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Experiment Experiencia: Art in Brazil
l958–2000
Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, through 21 October
2001.
The Brazil of the start of this period was scarcely realised in
the recent Tate Modern extravaganza ‘Century City’, other
than in the seductive notes of the Bossa Nova Rhythm. The Museum
of Modern Art, Oxford has in its typical manner sought to have explored
this cultural saga more deeply and more perceptively. Despite all
the evident energy displayed to represent this impossibly long single
perspective (and perhaps predictably), much of Brazil’s representative
work of the period appears to be fundamentally derivative. For example,
Sergio Camara’s constructions reveal Lucio Fontana’s influence.
And Helio Oitica’s brightly congregating rectilinear flashes
of colour offer a direct reference to Malevich. Yet modernism seems
to be commuted into an evolutionary constructivism if anything,
lacking in any collective manifesto, speaking through various individual
artists, rather than via any organised teaching or critical apparatus.
In the later l960s, it seems that the world of Arte Povera was extending
its influence through the media. ‘I’m Crazy About You’,
an emblematic double bed by Antonio Manuel, seems to prefigure Tracey
Emin’s far better known archetypal pit.
What emerges, despite an apparent absence of real contextual narrative,
in the whole exhibition, is an ethical, socially aware art, through
to the l990s, when across the world, a wave of consumerist, cyber-spatial
determinism set in. Sure, there is something called Brazilian Art,
and apart from this exhibition, this year will see four more exhibitions
precipitated on the subject. Indeed, all this follows on not only
from the now defunct Century City, (Rio de Janeiro section, Tate Modern),
but also the exhibition of homoerotic art at the Cartier Foundation
in Paris, where Brazilian artists seem exceptionally well represented
too, in the current show, ‘Un Art Populaire’.
But what of the years of political and intellectual repression
in Brazil? Where is the powerful work of Cildo Meireles? Is stamping
slogans of an anti-governmental nature on banknotes too antithetical
for today’s curatorial consumerism? Where are the tragic human
clumps of Arthur Barrio? History is here being rewritten, and such
works disappear. So is this proliferation of Brazilian art on show
part of an organised revision of those years of persecution, encouraging
amnesia? Or else is all this just a mere coincidence, that art as
elsewhere is good for export? We will see.
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