By LUIZ RENATO MARTINS*

The notion of objective form was directly linked to reflective historical judgment, integrating the set of critical responses to the new cycle of capitalist modernization in Brazil

1.

What paths lead to epic art? How can we move from the raw pressure of historical facts to their aesthetic form? How can we convert aesthetic time into objective and critical knowledge of the world?

The notion of “objective form,” which we will discuss, aimed to address such challenges by redesigning the nexus between aesthetic and socio-historical forms in new terms. Formulated in 1979 by Roberto Schwarz, it emerged in the Brazilian literary and critical debate against the model of rapid modernization unfolding from the 1964 corporate-military coup.

On Anglo-American campuses, the so-called language tour (linguistic turn), while in France the structuralist trend prevailed, closely followed by the post-structuralist wave. The common denominator of these trends was the segregation of the sphere of historical judgment, separated from the domain of aesthetic forms.

In contrast, the notion of objective form was directly linked to reflective historical judgment, integrating the set of critical responses to the new cycle of capitalist modernization in Brazil, resulting from the 1964 coup.[I] In this way, the aesthetic debate implied in the notion of objective form and, previously, embedded in its first and prototypical construct – the idea of ​​materialist form – brings historical-chronological affinities with the Western version of late Maoism, from the end of the 1960s, born from the crisis of the post-1945 capitalist expansion cycle, the so-called “Thirty Glorious [Years]”.[ii]

But beyond a concrete and shared concern about the socioeconomic model, there was a crucial difference: the discursive schemes of Western Maoism were based on the importation of formulas from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and both the former and the latter had very little to do with the mental life in the central economies. Thus, lacking real fluency and communicability, this movement was doomed to die as a critical reason, just as, on another level, Cuban focoism died out in Latin America, Germany, and Italy. Thus, despite some stridency and certain flashes of light, these movements quickly dissipated.[iii]

In contrast, the notions of materialist form and objective form – the former formulated by Antonio Candido (1918-2017), who was Roberto Schwarz’s teacher – were both based on the connection between aesthetic form and historical-social relations. Firmly rooted in the critical fabric and the collective experience of Latin American everyday life, of permanent tragedy, they flourished and multiplied, in fact, in the artistic vernacular, as we will see.

2.

I will leave aside here the remote historical sources of this debate. This would take us to the late novels of Machado de Assis (1839-1908), as read by Roberto Schwarz,[iv] and also to Trotsky’s notes, in 1912 and 1922, on the cultural dialectic between “backward” and “advanced” nations.[v] In return, I will prioritize the genetic moment of objective form, including, as said, its source: the conception of materialist form.

3.

In 1970, Antonio Candido established the materialistic way as “structural reduction and a formal condensation of social rhythms”.[vi] According to Roberto Schwarz, then an assistant professor and member of Candido's research team, “the aim was to explain how external configurations, belonging to extra-artistic life, could pass into fantasy, where they became structuring forces and revealed something of themselves that had not been visible. It was also a question of explaining how criticism could retrace this path in turn and reach one sphere through the other, with a gain in knowledge in relation to both.”[vii]

But why and how did such an objective arise? In the mid-1960s and 1970s, uneven but combined convulsions occurred, inherent to the end of the post-1945 expansionary cycle.[viii] It is crucial to keep these roots in mind, since the long capitalist crisis in dispute has not yet completed its adjustments. In any case, in many countries it is rapidly becoming evident that democracy is unnecessary for the new order of capital. Out of step with aberrant individualism and the pulverization of social relations, in the new era of mass narcissism and new modes of gain and domination, democracy increasingly appears as an outdated protocol in the face of capitalist imperatives increasingly focused on gains through dispossession.

However, the corrosive critical power of the objective form remains acute and ongoing. It constitutes a sort of “Ariadne’s thread,” nourished by the reflective activity and the objective critical force of the truth of social relations, when confronted with the current state of the world, which is not simple but labyrinthine; because the current world appears – or, rather, hides itself – under the effects of pulverization and transfiguration operated by “fictitious capital.”

4.

