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

In 2009, Zanna Gilbert warned that correlating conceptual art in Latin America too closely with political crisis only serves to "essentialize" the region and its most experimental artists. "If anything," she writes, "it is the fusion of radical form with radical content that distinguishes Latin American conceptualism, rather than a precedence of subject matter over form ("Ideological Conceptualism and Latin America: Politics, Neoprimitivism and Consumption." re·bus 4 (2009): 14). Gilbert's concerns remain relevant now that postwar Brazilian art is enjoying an unprecedented reception in the Global North, spearheaded by major retrospectives for Lygia Clark (MoMA), Hélio Oiticica (the Carnegie) and Lygia Pape (the Metropolitan Museum of Art). These shows have been accompanied by a new wave of scholarly publications in English on the 1950s and 1960s, a generative period in which Brazil transitioned from a developmentalist democracy to an increasingly repressive dictatorship (1964–1985) and medium-specific "concrete" abstraction gave way to the participatory objects and propositions of neo-concreto. Less attention has been devoted to the 1970s, arguably a more complicated decade. Between 1969 and 1974, President Emílio Garrastazu Médici was responsible for the violent anos de chumbo, in which disappearances and torture were common; the second half of the decade saw a gradual abertura toward democracy. In her recent account of the era, Claudia Calirman qualifies the connection between the dictatorship and key artists of the era, to better highlight it: "their creativity did not come out of the regime itself—they created neither because of the regime nor despite it, yet their art was inevitably, inextricably linked to its gruesome realities" (Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. 147–148).

If Calirman attends to a Brazilian art subsumed "under" the political situation, how does attention to "radical form" change the picture? Elena Shtromberg's book Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s considers art in this context as "an open system, a site that is the matrix of social exchange" (3) in relation to four "social systems:" currency, television, newspapers, and maps. Each comprises a separate chapter, beginning with background on the system in question: increased inflation coinciding with the worldwide shift off the gold standard; increasing censorship of newspaper content; the emergence of Rede Globo and contemporary Brazilian television; and the government's attempts to map the Amazon. The artists considered are selected for their proximity to each social system rather than affiliation through movements or tendencies. Cildo Meireles and Antonio Manuel serve as major figures in the currency and newspapers chapters, with less familiar female artists such as Sonia Andrade, Letícia Parente and Anna Bella Geiger, among others, receiving welcome attention in the book's second half. "At its core," she writes, "this book offers an in-depth social history not only of a select group of artworks but also of what they reveal about the historical moment they emerge in and the social systems they navigate" (4). In a methodological balancing act, Shtromberg presents "systems art" as a tendency or genre, while also using a "systems perspective" to historicize her examples. As a result, Art Systems locates "radical form" as both generated by and commenting on larger social systems. Rather than limiting her purview to politics, Shtromberg contends that "a sustained and exhaustive analysis of artworks produced during this time reveals the legislative, economic, aesthetic, and technological relationships of this period, highlighting those legacies that endure into the future" (158).

Cildo Meireles figures in three chapters as an exemplar of the "systems art" approach. In the first chapter, Shtromberg argues that Meireles incorporates the very flow of capital into the work's form. In Inserções em circuitos ideológicos (Insertions into Ideological Circuits, 1970), the artist stamped cruzeiro banknotes with political messages, utilizing the pre-existing conduit of money to circulate information. Shtromberg contextualizes these and other currency works in light of inflation and a heightened awareness of money in the period...