Brazilian Art under Dictatorship

ANTONIO MANUEL, ARTUR BARRIO, AND CILDO MEIRELESBy Claudia Calirman

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5139-9

Contents

List of Illustrations……………………………………………………..ixPreface and Acknowledgments………………………………………………..xiiiAbbreviations and a Note on Translation……………………………………..xviiIntroduction……………………………………………………………..11. “Non à la Biennale de São Paulo”………………………………..102. ANTONIO MANUEL: “Experimental Exercise of Freedom”…………………………373. ARTUR BARRIO: A New Visual Aesthetics…………………………………….794. CILDO MEIRELES: Clandestine Art………………………………………….114Conclusion: Opening the Wounds, Longing for Closure…………………………..147Appendix 1. Dossier “Non à la Biennale de São Paulo”…………………155Appendix 2. Chronology of Exhibitions……………………………………….159Notes……………………………………………………………………163Bibliography……………………………………………………………..185Index……………………………………………………………………199

Chapter One

“Non à la Biennale de São Paulo”

On Monday, 16 June 1969, a group of artists and intellectuals gathered at the Paris City Museum of Modern Art to discuss the storm surrounding the X São Paulo Biennial, now only months away. Scheduled to open in September in Ibirapuera Park, the biennial was expected to include representations from over sixty countries. The first group of artists selected to represent France had withdrawn in protest against the stringent dictates of Brazil’s military regime; now, it seemed, a second, provisional delegation might be in jeopardy as well. The meeting began with a number of Brazilian artists giving personal testimonies to the political situation in their country: the media and the arts were under censorship, and works of art containing any controversial aspects, sexual imagery, or political content were banned from the Brazilian public’s view. The assembled crowd listened as a dossier entitled “Non à la Biennale de São Paulo” was read aloud: it recounted the latest events involving cultural repression in Brazil under the military regime; broadly denounced the repression of politicians, intellectuals, and artists, which had already resulted in the suspension of the civil and political rights of numerous individuals; and decried the imprisonment and persecution of Brazilian cultural figures, including the musicians Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Geraldo Vandré, the filmmaker Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, and the directors of the two major newspapers based in Rio de Janeiro, Correio da Manhã and Jornal do Brasil (see dossier “Non à la Biennale de São Paulo” in appendix 1) (figure 1).

After heated debate, the crowd in Paris enthusiastically agreed to a boycott in solidarity with the Brazilian artists who were living and working under censorship; France would not participate in the X São Paulo Biennial. The event would go on but with a fraction of the art it might have show-cased—many countries, including the United States, Holland, Sweden, Greece, Belgium, Italy, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, the Soviet Union, the Dominican Republic, and Spain, would soon limit or cancel their participation, and some 80 percent of the artists originally invited declined to attend—without significant representation of the many international art tendencies that made the late 1960s such an exciting era. The international biennials of Brazil, and particularly that of São Paulo, its first, were the lifeblood of new developments in the visual arts, and in the absence of enthusiastic participation from abroad, the artistic community would remain isolated from the most current international trends and ideas. It was a hard pill to swallow for a country struggling under the grip of the repressive regime, but nevertheless the boycott received significant support from the local and the international artistic communities.

The São Paulo Biennials

By the late 1960s the São Paulo Biennial had for over a decade been the primary venue in Brazil for artistic innovation and exposure to international trends; indeed, the emergence of new visual languages in Brazil is inextricably intertwined with the history of the various important São Paulo biennials. By 1951 the Italian-born industrialist Ciccillo Matarazzo (b. Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho; 1892–1977) had set his sights on an ambitious exhibition of art from around the globe to be held in São Paulo. Part of a growing movement to bring Brazil into the cosmopolitan realm inhabited by so many other industrialized countries, the Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (later the Bienal Internacional de São Paulo) was conceived with a twofold goal: to integrate Brazil into the mainstream visual arts circuit and to establish São Paulo as the most important international art center in Latin America. The event, modeled on the Venice Biennial (founded in 1895), would host national representations as well as international exhibitions held under the direction of rotating chief curators.

