Brazilian Art Research Articles

Popau, Pop, or an “American Way of Living”? An Introduction to Aracy Amaral's “From the Stamps to the Bubble”

Abstract The introductory text foregrounds the article “From the Stamps to the Bubble” (1968) by Brazilian historian and curator Aracy A. Amaral. It seeks to locate the primary document within a broader historiography of Brazilian art in the second half of the 1960s, and examine the ways in which the military dictatorship, along with certain cultural exchanges facilitated by Brazil's economic development in this period affected artistic production. Placing particular attention on the multiple terminologies that were in use when the article was written, the introduction focuses on the contiguities of Pop Art in the Brazilian cultural milieu. It argues that Pop was present inasmuch as it inspired artists to initiate a process of radical experimentation, which empowered them to depart from an avant-garde tradition founded on geometric abstraction.

O artista popular e o contrato: lógicas divergentes nas produções musicais

The means of producing, distributing and consuming recorded music have been quickly changing since the end of the 20th century. Many investigations in different areas of the Human Sciences aimed at explaining and interpreting these means. The present article takes as its empirical object a work contract of “onerous assignment of fixed interpretation” made between a Brazilian musical artist, Joao do Vale, and a big record label, CBS, in the 1980s. It shows how this juridical document, which is an institutional form of specific social bonds, reveals the strategy of a hegemonic business model of distribution in that period and how the dispositions of the agents involved in that process adjusted perfectly to that order. The text builds on the hypothesis that the conclusion of this sales contract shows the mark and domination of the phonographic field, of its organization and its functioning, considering bot the label and the artist. Keywords: popular artist, phonographic market, major labels, work contract, artistic careers.

O cenário da licenciatura nos Estados Unidos: implicações potenciais para a arte-educação no Brasil

Dois professores dos Estados Unidos que trabalham em programas de arte educação falam de questões atuais decorrentes das recentes políticas que tiveram impacto direto sobre cursos de graduação, trabalho de campo, licenciatura e retenção de professores. O estudo é apresentado a partir da compreensão de um dos autores sobre a arte educação brasileira, através da aprendizagem experiencial e da pesquisa por meio de estudos comparativos. Os autores fornecem um enquadramento contextual do cenário educacional atual nos Estados com a intenção de informar os leitores de tendências que podem ter efeitos negativos semelhantes nas licenciaturas no Brasil. Por fim, os autores compartilham algumas estratégias que implementaram para responder aos desafios pontuados.

Sérgio Milliet: Críticas a Anita Malfatti

A pintura de Anita Malfatti foi co­mentada por diversos escritores, destacando-se entre eles Mário de Andrade, amigo que sempre a defendeu no âmbito do modernismo no Bra­sil, em críticas publicadas ou em cartas. Além de Mário de Andrade e de Oswald de Andrade, outro escritor que avaliou a produção da artis­ta foi Sérgio Milliet, figura muito significativa naquele contexto, tanto por ter contribuído com artigos para diversos jornais e revistas, quanto por ter viabilizado o contato dos artis­tas e escritores brasileiros com personalidades relevantes do ambiente cultural francês. Este artigo apresenta e discute a recepção crítica de Sérgio Milliet aos trabalhos de Anita Malfatti, através de comentários publicados em artigos e livros ou proferidos em cartas. O objetivo da discussão é verificar como as transformações na pintura da artista foram interpretadas pelo autor na década de 1920 e consecutivamente, quando houve uma preocupação maior em escrever uma história do modernismo no Brasil.

Sensorial, Supra-Sensorial, Hélio-Sensorial. Analyzing Oiticica in Action

Este texto estudia el conjunto de trabajos de los Parangolés que el artista brasileno Hélio Oiticica desarrolló entre 1964 y 1978 a partir de incursiones teóricas en la psicología del juego, del psicoanálisis, de los cultos religiosos y el arte op. Para Oiticica estas capas de uso interactivo ofrecen posibilidades de expresión creativa. Mediante el análisis de una película documental que muestra al artista usando un parangolé, se evidencia que la expresividad está destinada principalmente al participante mismo. Oiticica lo llama autosensación e intenta alcanzar lo suprasensorial. Es un experimento que emplea todo el cuerpo y especialmente los órganos sensoriales. Esto singulariza sus propuestas artísticas que requieren del participante una inmersión en sí mismo y disfrutar de las sensaciones puras, preferiblemente antes de cualquier conceptualización. Las estructuras y colores en constante movimiento conducen con una atención desenfocada a una especie de sobrecarga que atenúa una postura distanciada identificable para promover así una inmersión comparable a un trance.

