Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles by Claudia Calirman (review)

The usual assumptions regarding the relation between culture and repression are often represented by way of a notion of culture interrupted by censorship and violence exercised by the state. Claudia Calirman's book describes a cultural scene (the Brazilian art world from 1968 to 1978) where intense experimentation had to deal with an additional dimension: the rupturing of established limits on language imposed by military norms. How can one say when language is under police surveillance? In recent years, different publications have advanced our thinking in terms of analyzing artistic practice during dictatorships, for example Nelly Richard's work in reference to Chile, or the map of Latin American conceptualism delineated by Luis Camnitzer. Calirman's investigation confirms and expands upon a statement that cultural critic Roberto Schwartz published in 1970, in which he refers to the relationship between Brazilian culture and politics between 1964 and 1969 by saying, "In spite of the dictatorship from the right, there was a relative cultural hegemony of the left in the country" (p. 4). Calirman's book proposes that this cultural hegemony of the left was maintained in the period that followed, even when the dictatorship acted on its script for interventions in the field of culture (the Institutional Act #5, in effect from 1968 to 1978). In opposition to the dictatorship's methodology of terror—typified by technologies of repression, torture, the disappearance of individuals, and censorship—certain civil sectors (human rights organizations, political activists, intellectuals, and artists) deployed multiple creative strategies in order to impede the success of the repressive state's primary pursuit: the eradication of critical thought.

Based on three case studies involving works by artists Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio and Cildo Meireles, Calirman articulates an interpretation that takes into consideration both language strategies and their parallels to international art references and the political context that activated the works' reception at the moment they were exhibited. This perspective indirectly endorses another proposal: from the post-War period onward, and especially from the 1960s onward, a mimetic or derivative relationship toward art and art centers outside Brazil can no longer be suggested. Order in the art world was no longer established on the basis of centers where novelties were produced and a receptive periphery. Instead, contacts develop in a parallel, simultaneous manner. Neo-avantgarde movements everywhere were revising the strategies of both historical and local avant-garde groups. Thus it was not only Brazilian modernism—particularly the Brazilian model of anthropophagy inaugurated by Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila de Amaral in 1928—that was being examined in Río de Janeiro, but also the modernism of Dada and Duchamp.

In accordance with this reading, contemporary art from Europe and the United States constituted additional information that existed in parallel, not as a source or an origin. Terms such as minimalism, conceptual art, and body art are insufficient to explain Brazilian art from that era. It is necessary to consider the productivity of notions such as the "experimental exercise of freedom" (coined by Mário Pedrosa in relation to the censored work of Antonio Manuel in 1970), the "Aesthetics of Hunger" (Glauber Rocha, 1965), or the idea of "Brazil Diarrhea" (Hélio Oiticica, 1970). These are just a few examples among many ways of naming the artistic practices that were emerging from a specific cultural, social, and political context. It is also indispensable to consider the productivity implied by the proposal of contemplating the marginal (whether in terms of poverty or schizophrenia) from a creative, heroic, and romantic perspective.

Claudia Calirman's proposed analysis of Antonio Manuel's work (repeatedly exhibited and censored) emphasizes cultural differences in inscribing body art. While in the United States and Europe such art was tied to notions of endurance, mutilation, and pain, in Brazil it was linked to an idea of liberating Dionysian celebration, in recognition of the body's physicality...