Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s by Elena Shtromberg (review)

Elena Shtromberg explores a slice of art production in Brazil during the particularly repressive “leaden years,” or “anos de chumbo,” of Emílio Garrastazu Médici’s presidency (1969–1974). Using system theory as the theoretical framework for her study, she analyzes works of art that correspond with four selected systems of communication, exchange, and representation: currency, newspapers, television, and maps. Throughout, the author highlights featured artists’ common desire to, “mobilize artistic expression in the name of creative and political freedom by engaging a broader public outside of the confines of artistic institutions” (2). One way to reach a broader section of the population was to employ everyday forms of communication that cut across regional and economic boundaries; hence, the four above-mentioned systems.

Following an introduction, Shtromberg divides her examination into four chapters, each focusing on one of the systems. In the first chapter, on currency, the author highlights the play between the flow of currency and information, as well as the idea of “value” as it pertains to the art market, most notably through analysis of several of Cildo Meireles’s works in which he used currency as a medium. The artist’s choice of material was especially poignant during an extended period of rampant inflation. In Chapter 2, Shtromberg discusses how several artists were drawn to possibilities presented by the graphic and textual qualities of the newspaper. At a time when the military government strictly controlled print media, the featured artists were able to expose the public to their production by inserting their own work into the bodies of newspapers, often mimicking standard forms to avoid censorship.

In Chapter 3, on television, the author explores the use of television by both government and artists as a means to communicate messages to the masses. While the military was promoting its highly controlled image of a unified Brazil to televisions in even the most remote households, artists such as Sonia Andrade and Paulo Herkenhoff used the medium as a mechanism in their video art. Finally, in the chapter on maps, Shtromberg analyzes works that investigate spatial boundaries and cartography. In tracing the history of maps of Brazil back to the colonial period, the author underscores the negative effects of different governments’ exploitative interests on different populations and broader notions of territorial identity, and how artists working in the 1970s challenged those interests.

Readers with little knowledge of these artists featured in this book will find it challenging to situate the individuals and their production in the broader scope of Brazilian art history. Because much weight is given to artists’ conjoined desires to show their work outside traditional artistic institutions and reach a broader audience, it would have been interesting to learn more about where the video art pieces, for example, were shown in Brazil during the 1970s. Similarly, two of the four systems featured in the book involve text, namely newspapers and currency, and some of the corresponding works involve letters or text or both. The book does not take up the consideration of literacy rates in Brazil in the 1970s as an impediment to artists’ connecting with a broader audience through text-based works.

Overall, Shtromberg’s publication aptly demonstrates the adverse effects of this historical period of social and intellectual repression on everyday objects and systems, and conversely, how these commonplace instruments became powerful avenues for counter-expression in the hands of some of the nation’s artists. This study underscores, often ironically, how severe and how arbitrary governmental censorship was. Just as the regime sought to permeate the average citizen’s daily life with its ideology, the artists featured in this book use the same forms to exercise their creative expression. Shtromberg raises profound questions about art-making during a period of duress.