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Abstracts
Why Outros 500?
Gabriela Salgado
Power to the imagination: art in the 1970s and other Brazilian miracles
Milton Machado
Hélio Oiticica and the notion of the popular in the 1960s
Michael Asbury
Cristina Pape: an artist's trajectory
Cristina Pape
Why Outros 500?
Gabriela Salagado
Gabriela Salgado is curator of the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art
An introduction to the exhibition Outros 500 - selected from our Brazilian holdings- at the University of Essex Albert Sloman Library, and to the symposium from which the papers in this issue of ARARA derive.
Power to the imagination: art in the 1970s and other Brazilian miracles
Milton Machado
Milton Machado is an artist and writer living and working in London.
The 1970s were a time of experiences in excess, of experimenting with excess. I don’t mean experiences in excess to, which denotes discontinuity, deterritorialisation, surrendering and ceasing fire, but experiences in excess of our recent past, which denotes continuity, reterritorialisation, creation of new sites, the lighting of new fires. In excess of political struggle, we had mysticism, esoterism, and the need of self-knowledge that came with all the modulations of the hippie dream of love and peace; and, for those who could afford them, the ventures and the risks of psychoanalysis. In excess of a feeling of failure and defeat, we had a sentiment of accomplishment, if not of our projects of having things in right places, the certainty that the best things are definitely out-of-place, that the most interesting and exciting things are those for which there is no place, those which demand the continuous reinvention of things and places, those which cost us dearer. In excess of our amplified slogans and screams of protest, we had the advantage of proximity, the intimate face to face of the whisper, and the subtle but explosive power of the metaphor. In the 1970s we were armed to the teeth.
Hélio Oiticica and the notion of the popular in the 1960s
Michael Asbury
Michael Asbury is currently researching a PhD on Hélio Oiticia at Camberwell College of Art, London.
Recently I gave a paper at an art history conference which dealt with Hélio Oiticica’s work in relation to the social-cultural transitions which occurred in Brazil from the 1950s to the 60s. This transition entailed a shift from a positivist belief in the process of modernisation to an often politically engaged concern with the popular. In the arts, this led to the development from the orthodox constructivist-oriented concretism to neoconcretism, and finally to Oiticica’s engagement with the people of the shanty towns or favelas. The intention of such a historical overview was to argue against recent interpretations of Oiticica’s work which posit him as a paradigmatic figure in Brazilian contemporary art, purporting a Brazilian aesthetic tradition from the early modernists to the contemporary. During the panel discussion which followed, I was reminded by another panellist of Mário Pedrosa’s claim in 1965/6 that Oiticica’s work was post-modern. This paper - a reworked version of the previous presentation - is a response to that remark.
Cristina Pape: an artist's trajectory
Cristina Pape
Cristina Pape studied biology, completing an Ms.C. in Environment Education. In 1984 she moved to art and began to study Art History and Modern Art Restoration in Germany. She is now a lecturer in art at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, as well as a practising artist and restorer
The basis of my research is historical but it is also associated with
my personal trajectory. My research began with a rigorous study of Japanese
gardens, then the German Rococo style, and later, Meissen porcelain. The
baroque and the alchemists have shown me the gold, and currently I am
in search of the association between literature and modern art. The great
mixture of tendencies and projects that I have developed I call Madureira
Market, because, like me, both of us contain infinite forms, objects,
desires, and affections, which change with time. My work is accomplishing
my own potential. How far will I go? I don't know. Time will tell.
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