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Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 93; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2211056

1527-1900

Jennifer Josten,

Brazilian cultural history and politics

In recent years, art historians have shed light on the new forms of artistic production and distribution that arose in the context of repressive regimes in several Latin American nations during and after the 1960s. These manifestations, which some scholars since the 1990s have grouped together as “conceptualisms,” extended beyond the boundaries of traditional painting and sculpture into the realms of performative actions, ephemeral objects, site-specific installations, and networks of circulation (such as mail art). Bra-zilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles addresses some of these developments as they pertained to Brazil through a study of the politically critical, yet not propagandistic, artworks produced by three Rio de Janeiro – based artists between 1968 and 1975, the most repressive years of Brazil’s dictatorship. As the first single-author book in English to consider this period from the perspective of art history, Claudia Calirman’s concise monograph offers a new and useful framework for analyzing contemporary Brazilian art. At the same time, it contributes to the extensive body of literature on responses to the regime in the fields of history and political science, complementing existing studies of the concurrent Tropicália movement in music.Though the military came to power in 1964, it did not severely limit Brazil’s cultural sphere until late 1968, when Ato Institucional #5 (Institutional Act #5, or AI-5) provided a legal basis for censorship of the press and imprisonment of dissidents without trial. Visual artists attracted little governmental attention compared with their more visible peers in music and theater, who were at times arrested and forced into exile. Within this context, Calirman argues that Antonio Manuel (b. 1947), Artur Barrio (b. 1945), and Cildo Meireles (b. 1948) — three of several artists working in a conceptualist vein in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s — were all committed to addressing the nation’s repressive climate in their artworks while avoiding propagandistic images or slogans, thereby developing new aesthetic proposals while evading censors. Calirman draws on personal interviews with the artists and with curator and art critic Frederico Morais and also utilizes archival documents and photographs to craft a “narrative of creative advancement in the face of regressive politics” (p. 9). In the process, she charts a history of new exhibition venues and evolving critical attitudes that emerged within a tumultuous climate of uncertainty that reached beyond Brazilian borders.Calirman’s first chapter, which evaluates the international boycott of the X Bienal de São Paulo (X São Paulo Biennial) in 1969 as a local watershed, sets the stage for three subsequent chapters that address Manuel, Barrio, and Meireles, respectively, as participants in a search for new forms of artistic expression and nuanced social critique. Man-uel, she argues, did this by exhibiting his own body as artwork and by intervening in the layout and distribution of tabloid newspapers, challenging media censorship. Meanwhile, Barrio exhibited bloodstained, corpse-like bundles of animal bones in the streets, eerily evoking the disappeared. Finally, Meireles’s sculptures, performances, and insertions into existing systems of exchange invoked the regime’s torture of political prisoners, as when he stamped “Quem matou Herzog?” (Who killed Herzog?) on banknotes that he returned into circulation, furtively questioning the death of a respected journalist in 1975 (p. 140).Brazilian Art under Dictatorship’s chronological and thematic emphasis on the most repressive years of Brazil’s military regime makes it an important contribution within a field dominated by biographical monographs that span the arc of an artist’s career. It complements a growing body of literature on conceptualist tendencies that flourished around the globe beginning in the 1960s, tendencies that are typically both local and transnational in character. In offering detailed information about the relationship of visual art to political conditions in Brazil at a pivotal moment, Calirman opens path ways for richer comparative analysis. As she notes, it is up to others to explore resonances between these three artists’ practices and those of their contemporaries in Brazil, elsewhere in Latin America, and beyond; the comparisons she draws are predominantly with New York – based artists, from Vito Acconci to Andy Warhol. Another area for further research is the ways in which Manuel, Barrio, and Meireles’s practices represented a broader interest in challenging established hierarchies of mediums and institutions within the conflicts and protests of the global sixties. In this sense, the boycott of the 1969 São Paulo Biennial could be evaluated productively not only as a response to Brazil’s military dictatorship but also in relation to the international boycott of the 1968 Venice Biennale and the formation of Mexico’s Salón Independiente in the same year. The fact that these three artists’ efforts corresponded to a broader shift in artistic and critical approaches reinforces their significance to contemporary art writ large.