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

In Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles, journalist-turned-art historian Claudia Calirman presents a history of Brazilian artistic responses to the tyranny of military dictatorship and censorship. Focusing on the particularly repressive period of 1968–1975, Calirman centers her project on case studies of the works of three exemplary artists. Following the coup d’état that deposed President João Goulart in 1964, Calirman writes that these artists began to turn against the nationalistic and ideological popular revolutionary art of the orthodox left, an art form that had become commonplace worldwide in the late 1960s. Artists like Manuel, Barrio and Meireles instead favored a conceptually-based practice that pushed the epistemological boundaries of art, while preserving an albeit veiled political message. Ephemeral, body-based performances and coded conceptual art made critique of the dictatorship safer, despite the Institutional Act #5 (A-I #5), which suspended political and civil rights and permitted the torture of dissidents, and whose inconsistent enforcement ultimately begot self-censorship. These years saw the outlawing of street protests, the abrupt closing of numerous art exhibitions, and the arrests of journalists, academics, and students. New art forms allowed young artists to create art that questioned and subverted both the military regime and the artistic establishment of the times. While engaging in institutional critique and rebuffing the commodification of the art object, the artists discussed by Calirman also pushed the boundaries of art itself, rejecting traditional forms like painting and sculpture in favor of body art, installation and art actions. Calirman situates this work within international art historical discourses, while at the same time grounding it in local (Brazilian) art histories and pan-Latin American artistic trends.

The author is careful to point out that this text is not a survey; instead, it proposes case studies of works by Manuel, Barrio and Meireles as archetypal of growing trends in contemporary Brazilian art. The introductory chapter presents a political and historical overview of the period, exposing government censorship and repressive tactics. The chapter takes as the period’s foundational act the boycott of the 1969 São Paulo biennial, in which artists worldwide—eventually 80% of those originally invited to participate—refused to display their works in an act of solidarity with young Brazilian artists working against the dictatorship. Calirman skillfully documents the events while questioning the efficacy of silence as political strategy at a time when mainstream critics declared a “vazio cultural” (cultural emptiness) in Brazil (34). The issue of internationalism is handled delicately, and the author avoids a false center-periphery dichotomy, acknowledging that debate exists without being polemical.

The second chapter traces the work of Manuel, focusing on the ephemeral nature of performance and body art and the infiltration of popular communication channels through media-based works. While also tracing the history of alternative exhibitions in Rio de Janeiro in these years, Calirman situates Manuel’s work O corpo é a obra (The Body is the Work) within the historical context of Duchamp’s institutional critique and within the milieu of his international contemporaries, such as artists like Vito Acconci and art movements like Fluxus, while noting the importance of the legacy of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticia, with whom Manuel also collaborated. Throughout the entire text, the author succeeds at this kind of weaving in of varying influences and contexts into this Brazilian art history. Chapter three examines the site-specific work of Barrio’s garbage aesthetics, highlighting his well-known Trouxas ensanguentadas (Bloody Bundles), packs of cow meat and bones that were left in the municipal park and meant to evoke images of body parts of the regime’s torture victims while implicating the viewer, no longer a mere bystander. Calirman juxtaposes Barrio’s work with Arte Povera in Italy, asserting that Barrio relied on inexpensive materials as a way to embrace disintegration, disappearance, decomposition and precariousness. The final chapter, rooted in Foucault’s theories of control and surveillance, examines...