Brazilian Art Research Articles

Os desafios da performance na contemporaneidade

Este artigo elabora uma reflexão acerca dos desafios enfrentados no âmbito dos espetáculos performáticos que dialogam com a ciência e a tecnologia dentro do espaço cênico. Tais elementos podem estar presentes na composição cenográfica, serem aplicados em indumentárias e, em muitos espetáculos, poderão figurar como elemento narrativo essencial da obra. Este assunto está diretamente relacionado ao terceiro capítulo de nossa tese, intitulada A aplicação dos efeitos visuais em tempo real na construção narrativa de espetáculos com projeção (2017) e realizada com apoio da bolsa FAPESP sob o processo nº 2014/0296-0, o qual teve sua construção baseada principalmente no livro Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (2007) de Steve Dixon, que nos conta a história de artistas que atuaram nesta temática desde o início do século XX. Adicionalmente, colhemos informações na obra de Cesar Ustarroz (2011), em entrevistas realizadas com artistas brasileiros e espanhóis e, ainda, em nossas experiências pessoais decorrentes da pesquisa de campo.

Autonomous articulations of creative practices and resources management in art production and exhibition in Rio de Janeiro

This paper presents some strategies on the productive inclusion of visual and literary arts in an attempt to contribute to the debate concerning Creative Economy's relationships against the neoliberal landscape in which the culture market is embedded. For this purpose, we have initially used some examples of actions taken by Brazilian and foreign artists, sensibly shifting towards the social-political context of artivism, until we reach the management of personal experiences.

Cris Bierrenbach: Los Orificios del Cuerpo

Cris Bierrenbach's artwork, which is analyzed in this text, poses a questioning to the relationships between body and gender that we live in today's society through performance, photography and video. Queer theory is used to analyze how it is that the use of the image in this Brazilian artist confronts us with the social and corporal limits of genre. The corporal orifices, the spaces of the body, can enter the norm or they can question it. The various relationships of image and body created by Bierrenbach take us to the limits of each of the social spaces that our body inhabits, to create an artistic space for reflection.

Ideas of Reality: Antonio Dias between Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Milan

Despite the fact that the growing reception of Antonio Dias (b. 1944) in the English-speaking world is happening under the sign of global art history, the trajectory of the Brazilian artist in the 1960s and 1970s actually suggests both a counter-genealogy and a counter-geography of the global. This essay explores this situation by recontextualizing Dias's emergence vis-à-vis the critical debate on realism and underdevelopment that marked the Rio de Janeiro avant-gardist scene of the mid- to late-1960s and involved writers such as Ferreira Gullar, Hélio Oiticica, Mário Pedrosa, Pierre Restany, and Frederico Morais. It subsequently argues that such critical terms simultaneously both change and remain crucial as Dias moves away from Brazil, first to Paris, late in 1966, and then to Milan, in 1968, inflecting the artist's recourse to the English language and his turn to painting as his preferred medium even as he began to circulate amongst artists associated with Arte Povera and Conceptualism in Europe.

Um estudo a partir da semiótica visual da pintura A Primeira Missa no Brasil, de Victor Meirelles

A obra que nos propomos analisar neste artigo intitula-se A Primeira Missa no Brasil, de Victor Meirelles. Dada a sua expressiva dimensão, é considerada uma das telas de maiores proporções da arte brasileira produzida no século XIX. Como se sabe, a história do descobrimento do Brasil é repleta de contradições, dentre as quais se encontram questões sobre o acaso e a intenção dos portugueses que aportaram no Brasil em 1500. O quadro de Meirelles também se encontra envolto em divergências se levarmos em consideração a narrativa feita por Pero Vaz de Caminha, em sua carta ao rei de Portugal. A leitura dessa obra é trabalhada com o objetivo de apreender as categorias do plano da expressão homologáveis às categorias do conteúdo, com base nos pressupostos teórico-metodológicos da semiótica discursiva de A. J. Greimas e seus colaboradores, mais especificamente à vertente da semiótica visual. Tais categorias da expressão foram relacionadas com oposições encontradas no plano do conteúdo, cujo resultado aproximou-se do que, em semiótica, são denominadas relações semissimbólicas. Como as análises propostas centraram-se apenas no texto-quadro A Primeira Missa no Brasil, não houve a intenção de abordar o discurso ideológico desse quadro em oposição a outros discursos.

