Power to the Imagination: art in the 1970s and other Brazilian miracles

Milton Machado

mmachado@dircon.co.uk

Milton Machado (born Rio de Janeiro 1947) is an artist and writer with a BA in Architecture and a MSc in Urban Planning from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and a PhD in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College University of London who lives and works in London and Rio de Janeiro

Brazil, 1970s. Oh, those were the times! and oh, that was the place!

But first things first. We should begin with the 1960s, when everything seems to have begun.

The 1960s in Brazil were revolutionary times. And we had a new, revolutionary capital: Brasilia!

By opening this paper with a reference to Brasilia I pay homage to geometry, and to the illusion - and in the first years of the 60s we had reasons enough to believe it - that everything was in its proper place: the intelligence and delicacy of neoconcrete art, the brilliance of rationalist architecture, the beat and refinement of Bossa Nova, the black and white colours of Cinema Novo, and a democratic government with a view to the future: everything seemed to confirm Mario Pedrosa's diagnosis that Brazil is condemned to modernity, that the condemnation had come to an end, and the penalty of being off the map duly prescribed. With Brasilia at the centre of the country, Brazil was at the centre of the world. However, Brazilian peculiar geometry hardly pays homage to Euclid, and to the everlasting harmony and equilibrium of the Greeks.

Brasilia was built in five years, to be inaugurated in 1960. It’s an extravagance for a people to have the capital of their country inaugurated, launched, opened to the public.

Brasilia was conceived – by the architect Lucio Costa – as an object. The fact that the city is located precisely at the geographic centre of Brazil makes of the country itself a kind of geometric object. The general plan of the city resembles an aeroplane, with fuselage, wings, tails. On the symbolic level, the figure might suggest that the future had landed, and on the right spot; but the functional logic behind this rationalist planning was the distribution of branches stemming from a central axis. Perhaps never before has a city so nearly resembled a model.

A model of what?

Candangos was how the many thousands of builders that migrated from all regions of the country to work on the construction of the city became known. They came, but they could not stay. Because the city had been designed for an ideal number of one million inhabitants, the candangos and their families were forced to move out to the so-called Satellite Cities, precariously built on the outskirts of the Pilot Plan. So, when Brasilia the revolutionary capital of the future of a country of the future was opened to the public in 1960 it already came equipped with its shanty towns.

The Satellite Cities helped Brasilia resemble the model of a real city, and a model of exclusion. A model which, to be of the future, necessarily had to exclude its already present as its already past. The future does cost us dear.

Those were revolutionary times, indeed. The right wing military coup intended to free us Brazilians from the threat of communism was self-denominated “The Revolution of 1964”, sometimes also referred to as “The Redemptive”. As with any other case of redemption, this one also involved some sort of sacrifice and of religious deliverance. Shortly before the coup, good-hearted ladies organised the campaign “Gold for Brazil” – in which every decent and reasonably well-off Christian was expected to donate some piece of their jewellery to the country – soon followed by a street demonstration called “March With God for Freedom”, the aim of both enterprises being to raise funds – capital, physical and spiritual – to support the fight against subversion and communism. Freedom does cost us dear.

Four years later Brazilians would march again, this time in the opposite direction, and with bodies less burdened by the weight of cross and gold. In 1968, 100000 demonstrators occupied the streets of Rio carrying signs of Abaixo a Ditadura/Down with the Dictatorship, and contaminating the walls and the spirit of the city with other colourful slogans such as Power to the People, and – suggestively – Power to the Imagination. Such slogans did not so radically differ in form and content from Hélio Oiticica’s banner commanding Seja Marginal Seja Herói/Be an Outcast Be a Hero. And to be an artist at that time – or ever, in Brazil – did not so radically differ from being an outcast; and to succeed as an artist, from being a hero.

The artists’ responses to political repression and oppression were of two kinds: some turned attention to the manifestations and the repertoire of popular culture, by approaching the CPCs: Cultural Popular Centres, organised by the Students’ National Union; others also turned art into an instrument of resistance, but still believing in and without renouncing the critical potential of erudition. The transition from the 60s to the 70s is marked by this turning point, and by this choice between turning aesthetics into politics and politics into aesthetics.

