SERGIO B. MARTINS
CONSTRUCTING AN AVANT-GARDE
Art in Brazil, 1949-1979
The MIT Press
November 2013
Brazilian
avant-garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental but productive
out-of-jointness. They were modernist but distant from modernism. Europeans and
North Americans may feel a similar displacement when viewing Brazilian
avant-garde art; the unexpected familiarity of the works serves to make them
unfamiliar. In Constructing an Avant-Garde, Sérgio Martins seizes on this
uncanny obliqueness and uses it as the basis for a reconfigured account of the
history of Brazil’s avant-garde. His discussion covers not only widely renowned
artists and groups—including Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, and
neoconcretism—but also important artists and critics who are less well known
outside Brazil, including Mário Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Amílcar de Castro,
Luís Sacilotto, Antonio Dias, and Rubens Gerchman.
Martins argues that
artists of Brazil’s postwar avant-garde updated modernism in a way that was
radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. He
describes defining episodes in Brazil’s postwar avant-garde, discussing crucial
critical texts, including Gullar’s “Theory of the Non-Object,” a
phenomenological account of neoconcrete artworks; Oiticica, constructivity, and
Mondrian; portraiture, self-portraiture, and identity; the nonvisual turn and
missed encounters with conceptualism; and monochrome, manifestos, and
engagement.
The Brazilian avant-garde’s hijacking of modernism, Martins
shows, gained further complexity as artists began to face their international
minimalist and conceptualist contemporaries in the 1960s and 1970s.
Reconfiguring not only art history but their own history, Brazilian
avant-gardists were able to face contemporary challenges from a unique—and
oblique—standpoint.
