Some Notes on the Contamination and Quarantine of Brazilian Art (original) (raw)

Some Notes on the Contamination and Quarantine of Brazilian Art This essay seeks to question the characteristics that have come to be celebrated as forming a specific genealogy for Brazilian art. It traces how these very same characteristics have gone from providing the diagnosis that Brazilian art was the product of a culture suffering from a seemingly incurable malaise, to one in which it is seen to be thriving and dynamic, constituting its very own genealogy not despite but precisely because of its inherent hybrid or (as I will posit) contaminated nature. I will argue that within this new understanding of Brazilian contemporary art and its specific genealogy there exists a conflation of cartography, political history, and the praxis of art that is not without its own problematics. The art critic Paulo Sergio Duarte begins his survey entitled The 60s: Transformations of Art in Brazil by proposing a visit to an imaginary museum. This is not André Malraux's "musée imaginaire,"1 but very much a traditional one; as Duarte himself stresses, it is one that could be located in the United States, Europe, or anywhere else in the world.2 In the first gallery of Duarte's imaginary museum the viewer finds Oldenburg's "huge cushioned plastic hamburger," Warhol's Two Elvis, Jackie Kennedy and Cans of Campbell's Soup, Jasper Johns' Flag, a Roy Lichtenstein comic book painting, and so forth. The second gallery contains work that Duarte considers to be "diametrically opposed manifestations" by