This paper will focus on four artists who have chosen the latter alternative. Without pretending to be a documentary paper, this is a commentary – and an exercise of personal interpretation – with a concentration on artists who represent this transition, working specifically in Rio de Janeiro, and on some of their works in particular.

Carlos Zilio

If, around 1968, to be an outcast was a necessary condition for any Brazilian artist, and to become a hero one of its possible risks, Carlos Zilio took both. By his adopting the most radical form of political militancy and embracing armed resistance, Zilio’s political practice cannot be isolated from his artistic practice. Speaking in 1996 about his actions of urban guerrilla, the artist declared:

“I used to see those actions as something aesthetic, not something related to beauty proper, but to the absolute; as if they were a kind of installation, or a performance, something capable of changing and transforming reality, in a conception of aesthetics as a means to transformation”.

Marmita, of 1967 [Image 1], is one of Zilio’s last works before he interrupted his artistic practice to join political militancy – or his unconventional new form of artistic practice. A marmita is a small tin box used by workers for carrying food. Carlos Zilio’s Marmita does not carry food, and contains instead a faceless human mask with the word LUTE – FIGHT – printed in the place of the mouth. Marmita is a pamphlet-work, and perhaps the artist’s ultimate effort to connect art and politics, say, in a conventional way, as it marks the artist’s discredit in the efficacy of the formalised artwork as an instrument of resistance. In 1970, Zilio was seriously wounded – he was shot – and arrested by the police, only to be released in 1972.

It’s interesting to compare Marmita, of 1967, to some works representative of the artist’s production of the 70s, such as Identidade Ignorada/Identity Unknown, of 1974 [Image 2] and Para um Jovem de Brilhante Futuro/For a Young Man of Brilliant Prospects, of 1973 [Image 3].

In the first, a photograph depicts a pair of human feet, seen from an angle that would have pleased Mantegna, or Andres Serrano, at different times, and with an identification tag attached to the thumb that would have left confused a coroner at the service of the morgue. Identity Unknown, and yet, the hint is clear: these are the artist’s feet, this is a self-portrait. This work is autobiographical, confessional. In the same interview of 1996, Zilio declares:

“I had left prison very scared, and at the same time, with a feeling of defeat. It was the opposite sentiment I had when I was arrested. I came there dead but triumphant. I was released alive but defeated.”

In the same interview, Zilio provides clues for the reading of the work For a Young Man of Brilliant Prospects. He says:

“I had been released from prison and thrown in what people called then the ‘Brazilian economic miracle’. … I didn’t leave prison to find a country in war, to a Vietnam as I had dreamt. I left to another prison, to the ‘Brazilian miracle’.”

The young, promising executive in the photo is, again, the artist himself, acting, in action. Note his faceless mask – too busy to face the camera, he turns his back to us – and the position of his feet. We have seen this scene before]. Note his right hand, and interpret the gesture as you wish: “Fuck the world, I am a young man of brilliant prospects, I am the fruit of a miracle, and I am number one”; or: “EU LUTO, I FIGHT, my hand is a gun, beware of my pointing finger, for it aims at you”. And note his open briefcase on the foreground, shamelessly facing us, showing its contents: nails and geometry, order and progress. Ordem e Progresso: is this briefcase a new version of our national flag? A collection of pointing fingers? Or a coffin for a brilliant, miraculous fakir with an extraordinary capacity to resist?

Cildo Meireles

In the end of 1968, the AI-5 – Institutional Act #5 – the ultimate, ultra-sophisticated instrument of repression ever devised by the military in power, struck a hard blow on our revolutionary plans of having things back in their proper places, beginning of course with the military. A stroke on our plans, but not on our revolutionary dreams. Imagination does cost us dear, but we must go on producing the currency.

