By LUIZ RENATO MARTINS
The correlation of forces that govern the aesthetic experience of concrete art
Beyond the form/idea and its commandments
It can be inferred, regarding the correlation of forces that govern the aesthetic experience of concrete art, that a single principle unifies authorship, work and reception, despite the apparent distinctions of each instance. The principle governs the three levels implied by the poetic structure that appears concretized as a visual or rhythmic idea. It is the primacy of such an idea or the pictorial principle, necessarily clear and distinct – and which operates in the manner of an aesthetic contract –, that explains the guideline advocated by the fourth point of the charter of principles “Bases of Concrete Painting”: “The construction of the painting, as well as its elements, must be simple and visually controllable”.[I]
Let us take a different path – certainly heretical and contrary to the commandments of concrete art. Let us inquire into the premises and historical and social implications of the logical structure and its simplicity, allegedly intended for rational apprehension. This is not a strictly poetic problem, but one related to the history of ideas. Addressing this issue requires a discussion, in terms of the connections and their historical assumptions, of what came to be called retrospectively (a generation later) the “Brazilian constructive project in art.”.
From the outset, the late name was consecrated from a retrospective carried out in 1977,[ii] whose ideological and historiographical effects, inseparable from a broad and ambitious process of reinterpretation of Brazilian geometric abstraction, have not yet been exhausted.
Certainly, the claim of the constructivist lineage for Brazilian geometric abstraction involves a complex of connected questions with long developments that do not fit here.[iii] Let us dwell on just one crucial comparative precision in order to decide on the nature of the alleged constructive roots of Brazilian art.
This name has some consistency as it refers not to the original Soviet constructivism, but rather to the offshoot of the Western branch, which Benjamin Buchloh, with sharp and biting precision, dubbed “Cold War constructivism” (Cold War constructivism). "[iv]
Let us comparatively observe the context and assumptions of original constructivism – which I will call, for simplicity, “red”, as opposed to the “white”, of the “Western version”. The contrast serves to clarify the ties of origin of the Brazilian family, derived, in fact, from the migration here of the white constructivism practiced in Paris, the origin of concrete art.
Red constructivism
The original red constructivism – about which, incidentally, Mayakovsky (1893-1930) stated: “For the first time a new term in the field of art, constructivism, comes from Russia and not from France”[v] – initially manifested itself mainly in painting. But it soon took on another form through interdisciplinarity. In the Soviet case, the principle that governed the migrations of language from one field to another was politics; precisely, the urgency of the revolutionary objectives of politicization and agitation for the deepening of the October Revolution.
Thus, many of the first constructivist projects were born in the midst of the civil war against the “whites” and aimed at general mobilization in defense of the revolutionary government.[vi] In this sense, the overcoming of the traits of subjective spontaneity and personal expressiveness, in red constructivism, occurred in favor of the conjunction with politics and in favor of a form of collective and superior subjectivity, which was that of the revolutionary political subject – with the urgency of the “reconstruction of the way of life” (perestroika byta).[vii]
The conception of the constructivist work, therefore, far from being immune to circumstances and impervious to the process of realization, emerged structurally open to the situation and aims of the political subject of the process: the revolutionary workers' movement, to which the content of collective subjectivity was attributed. In accordance with the permeable and procedural nature of the work – in which the notion of form did not rule, but was subject to the materiality of the construction process –, the works of red constructivism presented themselves structurally derived from the materials used. In this way, on the aesthetic plane, the constructivist critique of the “unity of form” was engendered, crystallized in the affirmation of form as “a product of the dynamic force of materials”, in line with the “culture of materials” outlined by Tatlin (1885-1953).
White constructivism
On the other hand, in terms of the Ruptura group or concrete art bringing the DNA of white constructivism, simplicity and logical evidence attested to the hegemony of the form/idea totem, celebrated in each work as advocated by Van Doesburg's manifesto.
