Wherever art from Latin America is shown, sooner or later the term tropicalism crops up. Metropolis M asked Roos Gortzak, curator of the exhibition Tropical Abstraction at SMBA (2005), to investigate the origin and history of this originally Brazilian concept, and to take a look at what it means to the young, upcoming generation of artists from Central and South America.
Outside the Arsenale grounds in Venice is a telephone booth in the form of a parrot. It is part of Sergio Vega’s (Buenos Aires, 1959) contribution to Always a Little Further, the Venice Biennial exhibition curated by Rosa Martínez. The major part of Vega’s work is inside the Arsenale building, where he presents the fruits of his eight-year investigation into the location of Paradise. Following Antonio de León Pinelo’s 1650 account, recorded in El Paraiso en el Nuevo Mundo (Paradise in the New World), Vega was able to pinpoint the Garden of Eden in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. Vega made several trips to the region to initiate a kind of socio-anthropological archive of this paradise. He presents his findings in installation form, in order to evoke the places he has been and the thoughts he had while he was there.
His replica of a messy shantytown backyard is entitled Photographing Alice’s Backyard (2001-2002). When Vega attempted to photograph this original ‘paradisiacal spot’ for his research, according to the notes in his diary, he was driven out of the yard by the owner of the shanty. With this reconstructed yard, he presents one of the faces of the Mato Grosso paradise. He shows another in Modernismo Tropical(2003), a lounge in the style of the populist variation of the Brazilian modernism of the 1950s and 1960s. Its palm trees, parrots and parrot-shaped telephones are now here as well. Vega combined photographs of this kitsch-adorned architecture with record covers from recordings by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, both members of the Tropicália movement, a revolutionary cultural movement of the 1960s.1 Vega hopes his presentation will encourage visitors to ponder how the image encountered in this ‘new paradise’ relates to the ideas that the Tropicália members had for a tropical Utopia, and how today’s visitors imagine it.
Vega makes another reference to Tropicália. Waiting Room/The Void (2002) is a replica of a bench on which prisoners during the military regime in Brazil had to sit before being thrown off a nearby cliff. On the bench lie the personal effects and clothing of the artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), another member of the Tropicália movement. Vega intentionally uses these Tropicália elements ‘as a set of models for the critical examination of the historical and contemporary discourses of tropicalism’.2 One may doubt whether this actually happens, but the direct reference to Tropicália in his work does invite comparison with the significance with which Oiticica had infused the concept.
The beginnings of tropicalism
In 1967, Hélio Oiticica organized the New Brazilian Objectivity exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro. He created his Tropicália installation especially for the exhibition. It later proved to be the beginning of the Tropicália movement of the 1960s. The installation changed the museum gallery into a kind of favela, a Brazilian slum neighbourhood. Sand, stones and tropical plants in containers on the floor formed the decor for two simply-constructed huts hung with multicoloured cloth, through which visitors could walk (the so-called ‘Penetrables’), conduct sensory experiments and watch the television that was permanently on.
This was Oiticica’s answer to where Brazilian avant-garde art should be headed: it must not become a copy of the international Pop Art or Op Art of the day (which many Brazilian artists were adopting), but should retain its own character, without ignoring international movements. The specific character of Brazilian identity, according to Oiticica, was largely formed by its capacity for absorbing and incorporating other identities: ‘we are Blacks, Indians, Whites, everything at the same time.’3 For him, the new Tropicália movement, or tropicalism, must be aimed at this anthropophagic power of assimilation. Inspired by the Brazilian poet and author, Oswald de Andrade, who wrote his Anthropophagic Manifesto in the late 1920s, Oiticica believed that ‘Anthropophagy would be the defense that we have against foreign domination and the principal creative weapon, this constructivist will (…).’4
Tropicalism not only wanted to assimilate influences from overseas in virtually cannibalistic fashion, but equally to absorb the complex totality of Brazilian cultural reality – with an objective to instigating a radical process of transformation. The members of the Tropicália movement wanted to be rid of art as a fetish object for the elite, and in an attempt to reach a wider public, achieve a connection to popular culture. They saw a revolutionary potential in the way in which popular culture took on information from the various media and made it its own.5
