In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Brazilian poet Ferreira Gullar pursued a project he named “neoconcretism” — a project apparently distinct from his preceding and subsequent poetry, and bookended by the explosive economic success of developmental populism, at its beginning, and Brazil's 1964 military coup, at its end. What is the relation of Gullar’s neoconcrete period to Brazilian history? What is at stake, aesthetically, in Gullar’s poetic project? What are its politics? By way of addressing these questions, this essay attempts to shed light on the question of the relation between artworks and their social determination: in Marxist terms, between superstructure and base.
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