Therefore, instead of the expressive urgency of a political subject, as was typical of red constructivism, what was presented in the Brazilian and Latin American case in general – but also in that of white constructivism practiced at the Bauhaus – was the symbolic face of the Weberian standard, supposedly universal and ahistorical. However, this was nothing more than the theoretical mask that hid the empirical aspect of post-artisanal rationality, typical of the impersonal production of goods in various fields.
Put in the most basic terms of routine, the impermeability to subjective factors sought by concrete art was supported by mathematical constructs, and shielded by “ruler and compass” and, moreover, against accidents of execution and remnants of unplanned spontaneity. The Brazilian design of abstraction, in operational practice, intersected or coincided – as occurs in relation to any product or building project, also based on calculations – with operational procedures exercised in the activities of production of goods.
In this sharing, in fact, the local version of white constructivism did not separate its destiny from that, also amphibious, traced by the Bauhaus masters,[viii] who came and went between the sphere of pure contemplation and that of productive calculations of objects for the market. In São Paulo, the exchange was more than noticeable, even publicized, because many of the artists in question worked professionally as salaried technicians, self-employed professionals, small entrepreneurs, etc., in the areas of graphic arts, landscaping, natural, furniture, advertising, among others, and mocked the uselessness of “fine arts”.
In this way, the notion of subjectivity implied therein, only for convenience and a desire for philosophical support, claimed to be a descendant of the totem of ideal typology, whose behavioral and decision-making motivation would be strictly rational, according to Max Weber (1864-1920).[ix] In everyday life, the authors of concrete art had a business address, fulfilled commercial or work contracts, acted as legal entities, etc.
In this sense, regarding the paintings by Waldemar Cordeiro presented at the 1956st National Exhibition of Concrete Art (57-XNUMX), Mário Pedrosa said: “Waldemar Cordeiro nurtures his idea and transposes it onto the canvas, like a draftsman on a board traces his object”. Pedrosa’s metaphor was not casual. It alluded not only to the description of the careful and exact construction of Cordeiro’s works, but also to his professional situation. The same applied to Luiz Sacilotto, who earned his living at the time as a draftsman during the day and painted in his spare time.[X] as well as Geraldo de Barros and others.
“Good shape”, a jewel of modernization
The intellectual articulation between the matrix of Weberian subjectivity, supposedly universal, and the affairs of the market was guaranteed by the science of “good form” or shape, considered capable of functioning both in the domain of disinterested contemplation of forms and in the exercise of design or natural of objects for the market. Thus, the Gestalt – doctrinally advocated by concrete art as the “science of perception”[xi] – conceived an analysis of form, referred to and founded on axioms and empirical postulates linked to the individual's perceptive-cognitive performance.
The construction of this scientific basis for the analysis of form responded, in a certain key focused on commodity production, to the critical dissolution of the metaphysical unity of form, practiced in the so-called “laboratory phase” at the beginning of Russian constructivism, and which later unfolded in the “culture of materials” and later in productivism.
In operational circumstances that were inimical to critical consideration of the uses and purposes of production, the procedures of concrete art could migrate and transit without problems from one field to another – despite differences in materials, production techniques and modes of circulation. The condition was that they maintained the pure presuppositions of all concreteness and reaffirmed the objective of “good form”.
Specifically, this meant that norms and criteria of “good form” – which circulated indistinctly between the drawing board, the canvas, the packaging, the garden, the poster, the page of poetry and so on – always implied operations of division and abstraction, combined with the suppression of aspects of the materiality of the support or media.[xii] In this transit of perceptive techniques and practices, it would always occur, no matter how abstract and disinterested the union, in an allegorical figure of the modernizing and triumphant conjunction, between cost minimization and efficiency.
