Objective form: the brief story of a critical struggle

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Amidst debates in the sixties regarding late modernisation in peripheral countries, Roberto Schwarz came to define objective form (1991) as a construct that provides the rhythmic and invisible links between the social-historical domain and the aesthetic. It consists, said Schwarz, of a form comprising ‘a practical and historical substance’ acting also as the ‘social core of the art form’ (1997). By connecting the preexistent social experience to the aesthetically built form, the objective form works as a social contract legitimating the aesthetic form. Socially and historically ordered by a collective and impersonal subject, such construct distinguishes itself from postmodern eclecticism disconnected from the historical process. The objective form offers critical intelligibility before the historical-social matter, but only if taken as a form that is intrinsic to the aesthetic sphere. Thus, the problem of the aesthetic condensation of the social rhythms is therefore concretely and ceaselessly reoccurring—in production and reception—whenever necessary to retrace the reciprocal links between social-historical and artistic forms. Accordingly, the exercise of aesthetic intuition and the critical act in the infighting with the art materials are required to synthesise the structures of the social-historical matter—otherwise inapprehensible in the intrinsic connections to the perception and reflexion about the historical objectivity and dynamics. There are things that only in art emerge and make it an indispensable tool for dialectical historical reflexion. In this sense, this paper will revisit some critical responses that Brazilian art (Antonio Dias, Amilcar de Castro, Mendes da Rocha) gave to the civil-military coup of 1964 and to the late accelerated economic modernisation that ensued. And finally, it will also revisit the contemporary installation Big Wheel (2019, Carmela Gross)—a negative architectural construct that totalised Brazil’s tragic moment with rare clarity and epic poignancy.