Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s. By Elena Shtromberg. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 238. Photos. 90.00cloth.90.00 cloth. 90.00cloth.29.95 paper (original) (raw)
Related papers
This article examines the networked curatorial model popularized in the early 2000s by Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez's Heterotopías: medio siglo sin-lugar, 1918-1968. The network allows for a paradoxical rejection and reinforcement of Latin American art's peripheral status, rendering the region simultaneously a bounded locality where new ideas emerge and a set of nodes in a global art ecology. Recent exhibitions such as the Red Conceptualismos del Sur's Perder la forma humana (2012-2014) have adapted the network and its possibilities of visualization, while revising anew the geography and ontology of "Latin American art."
“Inside, outside and against institutions: Latin American aesthetic practices in the era of mass consumption and contemporary techno-capitalism (1950- 2020)”, 2023
*** Deadline: October 30 *** This dossier intends to set up a dialogue between aesthetic approaches that analyze different aspects of artistic production about institutionalism, under the specific prism given by the expansion of artistic consumerism and the progressive commodification of visual productions. The considered period extends from the second half of the 20th century –a world that, marked by capitalist production and mass consumption, exhibits the wearing out of the cultural field’s autonomy– to the first decades of the 21st century –a scenario that, in the heat of the development of new technologies of communication, has shaped a globalized “techno-capitalism” (García Ferrer, 2017), marked by a lack of artistic differentiation and a diffuse aestheticization. To address these issues, we consider two perspectives that intertwine in a dialectic and complementary manner: the institutional devices that encourage the artistic mainstream and the creative strategies that intend to corrode that system. Thus, we center our attention in the Latin American aesthetic field, understood not as an identity or an original property tied to the well-known binarism between center and periphery, but as a zone of loans and negotiations between cultural formations standing out by its political and positional character that disrupt the rigid territorial demarcation, thus overturning the categorization conducted by the question about the Latin American in art (Ticio Escobar, 2004). From institutionalism’s point of view, we are interested in critically observing the role of museums, exhibitions, and the art market as devices that shape artistic production, establish criteria of material and symbolic validation, and promote aesthetic and political ideas. As Nelly Richard suggests, we are referring to art as a tradition (the ideal of the aesthetic canon), a field (the specificity of the practices identified as works of art), or a system (the institutional mediations in the circuit of production, distribution, and exhibition) that validates “the authority of its own beliefs, values, and regulations, based on a selective layout of its borders” (Richard, 2014, 9). Regarding production, we propose to analyze the practices that critically intervene inside institutions, generating friction and hybridization of the aesthetic categories that, relationally, lead to transformations in social reality. On the other hand, we are interested in pieces developed at the margin of institutional spaces and in actions that intervene in the urban scene as a medium of work and subversion of the statu quo. In this sense, following Martha Rosler (2017), we intend to question the idea of institutional critique, exploring the issues concerned with canonical discourses, and to observe the positioning and urgencies traced by activism and other forms of interventionism, through new artistic regimes, new materialities, and new notions on art and on what it means to be an artist. In this way, we focus our attention on the subversive potential of the arts regarding other systems of symbolic and material validation, especially when dealing with resistance to the commodification of the work of art and the obliteration of critical voices under the pressure of the multiple conflicts of cultural authority (postcolonialism, subordination, feminism, and sexual and gender minorities).
Studies in Visual Arts and Communication: an international journal , 2015
Since the 2000, the preoccupations with the social dimensions of art have given rise to new strategies in the intersection between art and political activism in Brazil. In the early 70s, already worried about the encroachment of the entertainment industry in art, the critic Mário Pedrosa (1900-1981) proposes political action as the only way to break the circle, creating new conditions for the emergence of a new man and the flourishing of a new art. Within this context, this paper critically discusses “the uses of art” through project Comboio at Favela Moinho, São Paulo, in the context of the 31st Bienal de São Paulo. The Comboio acts in “informal spaces” in the central area of São Paulo and describes itself as a project of research and urban intervention. As the last remaining favela in central São Paulo, Moinho provides a crucial counterpoint in cultural terms and conditions to the Bienal, located in Ibirapuera Park. Can this be seen as a contemporary example of what Mário Pedrosa called, in his criticism of art and politics, “authentic artists” who distinguish themselves from the “silkworm" of mass production to take up the defensive position of what he calls “rearguard art"?
Latin American Research Review, 2016
The transformation of Latin American societies from the 1970s onward and the recent sociopolitical and economic changes at a global scale call for reconsiderations of the relation between art and power and its role in processes of democratization. This article examines art’s social function and its understanding as transformative social praxis—an activity that reflects upon the world and seeks to change it, and that at the same time critically reflects upon its own condition and relation to that world. It specifically suggests the idea of art’s rhetoric in order to conceptualize art’s critical potential and identify processes that generate and displace meaning across artistic, sociopolitical, and discursive contexts. Tucumán Arde (1968) in Argentina, Colectivo Actiones de Arte’s Para no morir de hambre en el arte (1979) in Chile, and Proyecto Venus (2000–2006), based in Buenos Aires, use interdisciplinary methodologies to critically intersect the public sphere. They scrutinize art’s position in society, seek to raise awareness, and act as alternative networks of information and socialization. RESUMEN: La transformación de las sociedades latinoamericanas post-1970 y las recientes reformas sociopolíticas y económicas pide reconsiderar la relación entre el arte y el poder, y su papel en los procesos de democratización. Este artículo examina la función social del arte y su comprensión como transformadora praxis social—una actividad que reflexiona sobre el mundo y trata de cambiarlo, y que al mismo tiempo reflexiona críticamente sobre su propia condición y relación con ese mundo—. Específicamente, con el fin de conceptualizar el potencial crítico del arte, se sugiere la idea de la retórica del arte. Esto ayuda a identificar los procesos que generan y que desplazan el significado a través contextos artísticos, sociopolíticos y discursivos. Tucumán Arde (1968) en Argentina, Para no morir de hambre en el arte (1979) por CADA en Chile, y Proyecto Venus (2000–2006) basado en Buenos Aires emplean metodologías interdisciplinarias para intersectar críticamente la esfera pública. Examinan la posición del arte en la sociedad, apuntan a concientizar, y actúan como redes alternativas de información y de socialización.
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.
Dissent and utopia: rethinking art and technology in Latin America
This paper explores the various ways in which art and new technologies converge in Latin America from a political and social perspective. Through the analysis of a number of art works and projects produced in the last de- cade in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru we observe different ways of responding to the dilemmas posed by recent history, poverty, exclusion, gender, migration and ecological problems. The paper will propose a sys- tematization of these art works following three main lines: a) practices that denounce, b) practices that dismantle, and c) practices that propose alternatives. These categories help us to understand the transformations stemming from the interaction of art, science and technology, revealing the new role adopted by the artists within a ‘post-autonomous’ practice in the field of art. Ultimately, this systematization will help us to identify new patterns or trends among the dissident voices in Latin America under the conditions imposed by the Neoliberal logic.