Ensaio sobre arte e testemunho: Rodrigo Braga e a invenção da experiência

Resumo O ensaio enfoca o testemunho como uma posição discursiva e explora seu papel na simbolização do trauma. Considerando-o como transmissão de centelhas do Real, defende que uma de suas modalidades seria a invenção da experiência, tal como aponta parte da produção contemporânea em artes visuais. Para melhor explorar essa hipótese, propõe um diálogo com alguns dos trabalhos apresentados pelo artista brasileiro Rodrigo Braga em sua exposição Mais Força que o Necessário, realizada na Bélgica em 2010.

Black Art in Brazil: Expressions of Identity - by Cleveland, Kimberly L.

Black Art in Brazil: Expressions of Identity - by Cleveland, Kimberly L.

Minor Transnational Brazilian Art

This article examines the emergence of Lyrical ion in Brazil in the late 1950s. Mostly forgotten in the contemporary moment in favour of Geometric ion, the author reconsiders the rivalry between these two forms of abstract art and the influence on European styles of Art Informel and Tachisme. Lyrical ion was predominantly practiced by Japanese immigrants in Brazil, and as a result the artists and their art challenged the category of national art as formed by European colonisation. Through the case study of Japanese Brazilian artist Manabu Mabe, the author argues for Lyrical ion as a transnational art that brings together Japanese, European and Brazilian influences. Brazilian lyrical abstraction disorders the idea of national art as defined only in contrast to the international, the typical binary throughout the history of Brazilian modern art.

Da Arte Correio à Telemática

Esse artigo examina os primeiros trabalhos dos artistas brasileiros Paulo Bruscky e Eduardo Kac, importantes precursores da arte e do ativismo na Internet. Também argumenta que esse legado artístico dos anos 70s e 80s é significante em qualquer nódulo da rede cultural global. Ambos exploraram a arte e a comunicação à distância: Bruscky em Recife nos anos setenta, através da Arte Postal, e Kac no Rio de Janeiro nos anos oitenta, através da rede de Videotextos e da Telepresença. Além disso, as práticas conceituais desses artistas resistiram à opressão política dessas duas décadas enquanto nutriam “o exercício experimental da liberdade.”

Red Shift: Cildo Meireles and the Definition of the Political-Conceptual

This article examines Cildo Meireles's refusal to describe Red Shift, his 1984 installation, as conceptual, political art. I use his rejection of these terms to reconsider conventional categories of the political in Latin American conceptualism as these have been historicized in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I argue that the artist builds his notions of conceptual and political art based on socio-artistic theories propagated in the short-lived but highly influential publication, Malasartes. This groundbreaking magazine, founded by Meireles and eight others in 1975, published texts crucial to Brazilian art history and translated international articles. These shaped the theoretical ideas that would inform the Brazilian art scene in the 1970s. Revisiting theses debates permits a deeper understanding of Meireles's view of art and politics. Revealing, in particular, the manner in which this generation of artists criticized the incipient art market in Brazil, then seen as synonymous with the larger art system. Proposing a differentiated art history, offering an autochthonous point of view, Malasartes's editors challenged the traditional view of the artwork as an isolated, commodified object, inserted in larger art movements through the stultifying imposition of stylistic categories on the artist. This critique of the art market helps to explain Meireles's stance on rejecting identification as a conceptual and political artist, despite the fact that his opus can be seen as both political and conceptual.