Vladimir Herzog was a journalist accused of subversion that was murdered in prison by the military police. The police explanation for the journalist’s death was that he had hanged himself. [Image 4] In a work of his series of interventions entitled Insertions in Ideological Circuits – to which the artist sometimes refers as a kind of “mobile graffiti” – Cildo Meireles stamped bank notes of Cruzeiros – the Brazilian currency at the time – with the words Quem matou Herzog? /Who Killed Herzog? By making secret interrogation backfire, by promoting a forceful, promiscuous interface between the electrical shocks of torture and the continuous current of the public circuit, by making a note on a note pass from hand to hand, and thus to circulate as blood circulates lively in the veins, Cildo provided the currency to renegotiate a version of our recent history that everyone was finding difficult to buy, in a distribution of goods from which no one could profit

Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, or Tiradentes, is another one of our national heroes. He was a dentist – hence the nickname – and the leader of the “Inconfidência Mineira”, a movement of independence against Portuguese rule, held in 1789 in the state of Minas Gerais. The uprising was violently repressed, its members were hanged. Tiradentes’ body was dismembered and its parts were scattered in the streets of Vila Rica – now Ouro Preto – and left there to rot, as a warning to people that rebellious dentists should keep their mouths shut.

In April of 1970, the military regime symbolically transferred the capital from Brasilia to Ouro Preto, appropriating the figure of the martyr and the movement’s ideals in a clearly populist manoeuvre of hypocrisy and misrepresentation. The inauguration of the Palácio das Artes in Belo Horizonte was part of the official celebrations.

[Image 5] Cildo Meireles’ contribution to the museum’s opening exhibition was the work Tiradentes: Totem-Monumento ao Preso Político/Tiradentes: Totem-Monument to the Political Prisoner. Wooden stake, white cloth, clinical thermometer, ten live hens, petrol, fire: that’s how the work is materially constituted and described. The function of petrol and fire can be easily guessed, and with it the destination of the ten live hens. But one might ask: what is the purpose of the clinical thermometer? What role does this healer’s device play, dislocated as it is, in this macabre instrument of sacrifice?

Dislocation is, precisely, what this work is about. The raw materials of this work are not wood, cloth, these things. Nor are the – oh, perverse dislocation! – “fried chickens”. The raw materials here are life and death. The hens become dirt, earth, the dislocation they perform is that of dust to dust, ashes to ashes, they are here for the sake of the inhuman. The thermometer explodes, no doubt, given the heat, the fever of the circumstances. But Mercury is dislocation with wings on his feet . If immolation is hell, the god dislocates himself, to heal. Mercury is the consolation of every prisoner, political, of war, for Mercury, by nature, is free.

In a recent interview, Cildo declared: “Of course I would never repeat a work like Tiradentes… I can still hear those poor hens in my emotional memory. But in 1970 I felt it had to be done”.

Memories are hot when they burn, but – like the wind – Mercury is always cool.

[Image 6] Later in 1979, Cildo Meireles again would provoke the gods with the installation O Sermão da Montanha: Fiat Lux/The Sermon on the Mount: Let There Be Light. The material this time?: imminent danger of explosions. 126.000 “Fiat Lux” matchboxes; 8 mirrors; black sandpaper covering the gallery floor; 8 beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount; actors. Duration: 24 hours. The actors’ job was to pretend to act as security guards, and they were dressed to kill.

The Candido Mendes Gallery, where the event took place, is in Ipanema, some hundred yards from the beach, where part of the audience had probably spent the morning exposing their bodies to the sun. In Brazil we say “hmmm, você está tão queimado!” – which, despite the literal meaning “hmmm, you really got burned”, stands for a compliment on the subject’s handsome and healthy looking suntan. The fact is that, regardless of how one had spent the morning that day, the audience that came to hear the sermon that evening was hot.

The gallery was packed and so were the matches… provisionally. I don’t remember if it was the exasperating noise of so many shoes scratching the sandpaper floor, reverberating the sound of matches being lit that came from the loudspeakers, or a general feeling of incompleteness given by the pointless contemplation of that mount without the roaring thunders that usually accompany the scene of the Sermon in films, or the irresistible urge to violate and to blind that untouchable, impassive cube with eyes that would not blink nor shed a tear, just like a god. That temple had to fall and be conquered, and the matches were used. Everyone wanted to light a candle for God and still another for the Devil.