Oiticica plunged himself into the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, where he lived at various times. It gave him new ideas. ‘Everything began with the formulation of the Parangolé in 1964, with all my experience with the samba, with the discovery of the Morros, of the organic architecture of Rio’s favelas, and principally of the spontaneous, anonymous constructions in the great urban centres - the art of the streets, of unfinished things, of vacant lots.’6 He tried to make a similar type of art, an art that was incomplete and open for the observer to take part. For this reason, he stopped making installations with monochrome paintings, in which the picture plane – à la Mondrian – was a formal analysis, to which the viewer could only relate in a spatial sense. He now translated them into coloured Parangolés: capes, jackets or neckties the participants could put on and play with. These articles of clothing, made of cloth, plastic, earth and other discarded materials that were to hand, only became art when the viewer made use of them. In 1965, Oiticica presented his Parangolés at Rio’s Modern Art Museum by having the samba dancers from the Manguiera favela, adorned in his clothing, enter the exhibition and dance around. This was not at all well received and the dancers were thrown out. Two years later, for his Tropicália installation, he put his favela right in the middle of the museum.7
Consuming tropicalism
A year after his Tropicália installation, Oiticica had already noticed a problem: his tropicalism was being taken over by others and twisted in the wrong way, as an image. Everywhere you looked were parrots and banana trees, which had nothing to do with experiment, posing no questions whatsoever about the problem of representing a culture. In his 1968 Tropicália manifesto, Oiticica turned against such superficial quoting of tropicalism. ‘Bourgeois, sub-intellectuals, cretins of every kind, preaching “Tropicalism”, Tropicália (it's become fashionable!) - in short, transforming into an object of consumption something which they cannot quite identify. (...) Very well, but do not forget that there are elements here that this bourgeois voracity will never be able to consume: the direct life-experience (vivência) element, which goes beyond the problem of the image.’8
In the year 2005, it seems prudent to take Oiticica’s warning against changing Tropicália into a consumer product to heart. For some time now, Latin American art has been the art world’s new darling, bringing with it the danger that superficial versions of tropicalism become fashionable, that the division between the interesting and the uninteresting progress of tropicalism becomes unclear. In 2003, for his To Be Political It Has To Look Nice exhibition at Apex Art in New York, artist, curator and critic Pablo León de la Barra (b. Mexico City, 1972) intentionally used a quotation from Oiticica as one of his starting points.9 He wanted to create an exhibition that would serve as a critical alternative to the unknowing, facile consumption of art in Central and South America. He therefore created a framework in which artists and artists’ collectives presented their work: a framework that played with the stereotypes and clichés of Latin American art. He gave the exhibition space the character of a tropical anarchists’ club, with the walls painted light blue and coloured lights. For the opening, he organized a series of events and performances entitled Sabado Gigante (Gigantic Saturday) in which everyone could take part. The participants sang, cooked, danced and made music. The boundary between artists and their public dissipated, so that they could take part in the activities together.
Contemporary tropicalism?
Where does Sergio Vega come into the tale? His work has all the appearance of being nothing more than a trendy, superficial version of tropicalism, functioning at the image level. For Vega, does the quoting of Brazilian tropicalism from the 1960s actually lead to anything? No. In Photographing Alice’s Backyard, Vega presents the favela from a distance, as an image that can be photographed. At the point when Vega does ask you to participate in his work, as in Waiting Room/The Void he has already predigested the way you are supposed to feel, by making the link with the prisoners who had sat on that same kind of bench, with the same kind of hood over their head, just before they died. Oiticica remained far removed from such unequivocal, illustrative use of his articles of clothing, in order to pave the way for a relationship between today and yesterday, between politics and art.
Are there contemporary forms of tropicalism that can carry on Oiticica’s tradition in an interesting manner, once again picking up his experimental practices, mixing them with local cultural possibilities? One might consider the El Cerro (the mountain) by Chemi Rosado Seijo (b. Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, 1973). In a way comparable to Oiticica’s experience with Rio’s favelas, Rosado Seijo was inspired by the organic architecture of Naranjito, a Puerto Rican mountain village. He observed that the impoverished inhabitants had unconsciously built their village in the shape of the mountain. He wanted to emphasize the form by painting all the houses in the green shades of the mountain, as a sort of homage to its ‘architects’. Initially, the villagers did not want to hear about his plan, but little by little, they were convinced by the artist, who travelled to Naranjito weekend after weekend to paint the houses, together with the local youth.