In 1970, as part of a seminar reviewing modern critical theories,[ix] Antonio Candido developed his reflection on the historical dialectic between literary form and semi-colonial underdevelopment, and, later, on the conception of materialist form.[X] Antonio Candido’s seminar did not come out of nowhere. Years earlier, in the torrent of criticism that flowed in response to the 1964 coup, works of music, architecture, visual arts, cinema, theater, social sciences, journalism, and so on were systematically interspersed with street protests.[xi]

In short, a vivid contrast emerged in the international aesthetic debate as the process of capitalist restructuring took off (at uneven rates in each country after 1968).[xii] Except for the young and vibrant European cinema,[xiii] most of the visual artistic discourses generated in hegemonic economies – although analytically advanced – were weakened by self-confinement in the domain of pure forms (free from contact with non-aesthetic forms, broadly speaking, historical-social).[xiv] On the other hand, in certain peripheral countries, critical and combative aesthetic responses were forged.[xv] Such art included the analytical advances of the “advanced” countries, but subsumed them into an updated reflection on the ongoing capitalist restructuring. It remains to be seen how.

In Brazil, the process of reconstructing realism, against the capitalist restructuring after 1964, confronted the purely analytical vogue in the central countries.[xvi] Thus, the work of the then young artist Antonio Dias (1944-2018) carried out operations of appropriation and displacement.[xvii] In fact, in 1965, at the opening exhibition of the New Figuration movement, Dias's works took over Pop Art clichés, turning them against imperialism and the Brazilian corporate-military dictatorship. The aphasia of geometric abstraction before the coup was thus overcome.

Antonio Dias developed the notions of “negative art” and “painting as art criticism” in a 1967 note.^[xviii] Both evoked the operations of appropriation and displacement of forms learned from either minimalist art or conceptual art.[xx] In August 1969, a new series of works by Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) and Antonio Dias, project book,[xx] claimed the permanent porosity of the work of art in the face of the surrounding reality, also including historical structures – such as laws, barely tangible in the artistic space. The latter were referred to allusively through ironic subtitles.

In addition to their authorial peculiarities, such formulations responded broadly to the movement of collective debate in the arts. Earlier, in 1967, Oiticica's programmatic essay “General Scheme of the New Objectivity” expressed the general desire for critical objectivity and reflective totalization.[xxx] He thus articulated, in the visual arts, the strategic horizon of the materialist form of “aesthetic condensation of social rhythms”.[xxiii]

This transmissible objectivity between historical structures and aesthetic forms constitutes the core of the materialist form and the objective form. Of course, the objectivity of social rhythms changes incessantly over time, but it is no less objectively structured by class relations, for example – which, like social rhythms, are also subject to aesthetic condensation.

5.

In 1979, Roberto Schwarz designated the objective form as a dynamic articulation that links the aesthetic and historical-social domains;[xxiii] in 1991, he also defined it as a form endowed with “practical-historical substance”; ^[xxv] and, in 1997, as “the social nerve of the art form.” ^[xxiv] However, conceptualization and description are not enough to present the objective form. In fact, only as a concrete artistic form does the objective form provide intelligibility to the objective historical-social matter, as a mode of critical condensation of this, which reveals its own functioning as a back and forth between the two domains, kept under scrutiny simultaneously.

To this end, the exercise of aesthetic and critical intuition is essential for synthesis with the otherwise incomprehensible socio-historical material. In short, there are links between the part and the whole, in terms of subjectivity, objectivity and historical dynamics, which only come to light in art.

Although Roberto Schwarz and Antonio Candido conceived their critical constructs with 1965th-century literature in mind, I will choose examples from the historical context of both to illustrate their critical formulation. The negative operations of the New Figuration, by Antonio Dias, which expropriated Pop Art in XNUMX, visually objectified the cliché of desire of the upper and middle classes, that is, the vortex of consumption.[xxv]

Thus, the operation of appropriation and displacement, which ironically inflected the formulas of Pop Art, dialectically condensed the class political project that drove the coup, in two senses: first, the ironic twist pointed to consumption as a fetish; second, while harshly ridiculing this objective, it objectified the protests against the new regime, which by then had become an open social and political conflict. In these terms, between 1965 and 1967, the arts prepared the genetic pool for the materialist form and the objective form.