In panic, the director of the gallery appealed to those actors who no longer knew how to act to act – this time for real – as security guards. “Don’t you dare touch those matches” – and they didn’t mean that work of art – and they shouted, and they pushed, and they huffed and they puffed, and they acted, and the gallery became hell. The police was called, the gallery was evacuated, and closed. The event did not last 24 hours, as planned. But: what exactly had been planned? I never really knew. But two things I know: that sure was an opening, and that sure was an “explosition”. [light a match]

Artur Barrio

Not only in prisons did people who died of inexplicable causes die in the 60s in Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, the bodies of homeless people were being found floating in the waters of the remote Guandú River, in numbers and often enough to suggest that they were being killed by the police and left there to rot in peace. This operation is known in Brazil by the suggestive name of “desova”, literally “laying of eggs”.

[Image 7] The banks of rivers were among other places where, in 1970, and first in Belo Horizonte, Artur Barrio exposed his Trouxas: bundles wrapped in cloth stained with red paint which the people who came in flocks to watch, and soon the police and the firemen who came to intervene, would immediately and for obvious reasons take for human bloody carcasses left there to rot. [16 series]

The word trouxas deserves further attention. Trouxa means bundle, pack, parcel. In a more sweetened view, Barrio’s work refers, perhaps pays homage, to the bundle of clothes a woman brings to the banks of a river for washing. Another meaning for trouxa is “fool”, “sucker”. Fazer alguém de trouxa – literally, ”to make a bundle of someone” – means “to fool someone”.

Unlike the painters in Pliny’s legendary narratives about the quest for maximum realism, and about the capacity of painting to fool the senses – such as painted grapes that birds would eagerly come to peck in the painting, paintings representing wrapped paintings that one would take for wrapped paintings – Artur Barrio was not at all claiming some prize for maximum realism – which obviously goes to the police. Fazendo alguém de trouxa by making a bundle of everyone with his carcasses apparently wrapped in blood, Barrio was just doing the washing. Or perhaps laying some eggs.

Antonio Manuel

Cildo Meireles’ mount did not last 24 hours as expected, but that was the duration of an exhibition by Antonio Manuel originally planned to last much longer. In 1973, the artist had been invited to do a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro. The directors of the museum had good reasons to be concerned about the kind of work Antonio intended to show – reasons which I will let you know very soon – and they met with the artist to discuss his plans. Their first decision was that, from the series of eight works proposed, only one should be shown. Sheer censorship, no doubt, but justified by the directors as a well-intentioned measure of precaution and protection – of the museum, of the work, of the artist himself. A decision later to be reviewed, resulting in the cancellation of the whole show.

Curiously enough, the piece that the directors had formerly agreed to show was O Bode/The Goat, surely the most radically subversive work proposed, and the one most likely to stink. If, in Cildo Meireles’ Fiat Lux, the material was the imminent risk of explosions, the blast here was latent, potential, symbolic. In the Quimbanda – a religious rite of African origin widely practiced in Brazil – the black goat is a symbol related to evil and negativity. Not that the goat is evil, but it becomes the receptacle for the evil that exists in ourselves, which the animal attracts, assimilates, and stores. Because there is a limit for the goat’s capacity to absorb our bad vibes, and beyond which the goat would end up imploding, exploding from the inside, the animal is sacrificed, in a process of sublimation, of eradication of evil – the very figure of the scapegoat.

Try to imagine, displayed as the artist intended, the black goat at the centre of a large circle painted in red – oops, still another version of our national flag? – and you’ll easily figure out how wrong the directors’ patronising, precautionary measures would go should the show be opened and attract the real censors with their stinking, terrible vibes.

[Image 8] But the exhibition finally was to take place, and it lasted 24 hours. Antonio Manuel convinced the editors of the daily newspaper O Jornal to dedicate six pages of their Sunday issue to the publication of his proposals. And the black goat was there, horny and proudly ruminating the bad vibes of those bad times in the good company of transvestites, vampires, The Cock of the Golden Eggs, The Painter Who Taught God How to Paint, among other outcasts and heroes of our human, all too human, daily sacrifice.

