THE BLOC OF ME ALONE
THE BLOC OF ME ALONE
The Brazilian Art Circuit in the New Century
Who are the successors of Rivane Neuenschwander, Cao Guimarães and Marepe, the by-now established artists from the nineties? A quick look at the youngest generation of artists from Brazil and their relation to their famous predecessors.The challenge is great. Growing up in the shadow of the artists who rose to success at the end of the nineties, it is no simple task for the new generation at the beginning of this millennium to replace them. The previous generation of artists had sprung up around the group exhibition Antarctica Artes com a Folha (1996)1 and, to a large extent, was validated by the XXIV São Paulo International Biennial (1998).2 Known as the Antarctica generation, it comprised a substantial number of artists who were to establish themselves in the subsequent decade. This group included Cabelo, Jarbas Lopes, José Damasceno, and Laura Lima, from Rio de Janeiro; Mauro Restiffe, Raquel Garbelotti, and Sandra Cinto, from São Paulo; Adrianne Gallinari, Cao Guimarães, and Rivane Neuenschwander, from Minas Gerais; and José Ruffino, Marepe, and Martinho Patrício, from the Northeast of Brazil, to name only a few. The Brazilian artists who emerged in the 2000s initially appeared under the sign of negativity. Within the competitive scenario of increased internationalization of the art circuit, with many artists and galleries coming together locally as well as abroad, in the first couple of years of the decade, the most discussed concepts were collaborative work, institutional critique, and network strategy. A certain demonization of the commercial and institutional circuit was observed, something that can be interpreted as a natural reaction to the immediately preceding expansion of these circuits in the 1980s and 1990s. The traditional biennial exhibition Panorama da Arte Brasileira (2001) confirmed this tendency.3 The curators of this edition, Paulo Reis, Ricardo Basbaum and Ricardo Resende, wanted ‘to show…that artists have a critical outlook on the system…that the logic of art is not reduced to market logic.’4 The exhibition brought together artists, collaborative works, and artist-run spaces. The general atmosphere was one of calculated exception and rebelliousness. However, let’s face it, at that point the Brazilian institutions were not so solid that they could endure such fierce criticism. Even in a scenario in which artists resist the usual mechanisms of legitimization (galleries, museums and collectors), it is clear that art to a certain extent is always related to individuality, and therefore to the system, whether you are for or against it, inside or outside it.
VIEW FROM THE INSIDE
At that same Panorama exhibition of 2001, one young artist stood out: the Argentinena-born, São Paulo-resident Carla Zaccagnini, who at the time was assistant curator at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP), where the show was held. Zaccagnini presented a work that dealt with the power struggle between two São Paulo art institutions: the MAM-SP, for which she worked, and BrasilConnects, a non-governmental organization focusing on art, which in those days leased the Oca building. The work – as poetic as it is simple – comprises an open window, titled Panorama (2001), looking out over the Oca building, located across the lawn from MAM-SP at Ibirapuera Park, which the Museum coveted for its expansion. Whereas on the one hand she engaged in direct criticism of the institutes, her strategy never involved the instrumentalization of art at all costs, and she queried her own position of insider, as a participating artist and a museum curator at the same time. After this work, which could be viewed as inaugural in her art production, Zaccagnini created an installation for the 28th São Paulo Biennial (2008) that served as an alternative playground set up in the same Ibirapuera Park. This installation, titled Reação em cadeia com efeito variável (Chain Reaction with Variable Effect, 2008) included a water fountain that started flowing flow whenever all of the equipment on the playground was used simultaneously.5 Marilá Dardot, born in Minas Gerais in 1972, is another artist whose career began in the early 2000s. Her work, strongly associated with language and reading, may be seen as an attempt to expand, from micro to macro, the viewer’s perception of the written language. Part of her early production consisted of book objects inspired by classics such as Plato’s The Banquet and Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but soon her works began to address spatial issues. In 2002, for an exhibition at Museu de Arte da Pampulha (MAP) in Belo Horizonte, Dardot installed a series of works in the museum garden that explored such issues as perception, participation, and contemplation and their relation to nature and language. The works of Zaccagnini and Dardot, as well as those of many artists from their generation, echo a tradition that that, in Brazil, developed from the Neo-Concrete movement, to the 1967 exhibition titled Nova Objetividade Brasileira (Brazilian New Objectivity), to the 1970’s generation of Cildo Meireles, Tunga, Waltercio Caldas and Artur Barrio. The appearance of participatory works that involve the audience and do not belong in categories such as painting, drawing and sculpture – in other words, works that originate from a ‘general constructive will’ and from an inclination to challenge artistic practice, or are anti-art – is at the roots of this Brazilian lineage deeply marked by the generation that began to show its art in the current decade.
