Tupi or Yoruba artworks be considered colonial? Or should they, instead, be understood as belonging to a distinctive path and independent art historical process? Is it viable to propose a transcultural academic approach without, at the same time, flattening the specificities and richness of the various societies that inhabited the territory? Recent scholarly work has been bringing together traditional historiographical references in Brazilian colonial art and perspectives from so-called “global art history.” These efforts have not only internationalized the field, but also made it multidisciplinary by combining researches in anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, history, and art history.
Visual Studies, 2024
Artur Barrio's installations/"situations" from the late 1960s and early 1970s embody one of the most vigorous endeavours to expose the political repression and the crimes committed by the Brazilian military dictatorship. Barrio's artistic practice of that period also contributed to a reconfiguration of the Brazilian visual language, propounding a radical aesthetic that dismissed the established forms of expression to empower a stronger connection between art and this country's reality (whether social, political, or economic). This article briefly reviews Barrio's politically charged artistic projects from his early period, proposing the concept of artistic simulacra for a more precise definition of their relation with the oppressive political reality, on the one hand, and with the spectator, on the other hand.