For a long time, tropicalism was something from back when and some other place, notably Brazil in the 1960s, where Hélio Oiticica made history with his local interpretation of Western modernism. In Oiticica’s eyes, modernism was not something to be represented, it was something to be lived. In just a few years, he changed his rationally composed, Mondrianesque abstractions into a Brazilian performance – with style, panache and sex appeal – rich with social criticism. By the 1990s, within the context of relational aesthetics then quite popular, Oiticica’s ideas about tropicalism traversed the world.
In 2006, we can conclude that tropicalism is no longer a local, exotic art form. It is everywhere. With Latin American artists travelling to the United States and Europe, tropicalism’s critical social perspective has become an export product, representing far more than just Brazil’s consumerist culture. As Dominique Gonzalez Foerster has on more than one occasion shown, even artists who are not Latin American are making work that strikes us as ‘Tropicalist’.
Are we now speaking of something other than a cultural phenomenon bound to a specific place? Is tropicalism larger than Brazil, larger even than Latin America? If we are to believe Carlos Basualdo, curator of the Tropicália exhibition that opens in London mid-February, the answer is no. He has had enough of all the blurring and erosion of the concept and brings tropicalism back to its historic origins, clarifying that tropicalism points to considerably more than just Brazilian folklore. It is, in fact, far more complex.
It seems though that not a great deal has changed. Even today, young artists from Latin America are asked how their work relates to tropicalism, for all its cheerful ‘look’ and its critique of society, let us say à-la-Oiticica. Most of them are not very appreciative of this, but at the same time, one has to recognize that the discourse on tropicalism serves as an appropriate case in point in the debate about local identity, especially that of Latin America.
Opening
