Camila Maroja

Este dossiê trata das relações entre arte e ecologia a partir das perspectivas latino-americana e do Sul Global. Os artigos aqui reunidos buscam precisamente repensar essas relações e analisar a produção artística gerada desde o impacto da emergente conscientização ambiental na arte e no modo como a arte é pensada. Demonstram a importância não só de apresentar noções ecológicas provindas da América Latina e de outros espaços pós-coloniais na criação artística contemporânea, mas também de repensar a historiografia e a análise da arte a partir de novos parâmetros que reconsideram o papel da natureza na arte.

During the 2017 Venice Biennale, the area dubbed the "Pavilion of the Shamans" opened with A Sacred Place, an immersive environmental work created by the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto in collaboration with the Huni Kuin, a native people of the Amazon rainforest. Despite the co-authorship of the installation, the artwork was dismissed by art critics as engaging in primitivism and colonialism. Borrowing anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's concept of equivocation, this article examines the incorporation of both indigenous and contemporary art practices in A Sacred Place. The text ultimately argues that a more equivocal, open interpretation of the work could lead to a better understanding of the work and a more self-reflexive global art history that can look at and learn from at its own comparative limitations.

In 2015, after an almost 20-year hiatus, the Museu de arte de Sao Paulo (Museum of Art of Sao Paulo, MASP) reinstalled the celebrated crystal easel display designed by the architect Lina Bo Bardi. To present “civilized art” as an authentic Brazilian expression, however, Bardi needed to assure his readers that it, too, was autonomous and local. In his chapter on the Brazilian art falling into this category, titled “Approach to Modernity,” Bardi thus glossed over the art of the colonial period and largely dismissed the academic and neoclassical art of the nineteenth-century as spurious and derivative. In his writings about modern Brazilian painting, Bardi thus construed a Brazilian modern art narrative based on European notions of the genius loci, the avant-garde and originality that reflected the Western model of modernity and art history.

This article surveys the 1920s transatlantic trajectory of painter Tarsila do Amaral, whose contributions to the history of a global modernism have recently begun to be more widely recognized. By arguing that Amaral’s negotiation of a place in the international art world can serve as a model for exhibiting contemporary art from non-mainstream areas, the essay also underscores the relevance of avant-garde ideas for the contemporary art world.

This article examines Cildo Meireles's refusal to describe Red Shift, his 1984 installation, as conceptual, political art. I use his rejection of these terms to reconsider conventional categories of the political in Latin American conceptualism as these have been historicized in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I argue that the artist builds his notions of conceptual and political art based on socio-artistic theories propagated in the short-lived but highly influential publication, Malasartes. This groundbreaking magazine, founded by Meireles and eight others in 1975, published texts crucial to Brazilian art history and translated international articles. These shaped the theoretical ideas that would inform the Brazilian art scene in the 1970s. Revisiting theses debates permits a deeper understanding of Meireles's view of art and politics. Revealing, in particular, the manner in which this generation of artists criticized the incipient art market in Brazil, then seen as synonymous with the larger art system. Proposing a differentiated art history, offering an autochthonous point of view, Malasartes's editors challenged the traditional view of the artwork as an isolated, commodified object, inserted in larger art movements through the stultifying imposition of stylistic categories on the artist. This critique of the art market helps to explain Meireles's stance on rejecting identification as a conceptual and political artist, despite the fact that his opus can be seen as both political and conceptual.

One of Brazil’s greatest colorists, Alfredo Volpi (b. 1896, Lucca, Italy; d. 1988, São Paulo, Brazil), immigrated with his parents to Brazil in 1897 and was trained as a painter-decorator by the age of fifteen. This training instilled in him a passion for artistic processes, as evidenced in the painter’s lifelong habit of stretching his own canvases and preparing tempera paint, a technique he embraced after discovering Giotto in an influential visit to Italy in 1950. His initial production is mostly figurative. Noteworthy from this early period are his 1939–1941 marine landscapes made in Itanhaém, following his encounter with the painter Ernesto De Fiori. From the 1950s onwards his artworks became more abstract. He painted the characteristic colonial façades and decorative little flag pennants (literally, bandeirinhas or "little flags"), which poetically evoke popular taste and local tradition. Although his oeuvre cannot be easily inserted into artistic movements, Volpi pa...

How should one approach the notion of the precarious in art – its meanings and its outcomes? Its presence in artistic practices may be transient, yet it instigates permanent changes in the production, discourse, and perception of art. The Permanence of the Transient: Precariousness in Art gathers essays that examine the traces and implications of precariousness in contemporary art, and lays a foundation for a thoughtful study of its emergence in related fields throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

The different perspectives represented in this volume touch on art history and theory, curatorial practice, media art, philosophy, language, and transnational studies, and highlight artists’ narratives. Together, these interdisciplinary essays locate precariousness as an undercurrent in contemporary art and a connective tissue across diverse areas of knowledge and everyday life.

In 1998, Brazilian curator Paulo Herkenhoff organized the 24th São Paulo Biennial around the theme of anthropophagy. The term, coined in 1928 by Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade, quickly became the most celebrated concept in the country for understanding national culture. Like the Tupy Indians who devoured their enemies to absorb what was most valuable in them, Andrade urged Brazilian intellectuals should incorporate imported references into the construction of a hybrid national culture. Guided by this metaphor, Herkenhoff used anthropophagy as a method to display international art from a national standpoint in the exhibition Historical Nucleus. Contrasting Herkenhoff’s 1998 diagram intended to inform Historical Nucleus’s multiple exhibits with the famous map of the history of modern art made by Alfred Barr, MoMA’s first director, in 1936, this article demonstrates that the two diagrams are aesthetically and politically similar in their intention to create new models of art history. Yet despite Herkenhoff’s intention to set the epistemological grounds for a new, post-colonial art narrative coming from the South, the article argues, his cannibalization of Barr’s radial structure ultimately had questionable results. Nonetheless, by weaving a transhistorical and cross-cultural narrative in the show based on the curatorial strategy he termed “contamination,” the 24th São Paulo Biennial demonstrated that other art historical narratives were possible and necessary.

Resumo: Rejeitando a noção de uma produção artística pautada em uma linearidade, o trabalho de Robert Morris das décadas 1960-1970 escapa a rótulos como minimalista, arte processual ou arte de site-specific, embora seus escritos e obras tenham sido ...