Revolutionizing Art

Panel 2: “Revolutionizing Art” at the International Conference “The other 68: Anthropophagic Revolutions in Brazilian Counterculture after 1968” at Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, 23-25 May 2018

Chair: Laura Teixeira (Frankfurt)

Moacir dos Anjos (Recife)
An underdeveloped art

Culture and politics in Brazil during the 1960s were informed by the concept of underdevelopment. From the work of economist Celso Furtado about Latin America to the works by Hélio Oiticica, Glauber Rocha, Caetano Veloso and others, underdevelopment was considered both a condition for those who lived in Brazil (“of adversity we live”, said Oiticica) and something to surpass. Underdevelopment was a concept that guided the “experimental art” made in Brazil and Cinema Novo, and it was at the core of the only written manifesto of Tropicalismo, published in 1968 by poet and filmmaker Jomard Muniz de Brito. This paper will address the Brazilian artistic production of the period as one that reflected, both thematically and formally, the paradoxical environment in which it was produced: an underdeveloped art.

Lena Bader (Paris)
„Interventions in Ideological Circulations“: The Rebellion of the Well-Versed Images

This paper revisits the origins of the anthropofagia movement in the 1920s in order to discuss its resurgence and popularity in Brazilian protest culture in the 1960s, and in particular in the Tropicália movement. The focus will be on individual artist, whose work emerged as pivotal moments of a transcultural modernity. With what we might call their pictorial migrations, they offer an important corrective for universalist approaches to a “Global Art History”. From an art history point of view, these works are significant because they highlight the politics of artistic engagement. The protest that they articulate anticipates figures and models of thought that become explicit in later, post-colonial debates and address basic questions of cultural identity.

Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz (Rio de Janeiro)
New Alliances, New Sex, New Cocaine: Exile and the Relations of Production in Hélio Oiticica’s Life and Work in New York 1971-75

Many protagonists of Brazil’s post-68 counterculture were living in exile. It is fair to say that some of the most emblematic of Brazil’s counter cultural music, film and art works have been produced abroad. For visual artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-80) – a key figure of the Tropicália and counter cultural movement – life in exile, first in England and later in the USA, led to profound changes in the way he conceived both his life and work. Yet, art history and history largely fail to account for the impact of these radical shifts on Oiticica’s work. This paper aims to de-center the standard accounts of Brazil’s counterculture of the 1970s.

Presented by:
The conference is part of the series “Tropical Underground” and is organized by the Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders” with the Department of Theatre, Cinema and Media Studies at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.