Light and Form: Brazilian and German Photography in the 1950s

Summary After the Second World War, Brazil underwent a rapid modernization and positioned itself in an international context, resulting also in the consolidation of the country's artistic and cultural production. Hand in hand with the repositioning of Brazilian art as seen, for instance, in the avant-garde Concrete and Neoconcrete movements, photography also renovated itself, pre-eminently in the works of José Oiticica Filho (1906–1964) and Geraldo de Barros (1923–1998). In that same period, a specific trend of European photography, particularly in Germany, also shifted towards abstraction and concretion. Noteworthy is the oeuvre of Otto Steinert and that of the fotoform and subjketive fotografie groups, which were to him connected. In those international scenarios, light and form play a fundamental role in the construction of non-objective photographs. Analysed here are the relationships between these geographically distant though formally related artistic productions.

A Brazilian pedagogical project for the teaching of the arts in the twenty-first century

This article describes the origins of SP Escola de Teatro (SP Theatre School – Development Centre for Stage Arts), located in São Paulo (Brazil), and the pedagogical system developed by the Brazilian artists who founded it. The school aims to establish an innovative teaching method comprising the specificities and the cultural reality of the twenty-first century. At the beginning of 2000, when the theatre company Os Satyros arrived at Franklin Roosevelt Square, the area was then controlled by criminality, prostitution and drug trafficking. Due to the theatre projects developed by Os Satyros within the area, it was completely revitalised, attracting other theatrical groups to the square. Starting from the question ‘What would your dream theatre school be like?’, some of these artists devised a stage arts school, with eight regular courses (acting, dramaturgy, directing, light design, sound design, costumes and scenography, stage technician and mime), eventually funded by the State of São Paulo’s government. They devised a modular project, non-hierarchical and non-cumulative, in full consonance with the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire’s principles, in which ‘those who teach also learn, and those who learn also teach’. Over the course of time, the school has been understanding through trial and error the best strategies to implement the project. This is especially true concerning the students’ role as active partners in the pedagogical process. The practical implementation of this principle caused many misunderstandings and over the years we have been learning how to deal with these challenges. However, many important contributions by students have made the school more dynamic and meaningful to all its members.

Desdobrando tempos, redescobrindo olhares: um estudo de “Sinhazinha na janela” de Lula Cardoso Ayres

The aim of this paper is to make a reading of “Missy in the window” (s/d) by pernambuco artist Lula Cardoso Ayres (1910-1987). From the formal-geometric imagery repertoire typical of the 1940s and 1950s, when the Brazilian art, and even the work of Ayres, was heading to concretism, we read the gesture as an intrinsic element in the image. The theoretical foundation is made from the thought of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in particular the text "Notes sure le geste", 1991, in which the "gesture" is the main reason of his reflections.&nbsp

The Brazilian Art of Transvestism: Routes to a decolonial genealogy

In this study, my aim is to portray routes to an investigation of Brazilian art of transvestism. In approaching to epistemological field of social constructionism, I argue that construction of sexual and gender identity cannot be isolated from personal social trajectory - including their social networks, their integration in cultural communities and their own course of career - I question use of categories like transvestite, transsexual, homosexual and transformista as they define evident isolated identities. I propose investigation of Brazilian art of transvestism as a way to look, from a different point of view, at subjective experiences as it extends sexual and gender meanings shared intersubjectively in localized scenarios and understand these contexts as spaces for creating new social meanings. Therefore, I introduce epistemic routes to comprehending art of transvestism within an ethnogenesis of Brazilian LGBT community, understanding it as a decolonial genealogy research and taking concept of the space in-between as reading operator.

Museu virtual (e plural) de arte

O artigo aborda os museus virtuais de arte, interfaces on-line que essas instituições desenvolvem para ampliar a comunicação com seus públicos. Evoca o conceito de museu plural proposto por Martín-Barbero e discute iniciativas em três tipos de interface: bancos de dados, visitas virtuais e jogos digitais. Analisa a relação obra-espectador que se dá em cada iniciativa, enfocando jogos de três museus: Tate Gallery de Londres, Museu Boijmans de Roterdan e Museu Virtual de Arte Brasileira. Conclui que o emprego de tecnologias não é condição, sequer garantia, para realização do conceito de museu plural, o que depende de como o museu entende seu papel institucional e relaciona-se com seus públicos.Palavras-chave: Museu virtual, obra de arte, Martín-Barbero