Thus, the changes advocated by the new Brazilian art, centered around the founding program of concrete art, focused exclusively on the recipe of poetics, that is, on the aesthetic mode of production. On the other hand, the other relationships remained untouched and the functional polarities unchanged; on one pole, between the author and the work, that is, between the artist and his materials, the entrepreneur and his inputs. While on the other pole, the dichotomy between the producer-entrepreneur-artist and the consumer of the aesthetic experience was also preserved. All were subject to the power of the form/idea totem.
In short, the aim was to modernize production and optimize the distribution or circulation of the product. This implemented a modernization process similar to that resulting from the introduction of more advanced technologies in industry, agricultural production and services, while preserving the premises of the functional and social division of labor and property relations.
In short, if the productive mode of art was renewed, on the other hand, everything remained the same regarding the dichotomous and dualistic distinction of functions in production and circulation, which was always governed, in white constructivism, according to the ideality of contemplation, that is, according to the dual opposition and the correlated dynamic, specular or projective, between the subject and the fetishized object of contemplation.
Political economy of geometric abstraction
Of course, none of these considerations about the premises and implications of the collection of values and ideas of concrete art contradicts the decisive fact, stated at the beginning and which is now worth reiterating, that the abstract geometric paradigm became the constitutive vector of an unprecedented process in the visual arts of Brazil, of formation of a modern visual system – in correlation with the new cycle of modernizations –, linked to the expansion of international trade and intensified by state investments in industrialization, during the second government of Getúlio Vargas (1951-54).
That said, if empirical research has already pointed out contiguities and parallels between the prestige of the visual paradigm of geometric abstraction and the regime of capitalist expansion and modernization, it is worth examining this further. Thus, in an investigation to determine the social and historical connections involved in the construction of the hegemony of geometric visual languages, new crucial questions emerge: how can we translate the symbolic ascendancy of geometric abstraction, from the point of view of the historical materiality of the forces at the forefront of such innovations, in South American modernization?
In short, which groups and classes acted as symbolic subjects of the generalized desire for geometry? Or, finally, translating such questions in terms of the problematic of formation proposed above: what are the historical-social implications and consequences of the geometric poetic rationality having become the formative vector of the Brazilian visual system in the period from 1950 to 1964?
General rhythm and aesthetic synthesis
To address such issues, it is essential to resort to a synthetic concept, capable of effecting and condensing the articulation between the historical process and aesthetic elaborations. In fact, they require the simultaneous reflexive synthesis of a complex of heterogeneous spheres, encompassing artistic materials and forms and historical-social forces, whose synthesis is neither immediate nor evident.
Such is the primary function of the related notions of materialist form and objective form, conceived respectively by Antonio Candido and Roberto Schwarz. How do they both operate to synthesize domains with such heterogeneous background and content? Through them, they both respond to the question about the process of aesthetic materialization, or, to put it succinctly, the “structural reduction” to the aesthetic form of an “external social datum” indicative of the “general rhythm of society” – translated, in turn, into an aesthetic form.[xiii]
In short, both critical constructs, materialist form and objective form, operate in such a way that the general rhythm of society, when translated as form in the process of specifically aesthetic consolidation, does not appear as, in the explanatory comparison proposed by Roberto Schwarz, an extrinsic “enveloping modality”, “but as an active internal element” of the literary form, thus imbued with an intrinsic dynamism.[xiv]
Considered in this way, the objective form encompasses and brings to the aesthetic sphere a practical-historical substance that becomes the inner power of the novel, or of the visual poetic process, if it is permissible to transpose the literary notion to the visual domain, as intended here. It will not be, however, except in the immanence of the aesthetic experience consolidated as poetic form, that the objective form will reveal the historical-social matter as rhythm. It is up to the interested party to encompass both. How?
In one way or another, based on the critical construct proposed by Antonio Candido and complemented by Roberto Schwarz, the question of the formation of the modern Brazilian visual system can now be provisionally posed in terms of the following dilemma: was the general rhythm of South American societies expressed, in that period, by the abstract-geometric paradigm as a form that materialized and objectified aesthetically and rhythmically the social and economic relations of the time?
