Art under a Diagrammatic Perspective: Brazilian Artistic Production in the 1960s and 70s

The merit of Calirman’s book lies in the manner it documents a well-known story, albeit one that is still revisited with caution, especially within Brazil. The volume of information included contrasts, however, with the author’s often schematic explanations and categorisations, where the value of Brazilian artistic production is endorsed by better known and earlier artistic practices from North American and Europe.⁰⁷ Calirman’s argument for the incontestable critical power of Cildo Meireles’s Inserções em circuitos ideológicos: Projeto Coca-Cola(Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project, 1970), for instance, is weakened by a final articulation of the artist’s work in relation to that of Andy Warhol through dispensable conceptual and formal links, and to that of Michel Foucault, through interpretative ones. Her analysis of Antonio Manuel’s work uses the artist’s intervention at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro,The Body Is The Work (1970), to categorise his practice during the period as body art, connecting it to Vito Acconci and Robert Morris, though noting that it’s marked by the celebratory worship characteristic of the Carioca culture, which is ultimately another category that could be deconstructed.⁰⁸ The same happens to Artur Barrio, whose work ‘does not fit neatly into any one movement of the period during which he made his art’, but is then placed in relation to Joseph Beuys’s sculptural practice and – with a degree of opposition – to Robert Smithson’s earth-based works.⁰⁹

In order to delineate the artistic and political context of the late 1960s in Brazil, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship opens with a discussion of the artists’ statement ‘Non à la Biennale de São Paulo’ (‘No to the 10 Bienal de São Paulo’), a document produced in Paris in June 1969, which expressed foreign artists’ outrage against the brutality of the regime, gave an account of the violence perpetrated against Brazilian artists and intellectuals and called upon artists of all nationalities to boycott the 10th Bienal de São Paulo.¹⁰ The large support that it gained (the document carried 321 signatures) and the significance of those involved in that protest, amongst them art critic Pierre Restany, speaks of the Bienal de São Paulo as a paradigmatic institution of Brazilian cultural history.¹¹The importance of the Bienal – and its symbolic representation of certain social classes aligned with the military regime – is further exemplified by the refusal to participate of the following Brazilian artists: Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Rubens Gerchman, Willys de Castro, Nelson Leirner, Mary Vieira, Antonio Dias and Carlos Vergara, among others.

The merit of Calirman’s book lies in the manner it documents a well-known story, albeit one that is still revisited with caution, especially within Brazil.The author also offers a detailed account of the obstacles found by the then-director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), György Kepes, when he was invited to organise an exhibition around art and technology for that edition of the Bienal de São Paulo. However, Calirman overlooks the reverberations of the boycott in the US itself, missing an opportunity to acknowledge the importance of artists’ actions in the US, which continued even after the end of the exhibition in São Paulo. Led by Gordon Matta-Clark,¹² artists of the Museo Latinoamericano continued the demonstration,¹³ publishing and circulating the book Contrabienal (1969), which functioned as a parallel exhibition to protest against the Brazilian dictatorship and its use of torture.¹⁴ In choosing to ignore the expanded protest of these Latin American artists in the US, Calirman loses sight of a complex web of contradictions lived by Latin American intellectuals and artists in exile.¹⁵

The detailed descriptions of specific events engender many other questions, which await deeper investigation and call for a more profound analysis. For example, a comprehensive report on the artistic community’s unabated outcry and international debate on whether to boycott the Bienal or not is brought to an end by a description of the opening of the exhibition itself and its numerous visitors, even if they were alienated from the events taking place backstage. Appreciative of the ironies and contradictions of these events, Calirman nonetheless discards their development in favour of a panoramic view of the period, inadvertently reducing their importance.

Aimed at being diagrammatic, somewhat in the manner of Alfred Barr Jr., the book does not dispense enough attention to the details that are important to historical writing, and this inevitably results in factual errors. For instance, in her discussion of the exhibition ‘Do Corpo à Terra’ (‘From Body to Earth’, 17–21 April 1970), held at Belo Horizonte’s Municipal Park, in the state of Minas Gerais, the author questionably points out that the exhibition was ironically sponsored by the military government even though it celebrated the Brazilian struggle for independence from Portuguese domination.¹⁶Indeed the date of the celebration was chosen to mark the hanging of Tiradentes, leader of an uprising on 21 April 1792 in Minas Gerais; his body subsequently dismembered. This event was commemorated in the exhibition by Meireles’s Tiradentes: Totem-Monumento ao preso político(Tiradentes: Totem-Monument to the Political Prisoner, 1970), an installation in which chickens were burned alive, thereby associating the violence employed by the Portuguese colonisers to that of the military government. The piece eventually precipitated the seizure of the exhibition,¹⁷ which was closed down by the police following a complaint.¹⁸ However, as the curator Frederico Morais notes, the exhibition was sponsored by Hidrominas, a tourism agency of the State of Minas Gerais;¹⁹ which did not make it representative of the military government. On the contrary, it demonstrates that this was a time of dissent across the left and the right, and that the Brazilian dictatorial government – composed by the military but also connected to part of the country’s industrial bourgeoisie – had housed its contradictions.

By reducing the reading of these artists’ work to a response to the historical events of the past, an opportunity is lost to enquire about the significance of studying them today.In addition to the importance of the political events that it triggered, this exhibition also had a significant artistic importance: Morais indicates that this was the first exhibition in Brazil where ‘artists where invited not to exhibit their concluded artwork, but to create work directly on site. As such, they had their travel and accommodation expenses covered, and also received a stipend, along with artists from the state of Minas Gerais.’²⁰ This fact per se merits special attention, as it shows the degree of innovation that existed in the relationships between artists and curators, including the reversal of their roles.

The didactic tone of the book ultimately affects the discussion of the artists themselves, otherwise so closely studied. Calirman disappointingly concludes by tying their separate trajectories to current hegemonic categories of art history and criticism. Antonio Manuel, for instance, is associated to body art and media art. In search of a new aesthetics representative of a peripheral country – one marked by precariousness – Calirman also refers to Artur Barrio’s ‘artworks in public spaces, merging political content with non-permanent artistic practices’ and is interested by the way in which Meireles’s conceptual practice was exhibited in a very genuine way, both politically and formally.²¹

 By focusing exclusively on Meireles’s artistic activities at that time, Calirman effectively demonstrates the political and critical nature of his work. However this is gained at the risk of ultimately rendering the impression that his greatest contribution was the ability to anticipate international trends and their operation in the local context. Again, diagrammatic solutions simplify a picture that is rather more complex. Still the reason for studying these artists at present is not made clear: is it to find that – at that moment – they already fit hegemonic models?

The recollection of the past is aimed at opening the doors to the present. By reducing the reading of these artists’ work to a response to the historical events of the past, an opportunity is lost to enquire about the significance of studying them today. How can a political agenda be articulated within today’s international art scene and globalised world? Is it possible to define global networks as public and democratic spaces per se, devoid of any kind of censorship? How to articulate artistic density and critical power that is able to respond to new models of social activism? The questions keep arising.