CÃES SEM PLUMAS: OS DESPOSSUÍDOS NA ARTE CONTEMPORÂNEA BRASILEIRA

Resumo Tomando um verso do poeta João Cabral de Melo Neto como metáfora para a situação de despossessão em que vivem parcelas da população brasileira, este artigo aponta duas maneiras em que tais grupos sociais são representados pela produção contemporânea em artes visuais no Brasil. A primeira é a representação partida , que os ignora e assim os exclui do universo sensível partilhado socialmente. A segunda é a representação das sobras, que se ocupa em criar equivalências sensíveis da realidade brasileira que tornam visíveis os nexos entres gentes, espaços e fatos que promovem a despossessão radical de vidas.

The Environmental Imaginary in Brazilian Poetry and Art

Malcolm K. McNee's The Environmental Imaginary in Brazilian Poetry and Art presents a sophisticated and nuanced inquiry into the representational strategies engaged by contemporary Brazilian artists and poets to promote dialogue about the relations between people and environments at various scales. The introduction and first chapter draw Brazilian artists' and intellectuals' ecological aesthetics into tension with recent trends in North American ecocriticism, particularly as they relate to and problematize the nationalistic “paradise motif” critiqued by Brazilian historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. In this way, McNee generates a productive dialogue between Brazilian thought on the lived experience of local and regional environments and the social/symbolic construction of nature and recent North American proposals about environmental representation, such as Amanda Boetzkes's reappraisal of earth art, James Engelhardt's ecopoetics, and Timothy Morton's “ambient poetics.” McNee argues for an expanded definition of environmental activism, which he relates not only to the political struggle for environmental justice, but also to the search for subjectivities that deconstruct the foundational modern human/nature binary.

Contextos e desafios para o desenvolvimento da Pós-Graduação profissional em artes no Brasil: A questão da pesquisa

Partindo de uma breve introdução sobre os desenvolvimentos históricos da pós graduação nos contextos internacional e brasileiro e da análise do arcabouço normativo pertinente no Brasil, o presente trabalho pretende contribuir para o delineamento conceitual do que seriam as atividades de pesquisa dentro dos programas de pós graduação stricto sensu na área de Artes no Brasil. Sem pretender abordar questões epistemológicas ou teóricas sobre a conceituação de pesquisa, este trabalho objetiva uma conceituação “prática”, dirigida à operacionalização dos diversos aspectos que tratam da pesquisa no funcionamento dos programas de pós graduação profissional em Artes no Brasil, apresentando em sua conclusão alguns conceitos derivados da experiência da aplicação desta conceituação em um Mestrado Profissional na área das Artes.

Remembering and forgetting the Kalunga Project: popular music and the construction of identities between Brazil and Angola

Kalunga Project was a mission of 65 Brazilian musicians, artists, producers, motion-pictures directors, and journalists that travelled to Angola in 1980, when the country was in a civil war. The invitation was made by the Angolan Government, and the caravan went through Luanda, Benguela, and Lobito, cities where the musicians performed shows, during a 12-day travel, characterized by a strong political connotation. The Kalunga Project happened without the official recognition of the Brazilian Government and it was not divulged by the press at that time, due to the censorship. The event had a clear political position at the international scenario polarized by the cold war. It was not only about supporting the Angolan people, but also the block of the socialist countries, from what Angola was part, as an allied country of the USSR and Cuba. At this time, Brazil was living a slow process of redemocratization that had begun with the Amnesty Law, in 1979. The mission reveals a postcolonial dialogue between Brazil and Angola of both musical and political dimensions. The Kalunga Project is also important in highlighting the transnational connections between the performance of Brazilian samba and Angolan semba, affording an insight into the construction of identities in the Black Atlantic

Breaching the frame: the rise of contemporary art in Brazil and Japan

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Politics of Abstraction 2. The Matter of Painting 3. Framing Contemporary Art 4. Outside the Frame 5. Concrete Poetry and the Materialization of Language 6. The Ticklish Object Epilogue Notes Works Cited Index