Similarly, in 1968, this time focusing on minimalist art through the work Do It Yourself: Freedom Territory (Do it Yourself: Freedom Territory,original title in English, 1968, adhesive tape and typography on pavement, 400 x 600 cm), Antonio Dias traced and marked the terrain with adhesive tape.[xxviii] He completed the work with stones evoking pieces of street paving, which bore a plaque, similar to a military identification hanging around the neck, with the inscription “to the police”. Thus, by explaining the resistance process by referring to the clashes in the city streets, and with the captions on the stones instigating the fight, Antonio Dias visually objectified the social and political protests, making explicit the ideological and visceral schism between the classes in Brazil.

Shortly after, he developed a series in exile, which began with Anywhere Is My Land (1968). In addition to alluding to expatriation, militarization, and mass incarceration, these works brought poetic structures in conflict with their motifs. Thus, instead of creating, as is usual in art, a unique form appropriate to the motif, the works resorted to hostile or inhospitable forms, expropriated from minimalist or conceptual art, reworking and adulterating them against the grain.

Thus, with such an antithesis objectified as a contradiction, the conflicts inherent in reality reached, beyond the alluded object, the very form and dialectical structure of artistic practice. They were constituted in these terms as the objective form of negativity, that is, of the power to deny and fight converted into a cogito and in an autonomous mode or for itself.[xxviii]

6.

This plastic strategy, which takes concrete relations of dependence and transforms them into creative, systemic-cognitive, and critical practices, has achieved remarkable dissemination. In the architecture of Paulo Mendes da Rocha (1928-2021), the objective form, generated as a pedestrian perspective and experience, instilled this element, in a constant and molecular way, in decidedly urban projects. I take the architecture of the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture and Ecology (MuBE) as a visual example, but the primacy of the pedestrian and the logic of the city – as an egalitarian polis and as an environment for “unpredictable encounters” – extend to the entirety of Mendes da Rocha’s work.[xxix] The latter was developed, in fact, against the course of modern Brazilian architecture, whose ethos monumental and contemplative derived, not by chance, from rural country houses, as in Brasília.[xxx]

For Amilcar de Castro (1920-2002) – an exponent of Brazilian geometric and neoconcrete art and a participant in the II São Paulo Biennial (1953) –, the historical synthesis with the surroundings as an objective form occurred in 1978, in a large-scale work for Praça da Sé (in São Paulo), the site of political demonstrations against the dictatorship at the time. Thus, he condensed new social rhythms, encompassing the collective production of temporality and spatiality by the masses, who had taken to the streets and factory yards in protest.[xxxii] Likewise, by using the brooms and brushes used by street sweepers and wall painters in his large-format drawings, Amilcar de Castro synthesized objective gestural forms of anonymous live work.

In 2019, the installation Ferris wheel, by Carmela Gross,[xxxi] made visible, on an epic scale, the dramatic and poignant national moment, under the official command of the far right. Ferris wheel brought objective forms, of tragic clarity, through a negative architectural construct, installed inside a neoclassical palace, originally conceived as the headquarters of a bank.[xxxii] To this end, 250 pieces (collected from scrapyards) were distributed on the floor of the palace's main hall, emblematic of the eclectic architecture inherited from the Empire (1822-1889) by the oligarchy of the Old Republic (1889-1930). Distributed on the floor were old tools and utensils, worn-out machine parts, all technologically outdated, evoking projects that were, for one reason or another, obsolete.[xxxv]

Thus, the sumptuous architecture of the building (presided over by a neoclassical colonnade crowned by French stained glass windows) was contrasted with objects easily found in degraded urban areas. An intricate web of ropes acted as a unifying system, or dialectical link between these two antithetical sets, giving the disparate grouping the intriguing content of an incongruent totality. The bundles of ropes (in themselves diverse in color, texture and thickness) carved the space in different ways, tying the objects in a zigzag fashion to the capitals of the columns, an apparently improvised device that contrasted with the ostentatious scenic rhetoric of the parent agency.

However, one did not have to go far to find the origin of the ropes (unlike the neoclassical capitals of the colonnade…). In fact, one only had to look around the cultural center to come across a cluster of tents, carts and street vendors’ stalls, crowding the sidewalk in the square (of Alfândega, in Porto Alegre) in front of the building. Ropes are emblematic materials of street commerce, which perform two basic functions: during the day, they hold transparent tarps over their makeshift shop windows; at night, they keep everything wrapped up.

