Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 8 July – 21 October
Reviewed by: Mark Harris
Brazil has escaped the voracious cultural tourism that has made contemporary Chinese art fashionable. Like the earlier demand for Russian work, such markets respond to the capitalisation of communist economies. Unsurprisingly, the demand is for work that challenges State orthodoxies and mimicks the subversive strategies that are familiar to any Western 20th-century avant-garde artist. But Brazil was neither communist, nor hostile to America. Instead for twenty years, from 1964 onwards, Brazilian artists worked under a right-wing dictatorship whose recourse to violent repression necessitated new forms of aesthetic opposition.
We could really use a survey of Brazilian art that explores this relation between aesthetic resistance and Latin American authoritarianism of the 1960s and 1970s. Oppositional strategies taken by Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica and Cildo Meireles represent an alternative to conventionally antagonistic avant-gardes, predating similar European or American examples. Something of a lost opportunity however, this show and its unscholarly catalogue limit the work to an anodyne internationalism, paradoxically de-emphasizing cultural distinctions.
Much is made here of Brazilian sensuousness, though it's no more extreme than with Arte Povera, for example. What needs greater elucidation is the politicisation of sensuousness in Brazil, influencing Clark's and Oiticica's use of salvaged materials and their reliance on participants to legitimise the work. In Oiticica's case this extends to the celebration of ghetto violence, sexuality and samba as manifesting anti-authoritarian vitality.
The first galleries introduce such work with Clark's interactive metal structures and Oiticica's bolides, the manipulable containers of contrasting materials. Helpfully, there is video footage of Clark's participatory events of the 1970s and usable replicas of Oiticica's parangoles, the customised cloaks serving as performative portraits of ghetto friends who wore them. There is unusual attention given to Lygia Pape, an overlooked contemporary of Clark's, who revitalized European Constructivism for new utopian formulations. Pape's Book of Architecture (1959), is a series of pop-up paper prototypes of fanciful monuments, while the wonderful Divisor, filmed in a 1968 performance, is a massive slotted sheet through which hundreds of participants poke their heads like a celebratory model community.
Later Brazilian work continues to be validated by audience involvement. Unfortunately Meireles, who used participatory installations for extremely effective political statements, withdrew from the show. Nevertheless, there is significant work of contemporaries like Antonio Dias whose 1968 Cabeças groups together black ballot boxes which serve as receptacles for wishes denied under the suspension of democracy. There is also footage of Antonio Manuel's recent installation at an Oscar Niemeyer museum perched on a column overlooking the sea. In a simple dystopian intervention Manuel impedes visitors' movements around this idealised structure, forcing them to crawl through rough openings he has hammered into partition walls.
On MOMA's upper floor are installations primarily by younger artists who are used to working for the international biennale circuit. Large-scale and designed to instantaneously impress a distracted crowd, they provide somatic satisfaction rather than more demanding enquiry. In this less clamorous environment such pieces feel bombastic. Since most artists have only one exhibit and there are no supporting images of other work in the catalogue, it's hard to reach judgement on Waltercio Caldas' disassembled ping-pong game Ping-Ping (The abyss for the blinking blind) (1980), or Jorge Damasceno's headless mannequin suspended horizontally from hundreds of cords The next omen (Experiment on the visibility of a dynamic substance), (1997), or Nuno Ramos' vaseline-caked marble monolith White Manorá (1997).
In this incomplete show the more thoughtful contemporary pieces like Rosângela Rennó's Cartology (2000) – a tribute to a Brazilian geographer – are overwhelmed by the domineering theatricality of other work. If this is an imperfect introduction let's hope a larger museum has the means to complete the task.
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MARK HARRIS
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