Academic Sessions: Oxford 2001
Dislocated Modernities
Oriana Baddeley & Michael Asbury, London Institute, Camberwell College of Arts, 45-65 Peckham Road, London SE4 8UF. Tel: 0207 514 6307; o.baddeley@camb.linst.ac.uk
The year 2000 was charged with references and ascribed meanings throughout the world but particularly so in the Brazilian context where the millennium coincided with the quincentennial of the founding of the nation. The new century’s rediscovery of the paradigms of modernity has a specific resonance in relation to existing stereotypes of Brazilian culture. The debates, both internally and externally about identity, nation and the “modern” within the Latin American context have frequently focused on Brazil as a complex disjunction of clearer arguments as to the relation of post-colonial culture to the concepts of originality, authorship and experimentation so intrinsic to the precepts of historical modernism. This session will address the issues raised by analysis of the Brazilian context but will seek to expand the debate through analogous examples beyond simple geographical boundaries.
Muniz Sodré, Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro
Black Aesthetics and Social Sensibility
We propose to discuss the emergence of a collective Black aesthetics in Brazil connected with a new kind of ethnic consciousness and with a social atmosphere that is characterised by mass-media, entertainment and an expanding multicultural ideology. In this case aesthetics has not do with producing critical judgements on works of art, but rather with a particular type of social sensibility, in which prevail analogical ways of thinking and acting. Brazilian Black aesthesia has much more to do with Baumgarten than with Kant.
Maria Esther Maciel, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
Cataloguing the World: Bispo, Borges and Greenaway
The paper focuses on the works of Brazilian artist Arthur Bispo do Rosário (1911-1989), connecting them to both the fictional universe of Jorge Luis Borges and Peter Greenaway’s taxonomic experiments. Poor, black, and psychotic, Bispo spent half a century in an asylum, where he dedicated himself to compose what he called ‘registers of his passage on earth’, that is, an inventory of all the things in the world, which would be presented to God on Judgement Day. On supports made of wood and cardboard, he catalogued shoes, mugs, bottles, tins, tools, cutlery, with great sense of rigour, besides embroidering lists of words and images on pieces of cloth. Moved by this obsession with enumeration and classification, he left us an extraordinary work, which can be associated not only to the encyclopaedic narrative of Borges (who asserted the arbitrary character of all classification systems), but also to the puzzles and catalogues created by Greenaway, especially in the opera-installation ‘100 Objects to Represent the World’.
Caroline Perret, University of Leeds
Difference as Subversion: The Artists of the Matter in the Immediate Post-War Period in France
The consensus history of Twentieth Century Art, established by American art critics such as Alfred Barr and Clement Greenberg, has produced fixed criteria under which to identify the potential quality of art. The imposing effect of such normativity is evident in the art of the immediate post-war period in France. First dismissing American criticism, French critics then had to confront the geographical transfer from Paris as originator, to New York as possessor of the Cultural International. In the retrospective attempt to rehabilitate the image of the avant-garde, they adopted models of interpretation which promoted the precise set of values which the French artists claimed to reject. The first part of the paper will comprise a study of such a process. The second will clearly avoid the notion of a homogeneous national identity within French art, and suggest instead a displacement in the criticism of the ‘Artists of the Matter’, with the objective of accounting for their difference as potential subversive character.
Angela Dimitrikaki, Liverpool John Moores University
The Sexual Politics of Nationalism, the Modernism/ Postmodernism Debate and the Failure of Feminism: The Male Nude in Twentieth-Century Greek Painting
This paper examines the reception of the male nude in the history of modern Greek art, from the inter-war years to the period after the military junta (1967-1974), considering how social groups with particular demands claim and/or subvert meaning. How the male nude was positioned in the modernism/postmodernism debate within a specific cultural framework structured on the basis of the centre/periphery division is highly relevant in this instance. The argument suggests, for example, that the influence of the celebrated Greek artist Tsarouhis in post-war art has been of a complex nature, figuring differently within the homogenising discourse of the nation than in relation to women’s practice at the time when feminist politics seemed to gain momentum. The reception (and suppressed political meaning) of this counter-appropriation in the context of the Modernism/Postmodernism debate in the 1980s will be discussed in connection with the historical failure of the women’s movement to articulate a critical vision in the Greek art scene.
Anna Dezeuza, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London
Lygia Clark and Yoko Ono in the early 1960s: Exploring the Boundaries of ‘Open Work’
Umberto Eco stated in his 1962 book, The Open Work that "when we speak of a work of art, our Western aesthetic tradition forces us to take ‘work’ in the sense of personal production which (…) always maintains a coherent identity of its own and which displays the personal imprint that makes it a specific, vital and significant act of communication". This paper explores the ways in which two artists, Lygia Clark and Yoko Ono, were questioning this very definition of the artwork by the ‘Western aesthetic tradition’, at the time of Eco’s study, by developing practices focusing on an active spectator participation. While Brazilian artist Lygia Clark participated in a radical re-reading of the European Constructivist tradition by the Neo-concrete movement in Rio de Janeiro, Japanese artist Yoko Ono produced works merging her own cultural traditions with developments in experimental music in New York, later leading to the creation of Fluxus. Working from the ‘margins’ of modernism, Ono and Clark thus made significant contributions to the development of new international participatory practices in the early 1960s which questioned the role of the artist and the status of the art object.
Paulo Sérgio Duarte, Hélio Oiticica Centre, Rio de Janeiro and Martin Grossmann, Museum of Contemporary Art, São Paulo
Debating Dislocation
A summative debate of the themes of the session and the issues raised by the preceding papers.