Migrants who fled hunger and poverty – initially mostly from rural areas of Brazil, but now also from neighboring countries – are the ones who trade in this type of trade in the cities. All of them are left to subsist precariously, surrounded and threatened, day and night, by the police and other social predators. According to Carmela Gross, Ferris wheel was born from a walk in that square. Brought to the interior of the mansion, the constructive practice of the resistance and survival model of migrants and “severinos”, in the words of the poetry of João Cabral de Melo Neto,[xxxiv] translated into the disparate weave of the rigging.[xxxiv]

There, the same genetic matrix, engendered in the misery of the streets, germinated and expanded, reforesting the space of the bank; when it burst into the grand hall, against the grain of class and property privileges, it revealed the bitter and unequal tenor of Brazilian social formation. A sudden eruption, but, in fact, conceived as an objective form, reconstructed by montage, as a strategy of shock, which critically contrasted – with the farcical colonnade – the bare and improvised architecture, originally invented for the daily struggle for occupation and life.

7.

To conclude: by questioning and challenging the observer (according to a scheme specific to the critical and reflective tradition of German Romanticism), the objective form invites the audience to consummate its meaning through a dialectical back and forth between the heterogeneous domains of aesthetic form and impure forms, rooted in the historical-social totality. But this will only occur if the observer – to culminate the critical-reflective game – is willing to simultaneously combine with the aesthetic sensation the negative consideration of the historical-social totality, a fundamental instance of the objective form. [xxxviii]

*Luiz Renato Martins is a professor-advisor of the PPG in Visual Arts (ECA-USP); author, among other books, of The Long Roots of Formalism in Brazil (Chicago, Haymarket/HMBS).

References

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Vv. Aa. tucuman burns (Tucuman is Burning). 1968, multimedia installation, Rosario, Confederación General del Trabajo de los Argentinos.

Notes

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[I] See Schwarz,1992, pp.61-92. Due to the dictatorship, the essay was initially published only in Modern Times (Schwarz, 1970, pp. 37-73); republished as “Culture and Politics: 1964-1969: Some Schemes” (Schwarz, 1992, pp. 61-92).

[ii] See FourastiÉ, 1979.

[iii] The phenomenon was acutely synthesized by Godard (1930-2022), in Chinese (1967): jargon and mannerisms mao appear as Pop Art styles, and simultaneously as jingles e spots

 advertising, that is to say, as merely reiterative formulas that spin falsely, according to fashion. See Martins, 2021b.

[iv] See Schwarz, 2000; Schwarz, 1989a, pp. 115-125; Schwarz,1990; Schwarz, 1997a, pp. 7-41; Schwarz, 2012b, pp. 9-43; and SchwarZ, 2010a, pp. 247-79.

[v] In his 1912 observation (on Bulgarian literature), Trotsky pointed out the inability of “all backward countries (…) to develop their own internal (cultural) continuity”, and were therefore “obliged to assimilate the ready-made cultural products that European civilization has developed in the course of its history” (Trotsky, 1980, p. 49). In his second note, from 1922, Trotsky observed that, in some cases, “backward countries with a certain degree of cultural development”, by appropriating the achievements of the “advanced countries”, “reflect these achievements with greater clarity and force” (Trotsky, 2015, p. 285; Trotsky, 2005, pp. 135-68).

[vi] Cf. Schwarz, 1989c, p. 132. See also, for the development of the notion of materialistic way, Candido, 2004b, pp. 17-46; Candido, 2004a, pp. 105-29. Regarding the previously published excerpts from “De Cortiço a Cortiço” – whose full publication occurred only in 1991, but whose writing originally dates from 1973 [therefore, in direct continuity of concerns with the preceding essay, from 1970, “Literatura e underdesenvolvimento” (Candido, 1987b)] – see “Note on the Essays (Item 4)”, in Candido, 2004c, p. 282.

[vii] Cf. Schwarz, 2012c, p. 48.

[viii] In ten years (1974-1984), a series of governments and former social democratic leaderships (rooted in anti-Nazism and politically formed in the construction of the welfare state against pauperism) capitulated in Europe; thus, they collapsed successively: in Bonn (1974), Willy Brandt (1913-1992); in London (1976), Harold Wilson (1916-1995); in Paris (1984), Pierre Mauroy (1928-2013). They all fell through intramural maneuvers of the party itself or of close circles, to make way for policies of market primacy, based on fiscal austerity and structural unemployment.