The eventual answer to this question will also provide the explanatory key to the content of the process and the historical forces that were part of it, which managed to interrupt the regime of laissez-faire artistic-visual. In short, why was such a disruption possible in cultures so characteristically inclined to discontinuities and gaps, to episodes of eclecticism and volubility, like South American ones? Why, in the situation in question, did they suddenly but also lastingly become afflicted with such a desire for geometry?
Figures of progress
In this sense, a brief examination of the systemic set of works that Wave Vibration constitutes, as we have seen, a precursory example indicating the reiteration of values of symmetry, balance, equitability, constancy, clarity, rationality, transparency, etc. In practice, the opposite of what is known as the content and everyday aspect of the historical-social process in Brazil and other peripheral countries.
How can we not correlate such values and their visual manifestation (in the systemic set of works in question) with the premise (hopeful and, as it turned out, utopian!) of a balanced development, combined with the other values mentioned, all desirable? In this order of relations, what meaning should be attributed to the voids and linear or chromatic intervals pertinent to symmetrical or binary structures, recurrent in concrete works?
From an optimistic perspective, such voids do not indicate lack, but, in their alternation with graphic or chromatic opposites, they inform the idea of a development in progress. It can then be inferred that, in Wave Vibration As in other works, the diagram or scheme of a development that evolves in an orderly manner and in light of the classical ideal of symmetry is presented.
Undoubtedly, such an intention, expressed as a desire or subjective projection on the part of the author, denotes generosity. However, if examined from another angle than that of authorial intentionality, and rather from the point of view of its effect on the observer, the relationship of symmetry reveals itself to be equivalent to a binary functioning regime of perception, according to the constant dichotomy or duality between positive and negative, as opposite poles. Such a mode, characteristic of simple mechanisms, can also reveal the reification of forces or the dynamics of an imperative motive, incessantly replenished and independent of reception and the observer.
In this sense, as a constant and insurmountable regime, restricted to the recurrence of the oscillation ab, the quintessential content of the visual set in question represents the ordering of a structural determinism, such as, for example, that of the physical laws that govern the movement of a pendulum – which takes us directly to the exemplarity of Wave Vibration, our initial sample. Thus, instead of historical or social relations capable of change, what appears is a mechanical process seen as a natural law, that is, in no way as a historical and political process.
The synthesis of the two observations, both the one about the generosity of the author's intentionality and the other, made from the observer's point of view, when applied to the case of Wave Vibration, brings a dilemma or a contradictory result: both the scheme of a process, imbued with rational, fair and desirable qualities, and, on the other hand, the reference to a mechanical process that transcends the observer and imposes itself on him as determinism.
The perspective of objective form
Faced with such a contradiction, what should we do? Let us change our perspective and investigative mode. What does the objective point of view tell us? I think it allows us to overcome the contradiction of feelings and values aroused by Wave Vibration. In fact, from the point of view of objective form, we must assume that the programs of symmetrical or binary structures, recurrent in concrete art, aesthetically materialize the structural duality of an objective historical process. How and why do they do so? By precisely realizing, as specific variants of a materialist and objective form, the aesthetic form that – regardless of the author's intention – translates general (social and economic) rhythms of society.
In these terms, would it be a question of a general rhythm of society, governed by watertight polar positions, according to a dichotomy whose overcoming is not in sight, or of a duality constantly reestablished, according to current concrete diagrams? Finally, putting things in this way from the point of view of the objective form, what historical-social functioning and what general process are we dealing with? Or, to use Schwarz's terms: what practical-historical substance is implied or translated into symmetrical or binary structures?
From aesthetic reduction to practical-historical relations
In short, we must now, starting from the aesthetic form (based on an unsurpassed structural duality), intuit – taking the opposite path to that of “aesthetic formalization” – a corresponding practical-historical substance. In this sense, what can we find? Now, the historical period in focus presented a discursive paradigm – and, this time, explicitly referring to the general rhythm – that expressed, although in another domain, a dilemma comprising the same constants in question, namely: a dual or polarized structure, translated into a practical-historical process, which was cyclically replenished and whose overcoming was not in sight.
