Max Bill, Unidade Tripartida, 1948/9. Courtesy of Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil.
Espaço Aberto/Espaço Fechado (Open Space/Closed Space) looks at sculpture in Brazil over the last 50 years – a period of changing styles, circumstances and political upheaval.
At the Henry Moore Institute until April 16 2005, the exhibition explores how artists responded to censorship by taking their work beyond the walls of official venues.
Espaço Aberto/Espaço Fechado (2002) is the title of a photograph by Rubens Mano showing the interior of the modernist pavilion built for the São Paulo Bienal art festival in 1951. It shows the huge space within the building empty, rather than filled with objects as it would usually be.
This building, designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer, is the launch pad for the organisation of the exhibition, emphasising the optimism that existed in Brazil at the time of the first São Paulo Bienal in 1951. The county was embracing modernism and the utopian vision of Niemeyer’s style – clean, sweeping lines, bright white walls and large windows.
Grupo 3NÓS3, Intervenção (Interdiction), 1979. Courtesy Mario Ramiro and Hudinilson Jr.
In the centre of the first gallery are three sculptures, two of which won prizes at the 1951 Bienal. A loose knot of steel curves, Unidade Tripartida (Tripartite Unity, 1948) by Swiss artist Max Bill, won the international award at the 1951 Bienal. Franz Weissman’s Cubo Vazado (Emptied Cube, 1951/1995), another metallic piece, was turned down by the judges on account of soldering marks.
Weissman, who worked in Brazil, was upset. He commented: “No one had taken into consideration that it had not been made in Switzerland, but in Belo Horizonte [Brazil].” The sculpture that won the national prize has a far more primitive feel to it, marked with scratches like rock art. Victor Brecheret’s O Índio e a Suassuapara (The Indian and the Fallow Deer, 1950) was a modernist, abstract piece nonetheless.
In 1964, Brazil underwent a military coup, leading to a harsh 20-year-long dictatorship. Censorship took hold, meaning artists who wanted to criticise the regime looked to alternative places to express themselves, rather than state-run museums and galleries. The second part of the exhibition concentrates on this upsurge of creativity in the 1960s and 1970s.
Cildo Meireles, Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos: Projeto Coca-Cola (Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project), 1970. Courtesy of the artist.
The art happenings instigated by Artur Barrio, Grupo 3NÓS3 and Ducha were caught on camera and reported in the press. The antics of Grupo 3NÓS3, for example, include ‘bagging’ the heads of public statues. Newspaper reports of such unexpected ‘urban interventions’ were a key part of the work itself, ensuring it met a wide audience, and are displayed in the second gallery.
Cildo Meireles also avoided formal venues for his art by putting it into public circulation on objects like Coca-Cola bottles and banknotes. Defying the 1968 act which outlawed all political opposition, his Insertions into Ideological Circuits series in 1970 slipped past the censors’ eyes. A cola bottle offers a recipe for a Molotov cocktail, while a banknote is stamped with the question ‘Which is the place of the work of art?’.
Some freedom could be found at the gallery of Grupo Rex, founded in 1966 in São Paulo by a group of artists dissatisfied with lack of connection between establishment art and society.
Grupo Rex printed their own newspaper to air their opinions. Others were playing with real newspapers to highlight how control was being exercised through censorship. Scrambled front pages and reports and photos of police clashing with dissenters covered by black blinds use metaphor to denounce the repression.
Cildo Meireles, Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos: Projeto Cédula (Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Banknote Project): (Quem Matou Herzog?) (Who Killed Herzog?) 1970. Courtesy of the artist.
Antonio Manuel staged an act of rebellion against the art system’s ignorance of work they considered to be without aesthetic quality by presenting his naked body as an artwork before a panel of judges at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro in 1970. He was escorted from the stage (despite making a perfectly aesthetically pleasing nude!).
When asked whether this act would meet the same reaction in the 21st century, when art runs to pickled animals and unmade beds, he said: “I needed a new language - the body was the best, the strongest form of expression. Now the context is different – it wouldn’t make sense now. This was the first time this had been done in Rio; it was an exercise of freedom.”
Eduardo Srur with Fernando Huck, Attack, 2004. Courtesy Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo.
In the final room of the exhibition, works by Jac Leirner reference the hyper-inflation that followed Brazil becoming a democracy. Thousands of 100 Cruzeiro bills are stacked together in a long snaking sculpture and a circle. He called the pieces Todos Os Cem (All the One-Hundreds, 1987) and Os Cem (Roda) (The Hundreds (Wheel), 1986), playing on the word Cem, which means 100 but also sounds like the Portuguese word for without. The bills were without any value within months of being printed.
Other artworks from post-1985, when Brazil became a democracy, reflect how the country's modern artists have been influenced by the work of their predecessors. Eduardo Srur and Fernando Huck, like Meireles before them, appropriate objects already in the public domain. In Attack (2004), they splatter billboards with ink, serving to criticise the invasion of advertising, rather than censorship or propaganda.
Espaço Aberto/Espaço Fechado is an interesting look at the response of Brazilian art to recent national history. It’s a good coincidence for those who would like to learn more that the Barbican’s Tropicália festival begins on February 16 2006, focusing on the movement that swept Brazilian culture in the late 1960s and early 70s.