[ix] “The seminars discussed, among others, texts from Russian formalism, from the structuralists, from Adorno, the Literature and Revolution, by Trotsky”, Schwarz recalls. For details, see Schwarz, 2019, pp. 410.

[X] In turn, such reflections on the conception of form go back to the interrelation between “literary structure” and “historical or social function of the work”, worked on since 1961 by Candido. See Candido, 2006, pp. 177-99. The theme of “historical function” will return as a constant in several other writings by Candido. See, for example, the dialogue with Beatriz Sarlo, originally published in Point of view (Buenos Aires, n. 8, March-June 1980), and in Portuguese in Candido, 2002, pp. 93-107; see also Idem, topic “II”, pp. 98-107, originally published as “Literature and history in Latin America (from the Brazilian angle)”, see Candido, 1987a.

[xi] An unprecedented Brazilian critical system was then formed. For details and discussion, see Martins, 2019e, pp. 73-113. The protests were banned after 13.12.1968, by AI-5 (Institutional Act No. 5), followed by arrests, torture, censorship and purges.

[xii] Only later, in the era of Thatcher (1978) and Reagan (1980), did this restructuring emerge in terms specific to hegemonic economies. Thus, capitalist restructuring – through structural unemployment, institutionalized violence and the assimilation of gangs into state structures – occurred much earlier in the periphery and, from this perspective, anticipated the current structural tendency towards the divorce between capitalism and democracy.

[xiii] To a large extent, A Clockwork Orange [1971], by Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999), foresaw the end of welfare state and aspects of the new capitalist cycle, including the merger of the State with criminal organizations. For a discussion on this subject, see Martins, 2021c. In fact, European cinema – possibly due to its necessarily industrial and collective art content – ​​did not suffer, during this period, from the same aphasia as the arts with a deep-rooted artisanal tradition and usually nourished by individual isolation – and therefore more vulnerable to the dogma of the autonomy of language in the face of the historical-social process and, consequently, to the speculations of linguistics.

[xiv] Pasolini (1922-1975) was one of the few to address, in films and articles, what was happening (both in youth behavior and on a macro level), by indicating a structural change in capitalism (which involved science), associated with a global right-wing revolution based on the worldwide unification of markets and the assimilation of consumption (including of oneself and others) as a value – with genocide as routine. Pasolini referred to “genocide” as the “assimilation to the bourgeoisie’s way of life and quality of life” of “broad strata” (sub-proletarians and populations of colonial origin) “that had remained […] outside of history” (Pasolini, 1975a, pp. 281-2). See also Pasolini, 1975b. See also, in this regard, Martins, 2021f and Martins, 2021g.

[xv] As to the critical state of the arts and the conjunction of specific historical-social demands of the moment, the answer can be found in Schwarz's 1970 essay, “Culture and Politics: 1964-1969: Some Schemes”. See Schwarz, 1992, pp. 61-92. Due to the dictatorship, this essay was initially published in Modern Times, in July 1970. See Schwarz, 1970, pp. 37-73. In parallel, in Argentina, see de Solanas and Getino The Hour of the Horns (1968), a film produced clandestinely and awarded at the IV International Festival of New Cinema (New Cinema), Pesaro, 1968. See Solanas, Fernando E. and Octavio Getino, 1968. See also Longoni and Mestman, 2010, on the series of interventions tucuman burns (1968), a multimedia installation in Rosario at the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT) de los Argentinos, produced by a group of about twenty artists and sociologists associated with a militant dissident union group. See also Katzenstein, 20, pp. 2004-319, and Longoni, 26. I am grateful to Gustavo Motta for the above references on the synthetic and totalizing content of Argentine art of the period. 

[xvi] On the combative turn of the arts and the movement to construct a new realism in response to the 1964 military-business coup, see Martins, 2019d, pp. 73-113. On the prevalence of geometric abstraction in the previous period, favorably echoing the developmentalist cycle in South America, see (on the Brazilian case) Martins, 2019a, pp. 44-72.

[xvii] See Martins, 2019e, pp. 75-84.