But I still owe you the explanation. What led the directors of the Museum of Modern Art – people, I must say, of progressive ideas and respect for the freedom of expression – to decide for the cancellation of Antonio’s show? The answer lies in the artist’s body of work, or better, in his body as work. O Corpo É a Obra/The Body Is the Work was how the artist responded to the decision of the jury of the National Art Salon, held at the same museum in 1970 – to refuse the artist’s proposal to expose himself as an artwork, a decision which resulted in forcing its members to cope with one more unexpected version of the Nude Descending a Staircase, [Image 9] the work by Marcel Duchamp which so eloquently tells us about the significance of regulations, juries, judgements, and refusals in art.

Naked, au naturel, just like babies are brought to the world, was how Antonio Manuel put in practice what the critic Mario Pedrosa defines as “the experimental exercise of freedom”, when the subject is art. And for sure, this is a new version of our national flag – note how proudly and civilly the artist exhibits his impudent “mast” while he holds another in his hand, both duly pointing upwards in the direction of Heaven – and indeed an original version of all national flags, before the creation of nations, before the creation of flags, at the very moment of the creation of Man. “Madam, I’m Adam”, so the palindrome goes, and no matter the direction of the reading, the work keeps saying: “there is no rule as there is no wrong as there is no right, for the primordial nation I inhabit is Paradise”.

And again, it’s Mario Pedrosa who says, in a conversation with the artist and commenting on his strip-tease in the now duly consecrated space of the museum:

“An act like yours, an action in itself, is a legitimate action of communication, for the authentic communication does not happen by means of any media. It is not the medium which communicates, it’s the fact itself, the fundamental and irreducible unity of Man which communicates with the Other. Its is this relationship – the essential communication which lies at the bottom of all things – which gives constitution to the authentic Cultural Revolution, total, totally against the establishment. …By not fitting and by being refused, you showed that life is greater than regulations. …The artist is the World. The artist is Reality. The artist is Nature.”

Life is greater than regulations, and still, “From Adversity We Live” (Hélio Oiticica). Exposed as an aesthetic object – and as an ethical subject – the artist’s body asks us to contemplate it with due love and care. The artist is Reality, and still – and in reality – the artist’s body is chased, persecuted, expelled. The artist proudly raises his masts and his flags, but the parapet of the museum is edgy, and as unstable and risky as a tight rope. Our acrobatic experimental exercises of freedom do cost us dear.

Brazil, 1970s. Oh, those were the times! and oh, that was the place! Remember how I began? And you must be asking: has Milton gone totally crazy, or has too much power been given to his imagination? For, up to now, I have been describing what may seem to you like a terrible time and a terrible place to be! Well, not really. The 1970s in Brazil were great times, and we have lots of fun; only, the various modulations of sex, drugs and rock & roll did cost us dear. However, believe me – podes crer – for this kind of negotiations, we never really stopped producing the currency.

The 1970s in Brazil were also the times of the “desbunde”. Given the most absolute impossibility of translating the term, here is an approximate meaning: the verb “desbundar” means “to go totally crazy, to have too much power given to one’s imagination”.

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.

[Image 10] And in excess of so many ideals and ideas in our heads, we had too much hair.

These are Cildo Meireles on the left, Artur Barrio on the right, Luis Fonseca in the middle, and on the right corner Vicente Pereira, a playwright of which one can only see the hair, with the Sugar Loaf on the background, photographed by Luiz Alphonsus in 1974.

[Image 11] And this is 21 Petites Sculptures en Cheveux/21 Small Sculptures in Hair, a work, also of 1974, done by Artur Barrio with excesses of his own ideas and of his own hair, after doing some washing, or perhaps laying some eggs.

With this paper, I pay homage to four artists, who also happen to be my friends. But there are other artists, and I have other friends. Only the choice of a concentration – on a period and a production of transition, as I pointed out – should justify a text on Brazilian art in the 1970s without the reference, among other artists just as fundamental for an understanding of the period, to Luiz Alphonsus, Luis Fonseca, Raymundo Collares, Antonio Dias, Iole de Freitas, Teresa Simões, Anna Maria Maiolino, Guilherme Vaz, Waltércio Caldas, José Resende, Carlos Fajardo, Tunga, Ivens Machado, etc. And only the lack of references to the work of these artists should justify a lack of reference to the artist Milton Machado.

Thank you, obrigado.

Milton Machado, London, October 2000

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