The I São Paulo Biennial, held in 1951, became a turning point in the evolving debate between figuration and abstraction, shifting the balance toward abstraction with the bestowal of its major international sculpture prize to a stainless steel construction by the Swiss artist Max Bill, formerly a student at the Bauhaus and soon to become the cofounder and director of the Ulm School of Design in Germany, one of the most important efforts in Europe to recover the legacy of the Bauhaus after it was closed by the Nazis in 1933. Based on the continuous surface of the Möbius strip, Bill’s Tripartite Unity (1948–49) (figure 2) was an elegant representation of the artist’s theoretical ideas, which dismissed artists’ subjectivity and intuition in favor of geometric abstraction based on rationality, mathematics, and systematic constructions. The artist’s presence at the first São Paulo Biennial was a springboard for major developments in Brazilian art; throughout the 1950s Brazilian artists, eager to break away from regionalism and local themes and to experiment with a more universal language in the visual arts, began to embrace the objective philosophies of Bill and other international proponents of geometric abstract art and started to adopt and individuate global trends in nonfigurative art.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the São Paulo biennials continued to introduce Brazilians to new works of art and developing trends on the international scene, and the event’s influence was reflected in the rise of new vanguard movements in the visual arts in Brazil. The first São Paulo Biennial led to the founding of groups dedicated to geometric abstraction: in São Paulo, Grupo Ruptura, founded by Waldemar Cordeiro in 1952; and in Rio de Janeiro, Grupo Frente, led by Ivan Serpa and founded in 1953. Issues and practices introduced by Grupo Ruptura, in turn, mobilized most of the artistic debates in Brazil in the 1950s, leading to the creation in 1956 of the celebrated São Paulo Concrete art movement favoring a nonfigurative art based on geometric abstraction, which became synonymous with rationality. The works coming out of this movement were scientifically and mathematically informed, making use of mechanical movements and following rigorous structures.

By the end of the 1950s the rigid forms of the São Paulo Concrete group would be challenged by the Neoconcrete artists from Rio de Janeiro, who created a more tactile, sensorial art which incorporated the spectator. Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) and Lygia Clark (1920–88), the Neoconcrete movement’s main exponents, later became the most internationally well known and acclaimed contemporary Brazilian artists, though each left Brazil in the late 1960s for personal and professional (rather than political) reasons.

Oiticica departed for England by ship on 3 December 1968, coincidently just ten days before the establishment of Institutional Act #5 (A1-5), to prepare for an exhibition that opened on 24 February 1969 at Whitechapel Gallery in London. He went back to Rio de Janeiro in January 1970 and then departed to New York in June 1970 to participate in the exhibition Information at the Museum of Modern Art. A month later he returned to Rio and by the end of the year he moved to New York after being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, only returning to Rio in January 1978, two years before his death on 22 March 1980. Oiticica was not in Brazil for the most repressive period of the dictatorship; nevertheless, he had a lasting influence on the generation that stayed in Brazil. Clark went to Paris in 1968 and remained there intermittently until 1976, when she returned to Rio. In Paris she taught at the Sorbonne, experimenting with sensorial practices and becoming interested in the relationship between art and therapy. Although the two artists shared the language of constructivist and geometric trends, the Rio de Janeiro Neoconcrete group emphasized subjectivity, experimentation, and intuition.

In its opening paragraph the “Manifesto Neoconcreto” (Neoconcrete Manifesto), written by the poet and art critic Ferreira Gullar in 1959, stated that the Neoconcrete artists aimed to position themselves in opposition to the Concrete art movement, which had become dangerously entrenched in excessive rationalism. Gullar called for an art that would move away from the mechanical and scientific concerns prevailing in geometric abstraction in Brazil, particularly by relying on the participation of the viewer to activate the space. In 1959 Gullar also wrote the influential “Teoria do nãoobjeto” (Theory of the Non-Object), which drew on theories of Gestalt and phenomenology to argue for the primacy of perceptual and sensorial experiences over the physical presence of the object of art. According to Gullar, “Without the spectator the work of art only potentially exists, waiting for a human gesture to actualize it.”

Gullar’s stance on the discussions and debates central to the production of the local and international avant-garde, however, did not last long; he became disillusioned with the apolitical tone of the Neoconcrete movement and suggested that all of the group’s production should be destroyed during a final exhibition. For him, the making of any kind of abstract art, be it geometric abstraction, abstract expressionism, or informal abstraction, was a form of alienation that deprived the public of discerning the real questions raised by artists interested in forging a national identity to Brazil. His writings from the 1960s are indicative of the cultural debate that occupied Brazilians at the time: Should art reflect the specific social and political realities of the place and time in which it was created? Or should Brazil attempt to pursue the same level of modernity as the European avant-gardes? The debate positioned elitist vanguard art against popular revolutionary art. Yet since important figurative artists at that point were adopting the language of Pop art, they became as interested in international trends as abstract artists.

Pop art had come to the country via another groundbreaking biennial: the IX São Paulo Biennial in 1967, known as the Pop Biennial, which featured work by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana, Richard Lindner, James Rosenquist, Edward Ruscha, and Tom Wesselmann. Brazilian artists were fascinated by the new visual language of Pop art, but they also had reservations about it since it was seen as a celebration of mass media and consumerism and as a movement driven to advance its acceptance and insertion into the art market.