^[xviii] See Dias, 1967-69. For a facsimile reproduction of the notebook pages, with notes on “negative art” and “painting as art criticism”, see Miyada, 2019, pp. 24-7.

[xx] On Dias' offensive operations once installed in Europe, see Martins, 2019b, pp. 174-201.

[xx] In the original English. The program comprised 10 work proposals according to specified open structures. For details of the project, see Dias, 2015, pp. 94-7; see also Motta, 2011, pp. 169-81.  

[xxx] See Oiticica, 1967. For the general desire for critical objectivity, see Oiticica, 1996c, p. 116. For other reflections by Oiticica, also committed to the reconstruction of realism in Brazilian arts, see Oiticica, 1996b, pp. 103-04; see also Oiticica, 1996a, pp. 127-30.

[xxiii] For the establishment by Candido, in “Dialectics of Malandragem”, of the bases of crafts hairsalon materialistic, according to Schwarz, as “structural reduction and formal condensation of social rhythms”, see Schwarz, 1989b, pp. 129-55. See also Candido, 2004b, pp. 17-46, and Candido, 2004a, pp. 105-29.

[xxiii] See Schwarz, 1989b, pp. 129-55.

^[xxv] Cf. Schwarz, 1999, p. 31. For data on the two initial publications, in 1991 and 1992, which precede the book publication in 1999, see Idem, P. 247.

^[xxiv] Cf. Schwarz, 1997b, p. 62.

[xxv] See Martins, 2019d, pp. 74-84. See also Martins, 2007, pp. 62-71.

[xxviii] The grid structure, traced with adhesive tape, was first assembled in 1969 at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, as part of the exhibition Contemporary Art. Dialogue Between the East and the West. In this and subsequent productions, the work was complemented by another work: to the police, described below.

[xxviii] See Martins, 2020.

[xxix] On objective way in the architecture of Mendes da Rocha, see Martins, 2021d, and Martins, 2021e. The editorial process for the publication of this text in book form is underway: Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Amilcar de Castro: The Power of the Negative (provisional name, org. LRM, São Paulo, MuBE/ WMF Martins Fontes, 2025).

[xxx] See Martins, 2019c, pp. 27-43.

[xxxii] For an analysis of such operations, the details of which are not available here, see Martins, 2021d, and Martins, 2021e, referred to in note 29, above.

[xxxi] Gross, 2019.

[xxxii] Started in 1927 and completed in 1931, the building served as headquarters, successively, for the banks of Província, National Trade, Southern Brazil and Meridional, before acquiring its current name in 2001 as Farol Santander.

[xxxv] See Gross and Martins, 2021.

[xxxiv] “TIRED FROM THE JOURNEY, THE RETIRATOR THINKS ABOUT INTERRUPTING IT FOR A FEW MOMENTS AND LOOKING FOR WORK WHERE HE IS – Since I have been retreating/ I have only seen death active,/ I have only come across death/ and sometimes even festive; only death has been found/ by those who thought they would find life,/ and the little that was not death/ was of severe life/ (that life that is less/ lived than defended,/ and is even more severe/ for the man who takes)” [my italics, capital letters and parentheses, from the original]. Cf. Melo Neto, 1999, p. 178.

[xxxiv]   See Gross and Martins, 2021, pp. 53-62.

[xxxviii] Text published in “Dossier: visual arts, left-wing imaginaries and capitalism in Latin America, in magazine Art & Sensorium, vol. 11 (2024), available at: https://periodicos.unespar.edu.br/sensorium/issue/view/421, second paper presented in the panel “Marxism and form in the praxis of art criticism”, at the meeting HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 2022 – 19th Annual Conference, Facing the abyss: An epoch of permanent war and counterrevolution, London, School of Oriental and African Studies – SOAS, University of London, 10-13 November 2022 (I thank Bruna Della Torre, Gustavo Motta, Nicholas Brown and Roberto Schwarz for their comments and suggestions). I am also grateful to Regina Araki for her review of this Portuguese version. This work constitutes the abbreviated version of the more comprehensive and detailed essay, “Do it yourself: objective form, territory of a critical struggle” (trans. by Nicholas Brown), to be published in early 2025 in the collection The Routledge Companion to Marxisms in Art History, ed. Tijen Tunali and Brian Winkenweder (Routledge, 2025).

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