A formação estética na criação artística do livro-imagem

Este artigo busca discutir os processos de criação artística considerando livros que são pensados para um tipo específico de público: as crianças. Os dados e as reflexões contidas neste texto fazem parte de uma pesquisa de doutoramento em Artes Visuais na Universidade Estadual de Campinas, que buscou compreender o processo de criação de narrativas visuais de artistas e leitura de imagem realizadas por crianças pré-escolares. Toma-se como referencial teórico no campo das Artes Visuais as contribuições de Ernest Gombrich e Fayga Ostrower. Assim, foram realizadas entrevistas com artistas brasileiros e franceses que narram suas intencionalidades, objetivos e concepções no momento da criação, tendo em vista a criança. Entender o processo de criação do livro-imagem, nesse caso, é parte fundamental para compreender a obra finalizada, sob a ótica do produto final como resultado de problematizações, de escolhas e alterações feitas ao longo de todo o trajeto. Nesse sentido, torna-se visível a intenção de oferecer aos jovens leitores imagens que instigam o pensamento, alimentam o imaginário e educam o olhar para outras linguagens visuais.

The Global/Local Power of the Inhotim Institute: Contemporary Art, the Environment and Private Museums in Brazil

At the end of the 1940s, three important private museums emerged in Brazil’s two biggest metropolises, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, establishing a circuit that would prove essential to the consolidation and internationalization of modern and contemporary Brazilian art. During this period, entrepreneurs and collectors created the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM–RJ, in 1948), the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP, in 1948) and the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM–SP, in 1947). As an heir to this tradition, but adopting a radically new proposal, the Inhotim Institute emerged approximatley sixty years later, in 2004. Located in the state of Minas Gerais, Inhotim harbors a museum complex with a series of pavilions and galleries with works of art and sculptures displayed in the open air, in a rural ambience that also contains a vast botanical collection of rare species. Like the private museums founded in Brazil in the 1940s, Inhotim’s creation was directly linked to the trajectory of entrepreneurs and collectors. The institution was created by businessman Bernardo Paz to hold the collection started by himself in the 1980s and that now runs to more than 450 works by Brazilian and international artists, making it one of the world’s most important collections of contemporary art. This paper discusses the tradition of private museums in Brazil and Inhotim’s impact on the contemporary art scene in the country and globally.
 
 Article received: December 28, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper
 
 How to cite this article: Barros de Castro, Maurício. "The Global/Local Power of the Inhotim Institute: Contemporary Art, the Environment and Private Museums in Brazil." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): 161–172. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.239

Max Bense/Aloísio Magalhães (Germany, 1969): the transcultural and popular context of Der Weg eines Zeichens

If the Modernist impulse requires new approaches, then many argue that highlighting the networks of artistic exchange is one way of reactualizing the Modernist paradigm. In 1969, Brazilian artist and designer Aloísio Magalhães (1927-1982) exhibited a series of photographs at the study gallery at Studium Generale, University of Stuttgart, an exhibition space for interdisciplinary discourse founded by Max Bense (1910*1990) in 1958. In this study I want to discuss key aspects of this exhibition project, comparing it with the Brazilian concretist movement and Lina Bo Bardi’s exhibitionary visions, as well as to examine the different cultural approaches to Magalhães photographic project and its common grounds with formalism, concretism and sign theory.

