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janeiro 31, 2014
Hope Under the Grip of Oppression por Martha Schwendener, New York Times
Hope Under the Grip of Oppression
Crítica de Martha Schwendener originalmente publicada no jornal New York Times em 10 de janeiro de 2014.
Paulo Bruscky - Art Is Our Last Hope, Bronx Museum, Bronx, New York, EUA - 19/09/2013 a 13/04/2014
Paulo Bruscky’s career as an artist began in a difficult time and place: Recife, Brazil, a few years after the 1964 coup that led to a dictatorship lasting nearly 20 years. Like other artists — and anyone who came under government suspicion — Mr. Bruscky was arrested (more than once), interrogated and tortured. But focusing only on the violent context of his work undermines what it set out to prove, which is that radical art can flourish even in repressive circumstances, and that it can be a form of communication, liberation and optimism, as the title “Paulo Bruscky: Art Is Our Last Hope” suggests. Installed at the Bronx Museum, the exhibition includes 140 works of sculpture, performance documentation, mail art and photography made between 1971 and 2011.
In the course of his career, Mr. Bruscky made several choices that had a profound effect on his work. One was to remain in Recife rather than head off to Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, which had bigger art scenes. Recife was a center of sugarcane trade during the colonial period and a hub for student and labor activists during the ’60s and ’70s. The idea of “sugarcoating,” with its doubled historical and political meanings, pops up occasionally in Mr. Bruscky’s work.
More important from an artistic standpoint, Mr. Bruscky broke away from the slick modernism of Concrete Art, which dominated Brazil in the ’50s and ’60s, and he created works that were participatory and relied on ephemeral media like postcards, newspaper ads or billboards. Often the city itself played a central role. For “Arte/Pare (Art/Stop)” (1973), Mr. Bruscky tied a ribbon across the Boa Vista Bridge, a main artery through Recife built in the 17th century under the Dutch. Pedestrians and motorists thought that perhaps a ceremony was about to take place — a re-inauguration maybe. The whole work, which seemed impromptu but took careful planning to avoid intervention or arrest, lasted only a few minutes and was captured on Super 8 film available for viewing at the museum.
Photos taken on his walks around Recife were treated as poetic gestures, inspired by Russian Futurists or the concrete poetry that flourished in Brazil and which similarly attempted new forms of expression. “Visual Poem,” from the 1980s, is a grid of four photographs featuring pebbles stuck in a street grate, an abstract composition that also looks like a music score. Maps stamped with handprints and descriptions of Mr. Bruscky’s urban meanderings are reminiscent of the Situationists in France. Other works are in keeping with the conceptualism that was taking place in the United States, like bureaucratic-looking memos declaring “A arte é a última esperança (Art Is Our Last Hope)” (1983).
In a recent interview with the curator, Antonio Sergio Bessa, Mr. Bruscky said that when he was making his early works, he was also “reading a lot of theory, and I had the question of the art-historical canon in mind, as well as the question of how an artist is constructed.” You sense this in an elaborate performance — “Funeral Art” (1971) is its easiest English translation — in which prayer cards were printed as invitations and a coffin was carried through the streets of Recife into the gallery. Alluding to the “death of the artist,” an idea of anti-authority and canonization made famous by the French writer Roland Barthes in a 1967 essay, the concept takes on new meaning here, and with immediate consequences: the gallery opening was shut down by the police and Mr. Bruscky was taken in for interrogations, which, in his recounting, sound like philosophical dialogues. (In one, the interrogator reportedly asked Mr. Bruscky: “I know that the concept of art is very open. If I put a piece of the floor on the wall, is it art?” To which Mr. Bruscky responded: “If you do it, no, but if I do it, yes, it is art. That’s the big difference between you and me.”)
A strain of experimental art with which Mr. Bruscky was more explicitly associated is Fluxus, a loose international movement that drew upon poetry, music and performance. Fluxus extended the Dada, Surrealist (and Marcel Duchamp’s) practice of making quirky, absurd-poetic objects. A display case lined with Mr. Bruscky’s works made with found objects reverberates with the politics of the Brazilian situation. “To See With Unbiased Eyes” (1983) is a jewel case with empty eyeglass frames and a small reproduction of the Brazilian flag. “Palarva (Word/Worm)” (1992) is a wooden box with a colonial-era map pasted on the top and cut-up paper inside, suggesting how information and meaning are produced (or destroyed).
Fluxus overlapped with the mail-art movement, and Mr. Bruscky participated in this. A lineup of postcards and envelopes, mounted in clear plastic boxes on the wall, shows again how art could be used as a tool to communicate, particularly under repression or for an artist living outside the center of the art world. Many include photos of missing people, but also the universal “by airplane” stamp, as if to suggest mail art as a form of spiritual if not actual transportation.
It is interesting to note that Mr. Bruscky kept his day job as a civil servant in a hospital — but this ended up fruitfully feeding his work too. Experimenting with technology, he made X-ray self-portraits and drawings in the form of encephalograms and worked with Xerox machines. “It is a drug” (1971/2004) also alludes to his vocation in a wry way: an assemblage of pharmaceutical packages stuck on the wall, it has a title that feels apropos both for art and life.
There are moments in “Paulo Bruscky: Art Is Our Last Hope” when more information would be welcome. The punning titles, translated from Portuguese to English, suggest references to complex histories and dark and poignant moments that are left unexplained. Even though something is lost in translation, however, the messages of Mr. Bruscky’s oeuvre are clear: that you can make art anywhere, from the periphery of the art world as well as at its center; that art is a form of global communication (even before the Internet); and that it is not a luxury or an elite form. Instead, it is an arena for hope and, in some times and places, even a “last hope.”