Review: Form and Feeling: The Making of Concretism in Brazil, edited by Antonio Sergio Bessa

Abstract

The legacy of concretism looms large in the history of postwar Brazilian art, and yet scholars still frame it as incomplete and failed, perhaps because periods of authoritarianism bracketed its comparatively brief moment of optimism and faith in economic development. This is volume editor Antonio Sergio Bessa’s argument. According to neoconcrete poet Ferreira Gullar, “the new,” which included concretism, brought to Brazil both freedom, in the form of necessary technological progress, and submission, in the form of subjugation to the cultural and political influence of the United States. Bessa characterizes this situation in Brazilian culture as “a cultural, political, and social minefield” (3), one that Form and Feeling attempts to negotiate.The book’s fourteen chapters go beyond the infamous rivalry between concrete and neoconcrete artists and poets that began in the 1950s, offering new research on topics that include moments of cultural détente between the two movements, the legacy of the Bauhaus in Brazil, and the importance of educational programs in promoting Brazilian arts and culture. Several themes repeat themselves throughout, such as insanity versus rationalism, interaction between visual arts and poetry, and the idea of that which has been excluded, become outdated, or does not quite fit. For instance, in his study of Flávio de Carvalho, “The Making of Concretism in Brazil,” José Lira argues that Carvalho conceived of his designs for a group of houses in the paulista neighborhood of Alameda Lorena as experiências similar to his two infamous performances in the streets of São Paulo. Carvalho’s houses involved “new spatial organization which would only be complete through the development of new body techniques,” in opposition to Le Corbusier’s functionalist idea of the house as a “machine for living” (29). Carvalho’s approach emphasizes lived experience over built structure, offering an alternative to standard modernist histories of architecture.One of the major concepts that emerges in Form and Feeling involves the complication and reconsideration of the legacies of 1920s Brazilian modernism, concretism, and neoconcretism. “The Funeral of Brazilian Modernism,” by Marcos Augusto Gonçalves, uses Cinema Novo director Glauber Rocha’s documentary on the death of modernist painter Emiliano di Cavalcanti as a point of departure for discussing the politicization and recontextualization of 1920s modernism during the military regime (1964–85). Michael Asbury’s chapter identifies inconsistencies in the split between concrete and neoconcrete art that occurred from 1956 to 1957. Instead of focusing on the canonical National Exhibition of Concrete Art, Asbury analyzes other events, including concrete poet Décio Pignatari’s criticism of di Cavalcanti and Gullar’s misappropriation of the work of mathematical theorist Susanne Langer. Luisa Valle’s chapter focuses on Mary Vieira’s concretist sculpture and architectonic space Polyvolume: Meeting Point. At first glance this project appears to engage public space. However, its presence in the lobby of the Itamaraty Palace, the home of Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, limits the members of the general public who can access this work to those who take guided tours. The association of Polyvolume: Meeting Point with authoritarianism during the 1970s paralleled the failed populism of Brasília as a whole and the increasing view of its urban design and architecture as tools of social control.Chapters by Adele Nelson, Martin Mäntele, and Claudia Saldanha analyze the role of pedagogy in Brazilian art. Nelson’s highly detailed and thoroughly researched chapter discusses the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea at Museu de Arte de São Paulo, which based instruction on the Bauhaus’s Preliminary Course in design. She compares this to Ivan Serpa’s approach to instruction at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro. Serpa emphasized the importance of arts instruction to children and continuity in his approach to teaching both children and adults. Mäntele discusses the founding of the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Ulm as the postwar legacy of the Bauhaus in Germany. He briefly mentions both the Brazilians who attended the HfG and those who went to the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, founded in Rio in 1962 as a continuation of the school at Ulm. However, since it is included in a book that focuses on Brazil, this chapter is a missed opportunity to probe the connections between these two institutions in more depth. Saldanha’s chapter on Lina Bo Bardi and the creation of a school of art at the Parque Lage in