Particularly affecting at the IX São Paulo Biennial were three works by Warhol, all from his Death and Disaster series (1962–67), in which the artist depicted automobile and airplane crashes, disasters, suicides, electric chairs, atomic bomb explosions, and civil riots. The images in these works came from Warhol’s archive of current news clippings and photojournalistic images. Orange Disaster #5 (1963) used silkscreen and acrylic to depict, fifteen times, the iconic image of an empty electric chair in the execution chamber of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. Saturday Disaster (1964) showed two stacked black-and-white screen-printed images of a fatal car crash. Jackie (1964), completed shortly after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, comprised sixteen close-ups of the widow’s face, done in silkscreen.

In this striking series Warhol moved away from affluent consumer culture and entered the political sphere, showing the dark side of consumerism through impacting and disturbing images of tragedy and death. Even if, as it has been argued, the works’ repetition annuls their sense of urgency, their vibrant colors restore the anxiety implicit in the paintings. This most morbid and uncharacteristic of Warhol’s series—particularly a work from the group that was not shown at the IX São Paulo Biennial, the silkscreened canvas Red Race Riot (1963) (see plate 1), showing police dogs being used to attack civil rights demonstrators during riots in Birmingham, Alabamahas similarities in sensibility with Antonio Manuel’s Repressão outra vez—Eis o saldo (Repression Again—Here is the Consequence) (1968) (see plate 2), a work Manuel showed two years later at the Pre- Paris Biennial in 1969. Manuel’s own striking work caused a stir when it triggered the closing of the exhibition that was going to represent Brazil at the VI Youth Paris Biennial that year at the Paris City Museum of Modern Art.

Repressão outra vez—Eis o saldo comprises five monumental panels, each covered by a large black cloth with a white string on top of them. At first glance they appeared to be huge geometric, abstract black canvases painted with a long vertical white stripe that became a triangular shape at the bottom. When the viewer got closer to the work, however, it became clear that the black surface was cloth, and the white, supposedly painted lines were actually rope that could be manipulated by the public. When the rope was pulled, the cloth lifted to reveal five oversized canvases, each featuring a red painted background overlaid with silkscreen images (culled from the front pages of the São Paulo newspaper Última Hora) of violent clashes between police and students. One of the canvases featured the newspaper’s headline “Morreu um Estudante” (A Student Died); farther down on the same panel were the words, “Eis o Saldo: Garoto Morto” (Here’s the Consequence: A Kid Is Dead). The work had a lasting impact for its content as well as for its bold visual language. Like Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, Manuel’s panels achieved impact and directness through their use of repetition, seriality, and saturated color in the background and black silkscreen ink on top, exaggerating the visual shock while at the same time keeping the layout of newspaper pages. Both artists exhibited great facility for using the media’s currency to heighten the dramatic effect of their art.

In the 1960s access to the international contemporary art scene was very limited—economic realities made travel abroad difficult for most Brazilian artists, unless they were awarded a traveling grant from one of the national salons—and magazines such as ArtForum, Art in America, Opius, and Domus were among the only resources available, though difficult to be accessed. When the repressive policies of the military regime began to threaten art exhibitions, at first in smaller regional venues but eventually leading up to the international boycott of the X São Paulo Biennial in 1969, it ended up jeopardizing the access of the local artistic community to one of its main sources of information and exchange. Nevertheless, many of the new artistic tendencies were already in place, and Brazilian artists were aware of them through international publications and reports from friends who were living abroad.

Censorship of the Media and Visual Arts: Laying the Groundwork for the Boycott of the Biennial

On 13 December 1968, a year before the fateful meeting in Paris that led to the French boycott of the X São Paulo Biennial in 1969, the Brazilian military dictatorship cast a watchful eye on the country’s media and cultural landscapes with the passage of a1-5. On the day the act was promulgated agents of the military regime arrived at newsrooms throughout the country, asserting control over content to be published and censoring unfavorable press. In São Paulo, Jornal da Tarde had part of its edition taken out of circulation before it was released, and O Estado de São Paulo was forbidden to circulate altogether. Forces descended upon the newsroom of the leftist newspaper Correio da Manhã (Rio de Janeiro) and demanded to know what the next day’s headlines would be, eventually arresting Osvaldo Peralva, the newspaper’s editor. When censors arrived at Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro’s most important newspaper at the time, Editor in Chief Alberto Dines was determined to circumvent the censors and denounce military control of the press. The next day, a hot December morning, readers saw an unusual headline on the front page of the Jornal do Brasil: “Dark clouds. Temperature suffocates. The air is not breathable. Strong winds invade the country.”

(Continues…)

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