In short, it was an analytical theory about “underdevelopment”, as it was called, linked to the proposition of a certain planning paradigm that aimed to promote, through the expansion of industrialization, a certain development model capable of overcoming the chronic backwardness of the country's economy.
Such was the national developmentalist program at the time, advocated by the analysis of “underdevelopment”, combined with the theory of planned development, as proposed by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), then led by the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch (1901-1986), seconded by the Brazilian economist Celso Furtado (1920-2004).[xv]
The course of Celso Furtado's research, emblematic of the national-developmentalist theses then current, revealed what was, at that time, considered a general rhythm guided by duality; or, to use Roberto Schwarz's expression, which evidenced the dichotomous structure of a “practical-historical substance”. In other words, aspects of precisely this nature were presented at the time by the economic theory that sought to establish the specific structure of “underdevelopment”. This was seen by Celso Furtado, according to Francisco de Oliveira in The adventurous navigation: essays on Celso Furtado,[xvi] as a modern formation contemporary with the development of central economies. In this sense, the analysis of underdevelopment did not take this complex phenomenon as a stage in a linear chain, but rather as a contemporary formation and in reciprocal determination with the developed economies, to which it transferred capital.
In this diagnosis, the fundamental structure of underdevelopment was based on the duality or structural dichotomy between two highly unequal sectors of the national economy. They were the export sector, linked to the so-called “modern” international market, constituted by specialization in the production of primary goods for export, and, on the other hand, an economic sector, said to be “backward”, focused on “subsistence agriculture”, whose “own dynamics (were) inimical to what is happening in the ‘modern’, export sector”.[xvii]
Virtues and impasses of “dual-structuralism”
These ideas, whose initial development dates back to 1950, when Celso Furtado was already integrated into the research division of CEPAL, were practically contemporaneous with the emergence in Brazil of the abstract-geometric paradigm, in the wake, it should be remembered, of its occurrence in Argentina – which, by the way, also carried out, before Brazil, its cycle of so-called modernizing structural reforms.
In the aforementioned study, Francisco de Oliveira highlights several aspects of the novelty represented by the “dual-structuralist” diagnosis of Celso Furtado, with whom he worked at Sudene. Thus, this program, in addition to conceiving “underdevelopment” as reciprocal with the development of the central economies, also assumed a planned state intervention in favor of an urgent agrarian reform, in order to overcome the structural duality between the advanced and backward sectors of the Brazilian economy.
Despite the Keynesian affinity and sympathy for such aspects of Celso Furtado's thinking and actions as a public planner, Francisco de Oliveira's study does not fail to critically highlight the tone of developmentalist optimism or his class ideology, one might say, prevalent in a generalized manner in the period and also shared with other South American countries, engaged in similar programs of “import substitution” through accelerated industrialization.[xviii]
The dual-structuralist scheme, fueled by the optimistic tone of belief in progress according to the national-developmentalist program, had a structural blind spot, in Francisco de Oliveira's criticism consolidated against the business-military coup of 1964 and its economic developments, which also sought to be modernizing.
