Renato Rodrigues da Silva
Interdisciplinarity & Participation in Contemporary Brazilian Art
In 1959, Brazilian poet and critic Ferreira Gullar published the “Neoconcrete Manifesto” in Jornal do Brasil, articulating and giving voice to a five-year-old dissidence against Concretism.1 The document was co-signed by artists Amílcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape as well as poets Reynaldo Jardim and Theon Spanudis. Soon after its publication, Aluísio Carvão, Décio Vieira, Hélio Oiticica, Hércules Barsotti, Willys de Castro, and others joined the movement. Until the mid 1960s, they systematically transformed contemporary Brazilian art, producing a formidable number of new formulations that continue to resonate in contemporary practices, perhaps as a result of their original radicalism and innovation.
If Neoconcretism had begun as a critique of concrete rationality—in an attempt to ground art in phenomenology—its last phase was characterized by free experimentation in the expanded field of culture. Thanks to this movement, interdisciplinarity and the participation of the observer were introduced into Brazilian art and ultimately became accepted practices, which engendered revolutionary experiments exemplified in early iterations of environmental art, institutional critique, body art, and performance, sometimes years before their appearance in American and European contexts. Neoconcretism’s contribution is thus significant within the history of contemporary art and should also be addressed in postcolonial studies.2
We now celebrating over fifty years of Neoconcretism, but rather than look back at the movement with the paralyzing eyes of a neophyte, let us approach this legacy with the purpose of creating new and unexpected formulations—the task is one of appropriation. However, the reception of Neoconcretism today still echoes ideas first developed by Gullar in the late 1950s—ideas that were essentially formalist in nature, which, as a consequence, overlooked the interdisciplinarity developed by this movement and disregarded its social context. In this article, I would like to more fully examine Neoconcretism, arguing that it cannot be understood on formal terms alone as it sheltered many different kinds of projects that eventually came to define the mainstream of contemporary Brazilian art.
Lygia Clark’s Organic Line Abstractionism was introduced in Brazil in the late 1940s, but its introduction differed from that of other countries. American Abstract Expressionism did not dominate the local art circuit at that time because the critic Mario Pedrosa exerted perhaps the most significant influence on young artists through various activities, such as promoting constructivism through the São Paulo Biennial, facilitating an exchange with European and Argentinean avant-gardes, and organizing international exhibitions. Led by Waldemar Cordeiro, these emerging artists founded the Rupture Group in São Paulo, in 1952, wholeheartedly subscribing to Max Bill’s version of Concretism.3 Eventually, the association of Brazilian culture with the Superior School of Form at Ulm (Germany) was not improbable: whereas the former was implementing an ambitious program of economic development, the latter was participating in the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. Both countries were developing their economies as a way of overcoming historical difficulties.
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About this Article
Interdisciplinarity & Participation in Contemporary Brazilian Art was first published in Fillip 11 in Spring 2010. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Renato Rodrigues da Silva received his Ph.D in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of several books including Modern Photography in Brazil, now in its third edition.
Notes
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