Its new coat of paint not only made the village more visible, it also lent it a new layer of meaning. Instead of being in the news for its high crime rate and drugs problems, Naranjito could now be acknowledged by way of a project of a more constructive nature. The project moreover developed into more than painting the houses. Together with other artists, students in different disciplines, businesses and the local population, Rosado Seijo also organized workshops and other events.
The art of Jesús ‘Bubu’ Negrón (b. Arecibo, Puerto Rico, 1975) can also be seen as a sequel to Oiticica’s experimental, engaged practice of art. As the cornerstone for all his work, Negrón uses physical or social structures that already exist in society. For his Vela Parking Service (2003) project, he mingled with Puerto Rico’s poor, who were trying to earn some money at night in the streets of the wealthy old centre of San Juan. They held parking spots free for tourists and visitors on an evening out in old San Juan and tried to get them to park their cars in ‘their’ places. A ‘business’ that was neither registered nor supervised, it emerged as a spontaneous (illegal) answer to conditions in the city, where parking is a major problem. The city authorities tolerated it, but preferred the practice to remain ‘unseen’. Negrón felt that this form of earning some income was a legitimate one and wanted to give those doing it a little more prestige and visibility. He designed a business title for them, with uniforms and business cards – so they could be proud of their work.
There is some doubt that the work of these contemporary non-Brazilian artists can in fact be included under the term tropicalism. In the catalogue for his Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture exhibition, Carlos Basualdo indicates that there are many incorrect interpretations of the term in circulation. In Brazil, Tropicália is in the first place associated with a revolutionary moment in the history of Brazilian pop music, and only later came to be associated with art, film, theatre and architecture. Outside Brazil, people often see Tropicália only as a title for Oiticica’s work or for the song by Caetano Veloso. With this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, Basualdo attempts to ensure that the collective and interdisciplinary nature of tropicalism be restored to its place of honour.
What immediately springs to mind is that this younger generation of artists (Vega, León de la Barra, Rosado Seijo and Negrón) are not about a collective, interdisciplinary, cultural movement that wants to express the realities of their countries. They are artists from different countries, each with their own projects. Nonetheless, it is enlightening to see their work in the light of this concept, on the one hand to reach behind the superficiality of Vega’s form of tropicalism, and on the other to discover the work of Pablo Leon de la Barra, Chemi Rosado Seijo and Jesus ‘Bubu’ Negrón with an attitude that parallels that of Oiticica. It is an attitude that perceives the dangers of representing a culture and seeks ways to express the complexity of a cultural reality without falling into the trap of facile, simplistic images. It is an approach that seeks a connection to groups that would normally be excluded from art, one that makes social engagement possible.
Tropicália
Barbican Art Gallery, London
16 February - 21 May 2006
Notes
- For more complete information on the Tropicália movement, see: Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture, published in association with the travelling exhibition of the same name, curated by Carlos Basualdo. The exhibition can be seen from 15 February through 21 May, 2006, at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, from July to September 2006 in Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon and from 14 October 2006 through 28 January 2007 at the Bronx Museum of Art, New York.
- Sergio Vega, ‘Finding the Garden of Eden’, in Always a Little Further, 2005, p. 292
- Hélio Oiticica, ‘Tropicália, 4 maart 1968’, in Helio Oiticica, Witte de With, Rotterdam 1992, p.125
- Hélio Oiticica, quoted by Carlos Basualdo, ‘Tropicália: Avant-garde, popular culture and the culture industry of Brazil’, in Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture, São Paulo 2005, p. 15
- Carlos Basualdo, ‘Tropicália: Avant-garde, popular culture, and the culture industry of Brazil’, in Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture, São Paulo 2005, p. 13: ‘For Veloso and Gil, as for Oiticica and Martinez Corrêa, popular culture was not a collection of fads and pre-established images, rather, it consisted above all in a certain mechanics of apprehension, interpretation, and reformulation of circulating information.’
- see note 3, p.124
- see note 5, p.17
- see note 3
- ‘The myth of Tropicália is much more than parrots and banana trees: it is the consciousness of not being conditioned by established structures, hence highly revolutionary in its entirety. Any conformity, be it intellectual, social, or existential, is contrary to its principle idea’, in To Be Political It Has To Look Nice, Apex Art 2003, p.30.
Opening