Thus, when critically reviewing in 1972[xx] the point of view of “dualistic reason”, underlying the industrializing reform program advocated by reformist thought in the decade prior to the 1964 coup, Francisco de Oliveira emphasized that “the Cepal-Furtado thesis of duality is distinguished from the general and historical observation of the 'uneven and combined development' of the Marxist tradition (of Lenin and Trotsky) precisely because for Celso Furtado and Cepal development is unequal but it is not combined. (Thus) The two sectors do not have articulated relations: the 'backward' sector is only an obstacle to the growth of the 'modern' sector, mainly because, on the one hand, it does not create an internal market and, on the other, it does not meet the requirements of food demand (coming from the modern sector)”.[xx]
In this way, the “delay of the 'delayed' (…) becomes” in the Cepalian-Furtadian argument, “in obstacle to the expansion of the 'modern'”, among other reasons, because it truncated the process of accumulation or capital formation.[xxx] Similarly, the rationalist interpretation of the pockets of poverty and backwardness ultimately converted them into points of irrationality in the system. Consequently, Celso Furtado proposed as a “remedy (…) against the obstacles of backwardness and the evils of structural duality, industrialize (…) to escape the vicious circle of underdevelopment (…)”.[xxiii]
In this way, and despite the innovative critical aspect already mentioned, of conceiving the underdevelopment as a modern and specific economic formation,[xxiii] the theory of underdevelopment, when converted into industrialist ideology, without further ado, “also […] masks the new class interests […] (posts) now as 'interests of the Nation'”, summarizes Francisco de Oliveira.[xxv]
The developmental blind spot
In effect, according to the unilateral and rational perspective prevalent in his work before 1964, Celso Furtado sought, “in the manner of the neoclassical (economists), to present an ‘economic’ theory of the economy”. In other words, unlike Marx, Oliveira points out, it was not a question of a political economy presented in materialist and dialectical terms, according to which the relations of force and domination underlying the relations of production are replaced, reproduced and recycled by them, in such a way as to incessantly reconstruct, in turn, general sociability in terms of inequality and domination.[xxiv]
In short, the silence in the face of the political issue,[xxv] manifested in the absence of a concrete analysis of the classes, constituted the blind spot and, substantially, the conservative limit of the theses of CEPAL and Celso Furtado, points out Francisco de Oliveira.[xxviii] In fact, it would only be in 1966, two years after the coup and already in exile, that Celso Furtado would recognize that “industrialization, in the concrete conditions of our continent, concentrates income instead of operating its best distribution”, as Francisco de Oliveira concludes, based on Celso Furtado's book, Underdevelopment and stagnation in Latin America (1966), and others that followed.[xxviii]
In turn, for the aesthetic analysis carried out, from the point of view of the objective form, it is important to note that the contemporary prestige of the national-developmentalist theses, as well as their blind spot, will have constituted, as contemporary historical formations, elements of the practical-historical substance correlated to the aesthetic-symbolic scheme of geometric abstraction, and will have equally constituted its unreflected and unexpressed elements. What further precisions will the molecular analysis of Wave Vibration can you bring it?
From the myth of planning to national illusionism
We deduce as to Wave Vibration and its systemic or programmatic peers that the generous ethical expectations, invested by the poetics of concrete art in its symmetrical and binary schemes, come into contradiction with the experience of the observer, subjected to an imperious mechanism that transcends him. Let us examine in more depth the implications related to such connections.
The manifesto RUPTURE, in the wake of the Paris Charter of Concrete Art, explicitly listed, in 1952, a series of dichotomies relating to artistic procedures, grouped around the opposition between the “old” and the “new”.[xxix] However, it was found that, on the margins of such polarities, a set of structural relations of the artistic and symbolic process remained ignored and substantially unchanged, despite the many innovations introduced by geometric poetics. Nothing new, by the way, compared to what was happening in white metropolitan constructivism.
In fact, if the parallel and maieutic analogies between the planning optimism of “dual-structuralism” and the planned renewal focused on poetic procedures of production and circulation, according to the proposal of concrete art, are valid, it is clear that the Gordian knot in both cases (the economic and the artistic) lies in the unilateralism of pure planning of action, which minimizes the importance of social and class relations and political practices. Thus, the basic and essential assumptions of power relations, naively assumed to be essentially rational and extra-political, from the perspective of white constructivism, are kept untouched, when not simply ignored by it.