FORM, BODY AND LIFE
A program of key significance for the development of the new generation of artists is the Bolsa Pampulha (Pampulha Grant) at the above-mentioned MAP in Belo Horizonte. Adriano Pedrosa designed this program that I coordinated in 2003-2004, when we held the posts of chief-curator and assistant curator at the museum, respectively. The aim of this on-going endeavour is to stimulate the art production of emerging artists through grants, critical reviews, and a solo exhibition at the museum. Several artists who have been exhibiting their work in other galleries and cultural institutions in Brazil first showed solo as part of the Pampulha Grant program, namely Bruno Vieira, Cinthia Marcelle, Cristina Ribas, Jared Domício, Lais Myrrha, Matheus Rocha Pitta, Paulo Nenflídio, Pedro Motta, Rodrigo Matheus, and Sara Ramo, besides Laura Belém and Marilá Dardot. Possibly because the process of organizing these exhibitions has involved the close interaction of artists and the institution, several shows have taken the museum and its history as a starting point. For her work Jardim das coisas do sótão (Garden of AtticThings, 2004), for example, Sara Ramo drew inspiration from a repository of unused objects that the MAP had put away over the years; in his turn, Rodrigo Matheus had a fictitious security company called Centurium monitoring the museum building during his exhibition. São Paulo artist Renata Lucas has been drawing inspiration in the development of her work from venues in which she has shown, to engage in dialogue with the context and the art institution, though from a more extreme viewpoint. Her projects address the human attendance of the show venue, the existential charge of the architectural designs, and the formal attributes that sculpture acquires in the expanded fields of these architectures. Lucas reintroduces, in this network of intertwined fields, a phenomenology found at the base of the richest tradition of Brazilian art from the second half of the 20th century, and one that relates form, body and life. In Cruzamento (2003), for example, she changes a crossroads in Rio de Janeiro into a square by covering it with wood. And in the work Atlas (2006), she reacts to a conflict between a gallery and its neighbours, by having the neighbours’ gate run through one half of the gallery space and in the other half creating a parking space and broader sidewalk. Lucas thus moves freely between formalism, institutional criticism and architecture. The artist most recently showed her creations at the São Paulo and Sydney biennial exhibitions. Currently she is preparing a new intervention that she will present during the Venice Biennale.
DISLOCATION
Whereas Lucas often returns to the gallery after going down her nomadic trails, with other artists this dislocation may be more permanent. Here I refer specifically to two artists, Alexandre da Cunha and Tonico Lemos Auad, who have been living and working in London since the turn of the decade but continue to maintain an intense dialogue with Brazilian issues. Da Cunha takes converging repertoires and materials appropriated from Brazilian folk culture, decorative arts, and art history to produce an art that deals with aesthetic values from a political and also seductive perspective. In a recent series of works, for example, the artist used scarves he bought from street vendors of souvenirs, which he arranged in the manner of flags to discuss such issues as mass travel, self-image, and cultural identity. Lemos Auad renovates the Brazilian tradition of participatory art developed from Lygia Clark to Rivane Neuenschwander, presenting installations that are modified daily by the viewing audience. Recently he exhibited a large wall piece at Stephen Friedman in London, where visitors could reveal the drawing hidden underneath by scratching away the top layer. With both Da Cunha and Lemos Auad, the fact that they work in London is determinant for their having been absorbed into the international circuit and for the manner in which they handle Brazilian references Their displacement may be viewed as having set a precedent for Marcellvs L., a young Belo Horizonte-born artist who moved to Berlin two years ago with no plans to return to Brazil. The move to a different city has introduced a number of new elements in his production that not only have garnered him more opportunities to show, but also have led his videos to focus on different historical events than those he used to address in Brazil. His shooting of images of the Holocaust Memorial, in Berlin, in 52°30´50.13″ N 13°22´42.05″ E (2007), for example, examines the limits between form and politics, as well as between individual and universal, in a disturbing manner.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE BIENNIAL
The Brazilian art world approaches the end of this decade with numerous programs devoted to emerging artists, institutional endeavours to map new artists and offer them first opportunities, though not predetermining how to handle the subsequent phases of these artists’ careers. Rather alarming, however, are the constant administrative crises that have been affecting the São Paulo International Biennial – a show that historically has provided a stage for the affirmation of young careers. In the long term, these crises could lead to the loss of the biennial and consequently the education of the audience and the introduction of works by flourishing Brazilian artists to an international audience. Notwithstanding its expansion, the Brazilian network of institutions is far from fully capable of replacing this loss and of organizing insightful exhibitions of artists in mid-career. Looking back at the Panorama of Brazilian Art exhibitions, particularly the 2001 edition, one must conclude that this generation of alternative artists has not yet been very successful. Many of the artists are radicalized to the point of reducing their contact with the mainstream to a bare minimum. All things considered, a decade that began with a pledge to promote collaborative artistic practice, now ends in the spirit of ‘a block of me alone’.6Rodrigo Moura is an art critic and curator of Inhotim, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Rodrigo Moura