Rio situates this project within Bo Bardi’s larger oeuvre. Parque Lage originated as a lavish mansion located in the middle of 125 acres of lush mata atlântica rainforest that was remitted to the city as a debt repayment and remodeled into an art school. Saldanha briefly references several other topics that deserve further consideration, including artist Rubens Gerchman’s tenure as director of the art school, Governor Carlos Lacerda’s interest in making use of dead urban spaces in Rio, and problems with the school’s curriculum being too repetitious and not as innovative as its reputation suggested.The emphasis on concrete art and rationality during the 1950s eventually gave way to an exploration of irrationality in the Tropicália movement of the 1960s, with moments of collaboration between the two, as Frederico Coelho discusses in his chapter. Claudia Calirman extends this theme with her discussion of the “visceral” works of Lygia Pape and Anna Maria Maiolino, which moved beyond neoconcretism and into the abject world of body art and its explorations of sensuality. In a similar vein, Antonio Sergio Bessa offers an alternative reading of the work of Lygia Clark, often referenced as one of the most influential artists of the neoconcrete movement. He looks at Clark’s book entitled Meu doce rio (My Sweet River, 1975) and how it functions as a sort of fable in the spirit of Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma, therapeutically exploring the theme of irrationality in response to her abusive and traumatic childhood.Form and Feeling also includes chapters about artists whose works defy easily constructed narratives and inclusion into canons. Fernanda Lopes writes about artist Emil Forman, who studied with Ivan Serpa, mentor to the neoconcretists. During his brief artistic career, Forman created dense displays consisting of dozens of photographs of family members, framed and hung close to one another. His work had little in common with the minimalist and conceptualist works that were popular during the 1970s. This fact, and his early death at age 29, resulted in his work disappearing almost completely from histories of Brazilian art. Form and Feeling similarly explores the reconsideration of forgotten or neglected writers in Brazilian literature. The concrete poets themselves initiated this project with their studies of Sousândrade (Joaquim de Souza Andrade), Pedro Kilkerry, and others. Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira considers a meeting between Haroldo de Campos and Hélio Oiticica at the Chelsea Hotel in New York in 1971, where the two discussed their mutual interest in Japanese Noh theater and other topics. This meeting serves as a metaphor for the themes explored more generally in Form and Feeling, defying expectations and stereotypes regarding the perceived rivalry between concrete and neoconcrete artists and poets that originated in 1957.The last two chapters focus on literature, and in particular on the concrete poets’ interest in translating and rereading the work of writers whose work was previously considered “unreadable,” as Simone Homem de Mello argues. Eduardo Sterzi’s analysis of Sousândrade begins with the poem “O Guesa” (The Wanderer, 1876), which initiates a discussion of Pan-Americanism, the role of Indigenous peoples within Brazilian culture, survival and the witnessing of genocide and violence, and the idea of the poem itself as a journey. Sterzi compares “O Guesa” to Paulo Nazareth’s performance News from the World (2011), in which the artist walked through several Latin American countries wearing the same pair of sandals and collecting dust on his feet, which he did not wash off until he arrived at the Hudson River in New York. This closing chapter implicates the United States in the history of Latin America, with a high degree of ambivalence.What does it mean to write the art history of a country like Brazil from an outside point of view? For the past fifteen years, it has meant that those artists whose work fits neatly into preestablished, canonical art historical narratives have received the most attention. While concrete art is taken to represent the legacy of De Stijl and European geometric abstraction in general, neoconcrete art has entered discussions of formalism and minimalism. These essays build on this history but also offer new approaches that consider the role of institutions, the circulation of meanings within local contexts, and the relationship between concrete poetry and the irrational, as represented by Tropicália and the rediscovery of Brazilian writers whose work falls outside the literary canon. Hopefully, these contributions will establish a foundation for further research as well as models for reading the unreadable and including that which does not fit.