Ultimately, the symbolic paradigm of geometric abstraction, not limited to the realm of aesthetics but rooted in productive domains such as manufacturing design, architecture and urban planning (see the case of Brasília), consisted, despite good intentions, in a program of “national illusionism”. As such, it was subordinated to the mythology of progress and, on the political level, to the ideology of conciliation or the mere denial of class conflicts.
Trojan Horse
That said, a fissure has emerged in the citadel of geometric abstraction; nevertheless, this is a specific fact and is still occurring at the time of Wave Vibration, it is worth noting and discussing it, especially since it also comes from Sacilotto's work. It was, after all, the initial symptom of what would later become a long chain of historically decisive developments.
The crack in question arose under the traces of a distinct intuition, in a piece also by Sacilotto, Concretion 5629 (1956, enamel on aluminum, 60 x 80 x 0,4 cm, São Paulo, Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo). Still in an embryonic state, upon emerging, the change manifested itself in the form of vertigo. The work involved, in new terms, the activation of the observer's spontaneity.
Even with limited impact, in the case of sensory phenomena, the work involved in new terms the activation of the observer's spontaneity.[xxx] Mário Pedrosa promptly noticed the novelty and discussed it in the article “Paulistas e Cariocas” (Rio de Janeiro, Newspapers in Brazil, 19.02.1957). In it, he highlighted, in relation to Concretion 5629, the virtual power of the construction, based on black and white triangles, which provoked “perceptive ambivalence” and made “the captivating game of visuality continue to alternate indefinitely”.[xxxii]
The new dynamic that Mário Pedrosa highlighted there, in contrast to the previous works of concrete art that maintained the centrality of the vanishing point, involved precisely the lively, open and indefinite experience of the act of observation. In effect, Mário Pedrosa's critical acumen, in detecting the novelty of the phenomenon within concrete art, showed itself – much more than just sensorially acute – to have a great historical sense. Seen from today, it stands out even more as strategically decisive.
It is precisely in this gap and from its central point – the revitalization of the activity of observation – that a substantial part of the reasons that led to the establishment of the Neoconcrete platform would be based, two years after Sacilotto's innovative experience. From there, too, from the spontaneous activity of the observer, the concept of “participation” would mature, central not only to Neoconcrete art, but also in the process that led to its critical overcoming after the coup d'état in 1964.
In fact, the strategy of participation, through important developments in the following years, would break down the pure walls of abstraction and award, in terms of neoconcrete art, the forum of the observer's subjectivity to geometric abstraction. Even though initially, posed mainly in terms of phenomenology, such incorporation would be processed in abstract and impersonal terms, the notion of participation (endowed with a latent political charge, as will be seen later) would function as a Trojan Horse, transported within the walls of white constructivism.
From its core, the critical reflexive process would develop that would give objective forms to the analysis of classes and racial segregation, anti-imperialism, decolonization and psychic “de-conditioning”. Brazilian geometric abstraction, as a hitherto hegemonic tendency, would not resist, as is known, such contributions, and, despite formalist resistance, would come to be overcome and subsumed in the presentation, in 1967, of a new synthesis of realism: New Brazilian Objectivity (Rio de Janeiro, Museum of Modern Art, 6 – 30.04.1967).[xxxi]
*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 (Haymarket/ HMBS).
To read the first article in this series click on https://aterraeredonda.com.br/vibracao-ondular/
Notes
[I] See T. VAN DOESBURG, “Concrete Art”, apoud A. AMARAL (org.), Construction Project…, op. cit., p. 42.
[ii] See A. AMARAL (org.), Construction Project…, op. cit.
[iii] See Ronaldo BRITO, Neoconcretism: Vertex and Rupture of the Brazilian Constructive Project. The book, written between May and November 1975, was first published only in 1985 (Rio de Janeiro, Temas e Debates 4 collection, Funarte/National Institute of Visual Arts). However, it circulated through many hands from 1975 onwards in the arts circles of the Rio-São Paulo axis and had a decisive influence on the conception of the 1977 retrospective at the Pinacoteca. It was republished later: Ronaldo BRITO, Neoconcretism: Vertex and Rupture of the Brazilian Constructive Project, New York, 1999.
