Flavio de Carvalho: Media Artist Avant la Lettre
- Flávio de Carvalho:Media Artist Avant la Lettre
This paper examines the work of Brazilian artist Flávio de Carvalho (1899-1973) from the perspective of contemporary media art, highlighting his practical and theoretical legacy. Initially associated with the Anthropophagy art movement, Carvalho used mass media creatively and incorporated insights from psychology, sociology and anthropology into his art. He realized events that went beyond "performance art," including a pioneering presentation on television in 1957. This article offers a brief overview of Carvalho's trajectory.
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Article frontispiece. Experiência #3 (Experience #3), 1956. Flávio de Carvalho parading his new style on the street and in a newsroom. The artist argued that under tropical heat men should use more comfortable clothes and not imported garments such as suits and ties.
This article presents certain aspects of the work of Brazilian modern artist Flávio de Carvalho (1899-1973) reinterpreted from a contemporary viewpoint: the early days of his career as an architect, in 1927-1929, when he championed the press as forum for the discussion of projects he entered in official contests; and three subsequent instances in which, driven by personal pursuits, he executed projects that favored personal experience over the creation of art objects. In his Experiência No. 2 (Experience #2), Carvalho challenged Corpus Christi procession attendants with the objective of testing their reaction (1931); designed a provocative men's summer outfit that he wore on the streets of downtown São Paulo (1956); and joined an expedition destined for making first contact with Native Brazilian Indian tribes on the upper Rio Negro (1958). In all three instances, the events became independent of the investigation that originated them. Well aware that the media is the arena for public action, the artist always sought to secure extensive press coverage for his creations. Almost a decade before the emergence of video art, Carvalho's flaunting in his original summer attire was covered live on television. A proper understanding of these aspects of the artist's work requires a preliminary description of his career and the context in which he operated [1].
The Brazilian Modernist trend, the earliest manifestations of which date to the second half of the 1910s, asserted itself throughout the 1920s. This initial combative period, which began in São Paulo with the Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art) in February 1922, ended with the onset of the Antropofagia (anthropophagy) movement, launched by Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) and Raul Bopp (1898-1984) in 1928. They envisioned the incorporation of European culture into the Brazilian scene (hence the choice of the word "anthropophagy," a synonym for cannibalism) through a particular approach based on indigenous myth and tradition.
After attaining a degree in civil engineering in 1922 from the University of Durham at Newcastle upon Tyne, where he also attended art school, Flávio de Carvalho returned to Brazil in the second half of the same year. In São Paulo, where he settled, Carvalho initially remained detached from the city's group of Modernist artists and writers. Only in early 1928, when he started his career as an architect with a project design for the Governor's Palace in São Paulo, did he come in closer contact with the Modernist circle. Carvalho adhered to the Antropofagia movement in 1928 when he entered an international design competition for the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse in the Dominican Republic. Flávio de Carvalho's design combined the Futuristic style of monumental buildings surrounding the huge lighthouse structure and interior design with decorations inspired by pre-Columbian cultures and civilizations. Carvalho attended the Fourth Pan-American Congress of Architects, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1930, as delegate of the Antropofagia movement. At the event, he held a conference titled "A Cidade do Homem Nu" (The City of Naked Man), in which he proposed an urban Utopia: the city transformed into an immense home where a...