A contemporaneidade de Bispo

Arthur Bispo do Rosário, paciente psiquiátrico que representou o Brasil na Bienal de Veneza de 1995, talvez seja o artista outsider mais conhecido do país. A análise que proponho de sua obra considera o significado de respeitar os direitos dos loucos, abordando seus trabalhos pela perspectiva da arte contemporânea. Bispo nunca atribuiu estatuto artístico à sua produção. Investigo se classificar seu trabalho como arte contemporânea, como faz Frederico Morais, não abandona um tipo de controle epistêmico (o psiquiátrico) para adotar outro: um formalismo estético atemporal. Defendo a necessidade de mais estudos para compreender como Bispo, cuja identificação psicopatológica se confunde com a discriminação de raça e de classe, se tornou um dos artistas brasileiros de maior prestígio.

Currency, Art, and Economic Crisis

The condition of a country’s currency is perhaps one of the most effective barometers of its economic state, a topic that has been amply examined by economists. Currency as artistic medium is lesser-explored terrain and yet its study can prove revealing of a country’s economic and historical circumstances while poignantly commenting on the whimsical nature of the art market and the commercial value of works of art. For this study, I will explore the work of artists who employed currency as commentary on their country’s respective economic crises and the political conditions that led to them. I have selected a small sample of artworks with currency focusing specifically on the circulation of the US dollar, or rather it symbolic dominance, in Latin Ameircan economies. In this study, I examine three case studies spanning several decades, among them: a series of banknotes by Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles entitled Zero Dollar, created during the late 1970s and 1980s; a multimedia installation Circulante (Circulating) from 1998 by Ecuadorian artist Patricio Palomeque, and the video piece Inversión from 2011 by Cuban artist Glenda León. All three artists used their work to foreground the instability and fragile structures underpinning currency while critiquing the expansion and reach of the US dollar in their countries.

Aesthetic strategies to explore beyond the models of sustainable development: An analysis of Lisa Simpson's Musical Sewing

AbstractThis essay provides a critical reflection about the (lacking) ethical dimension in the conventional models of sustainability through an aesthetic approach. To perform this exercise of reflection, the work of the Brazilian artist Lisa Simpson—Agente Costura is introduced and some “unconventional” aesthetic strategies present in her work, such as embodiment, affect, mindfulness, rhythm and movement, are explored. These aesthetic strategies are demonstrated to have the potential to enhance and improve environmental perception and generate self‐reflection, engagement and responsibility. Furthermore, the processual qualities and transformative potential of sustainability are emphasized through an investigation of the complex temporal dimensions that are combined in Simpson's practice. The work of the Agente Costura enlightens not only possible alternative paths for pragmatic and multisensorial strategies to examine environmental and sustainability ethics, but also the rich role that can be played by artists and artistic practices within the increasingly necessary inter‐ and transdisciplinary collaborations for sustainability.

Beauty and the (Huge) Beast Await You at N.Y. Museums

Beauty and the (Huge) Beast Await You at N.Y. Museums

Brazil After History, or Two German Accounts of Postwar Brazilian Literature

This paper interrogates the claims of the German theorists Max Bense (1910–1990) and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (1948–) that they perceived in Brazilian art and literature a tropical temporality, defined by a constructed existence outside linear (“European”) history. As he wrote in his Brasilianische Intelligenz: Eine cartesianische Reflexion(1965), Max Bense, a Stuttgart-based philosopher of aesthetics and technology, found in Brazil's modernist capital, said to have been built ex nihilo in the late 1950s, an unprecedented fusion of design and politics that upended historical models of aesthetic valuation. As Bense applied his informational aesthetics to his study of Concrete poetry, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, in hisAfter 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (2013), uses a post-hermeneutical method to denude João Cabral de Melo Neto's poetry of historical and semantic depth. Ultimately this paper argues that in their autobiographical accounts of travels to Brazil both authors betray a tendency to equate Brazil with an “otherness,” thereby displacing onto Brazilian culture another indication that, from the European perspective, its dream of itself persists.

Call Me Text, Just Text*

ABSTRACTThis text introduces and discusses the MOVIMENTO HO (HO MOVEMENT), a collective action conceived by Brazilian performance artist Eleonora Fabião and realized November 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. Performed by 4,700 bricks, 3 books, a group of 7 artists-collaborators, gallery visitors, the cultural center’s staff, a truck and moving workers, among others, the action started at Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica (Municipal Art Center Hélio Oiticica, located in downtown Rio) and ended in front of the Casa das Mulheres da Maré (Women’s House at Maré, located in one of the city’s major conglomerates of slums). During 7 days people, bricks, books, and truck, among others, moved one another through varied spaces, tangible and affective matters, and performative dimensions.

ENTRE ARTE, ENSINO E AFRODESCENDÊNCIA

Considering the propositions of law 10.639/ 2003, this study intends to present a brief trajectory of art education in Brazil, trying to highlight the presence of the black in artistic works as thematic and as a subject that expresses itself artistically, transmitting his multiple knowledge through Art. These considerations can broaden the vision and understanding of the Black Hand in Brazilian art, its representations and its implications in education, allowing new reflections for teaching practice and for the critical artistic making of the students.

Resituating Nitheroy in the Translation Zone: Transnational Travels, Creative Transformations, and the Making of a Modern Brazil

This article situates Domingos Goncalves de Magalhaes (1811–1882) and Nitheroy, which he published in Paris in 1836, between languages, nationalist cultures, political beliefs, and economic models. My reading of the poet and the periodical as transnational translators complements existing studies that either emphasize their literary contributions of introducing Romanticism in Brazil or focus on their political relevance to Brazilian nationalism in comparison to Spanish American countries. I highlight how Nitheroy and its editors engaged in acts of translation by extending the reach of European and North American ideas, values, and practices to elite Brazilian readers through the periodical's content and circulation. By reading Goncalves de Magalhaes and Nitheroy through the lens of trans-national translation, I emphasize that Brazilian writers and artists did not copy European Romanticism and other foreign concepts, but rather, creatively transformed them for Brazil as part of the process of transatlantic transfer.

Geraldo de Barros: Photography as Construction

This essay analyzes the form and content of Brazilian artist Geraldo de Barros’ 1951 exhibition Fotoforma. In the Fotoforma photographs, Barros employed photography as a process of construction. With photographs of construction materials as his building blocks, Barros rebuilt urban space by layering his negatives with artistic interventions, drawing attention to the tenuousness (physical and theoretical) of São Paulo’s urban structure. The experimental form of Barros’ oeuvre, as well as his interest in vernacular spaces, creates a place for marginalized narratives to enter the dialog of Brazilian modernization.

The “Ecology of Information” in the Work of Brazilian Artist Rosângela Rennó

The “Ecology of Information” in the Work of Brazilian Artist Rosângela Rennó

Drawing as memory and survival; painting and its relationship with history

In an interview with Sheila Cabo Geraldo, visual artist Carlos Zílio recalls aspects of a trajectory that turned him into a reference in the field of art in Brazil since the second half of the 1960s. The conversation emphasizes, above all, the artist’s political engagement, his imprisonment and the possible ways of resistance in that period; it also reviews the interaction with his generational peers (Gerchman, Vergara, Dias) with Iberê Camargo and French art historian Hubert Damisch. Finally, it discusses his perception about painting itself and his notion of an encounter with a “ground zero” of painting in the 1970s, projecting its chances of permanence in contemporary times.

Is there a brazilian art?

Debate originally published in French and Portuguese in the magazine Perspective, 2, 2013. Electronic reference: Luiz Marques, Roberto Conduru, Claudia Mattos et Mônica Zielinsky, « Existe-t-il un art brésilien ? », Perspective [On line], 2 | 2013. Text in French available in: URL : http://perspective.revues.org/3879 | Original text in Portuguese available in: URL : http://perspective.revues.org/5543.