[iv] For the differences between original and “Western” constructivism, see Benjamin BUCHLOH, “Cold War Constructivism”, in Serge GUILBAUT (ed.), Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris and Montreal 1945-1964, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992, pp. 85-112.
[v] Cf. Vladimir Maiakovski, Lef, n. 1, 1923, apoud Francois ALBERA, Eisenstein et le Construtivisme Russe/ Stuttgart, Dramaturgie de la Forme, Lausanne, collection Histoire et Théorie du Cinema/ ed. L'Age d'Homme, p. 118; Eisenstein and Russian Constructivism / The Dramaturgy of Form in “Stuttgart” (1929), preface by LR Martins, trans. Eloísa A. Ribeiro, São Paulo, Cinema, theater and modernity collection/ Cosac & Naify, p. 165.
[vi] See LR MARTINS, “The debate between constructivism and productivism, according to Nikolay Tarabukin”, Ars, n. 2, S. Paulo, PPGAV-ECA-USP, 2003, pp. 57-71; republished in two parts as “Note on Russian Constructivism”, in The Earth is Round, 19/11/2022, available at https://aterraeredonda.com.br/nota-sobre-o-construtivismo-russo/>, and “Note on Russian Constructivism-II”, in The Earth is Round, 25.12.2022, available at https://aterraeredonda.com.br/nota-sobre-o-construtivismo-russo-ii/.
[vii] On the notion of perestroika byta, see Anatole KOPP, When Modern Was Not a Style but a Cause, trans. by Edi G. de Oliveira, São Paulo, Nobel/ Edusp, 1990, pp. 76-86. See also F. ALBERA, Eisenstein and the…, op. cit., pp. 173-5; Eisenstein and…, op. cit., pp. 237-9.
[viii] For red constructivist/productivist writer Nikolay Tarabukin's critique of the Bauhaus artist-technician paradigm, indifferent to the question of the social division of labor, see note 29.
[ix] For a critique of the Weberian conception, see Cornelius Castoriadis, “Individu, société, rationalité, histoire”, in idem, Le Monde Morcelé/ Les Carrefous du Labyrinthe, vol. 3, Paris, Essais/Seuil, 1990, pp. 47-86.
[X] Cf. Mario PEDROSA, “Paulistas and Cariocas” (Rio de Janeiro, Newspapers in Brazil, 19.02.1957), in Academics and Moderns: Selected Texts III, org. Otília Beatriz Fiori Arantes, São Paulo, Edusp, 1998, p. 256. Sacilotto entered the profession of draftsman in the 1940s, after completing a technical course in project drawing at the Instituto Profissional Masculino do Brás, where he graduated as a lettering draftsman in 1943. Between the 1940s and 1960s, Sacilotto worked as a draftsman at the Hollerith Machinery Industry, at the architectural offices of Jacob Ruchti and Villanova Artigas, among others, and also at the Fichet-Aumont factory, where he even came to design window frames for buildings in Brasília (I owe this last information to Aracy Amaral). About Cordeiro, see AM BELLUZZO, op. cit., pp. 15-35; AM BELLUZZO, “Rupture and Concrete Art”, in A. AMARAL (org.), Constructive Art…, op. cit., pp. 116-20; on Sacilotto, see AM BELLUZZO, “Ruptura…”, op. cit., pp. 122-8; see also Enock SACRAMENTO, Sacilotto, New York, Orbitall, 2001.
[xi] About Gestalt, see, among period materials, F. GULLAR, “Neoconcrete art: a Brazilian contribution”, in A. AMARAL (org.), Construction Project…, op. cit., p. 116; A. MAVIGNIER, “Testimonial” in A. AMARAL (org.), Construction Project…, op. cit., p. 177; M. PEDROSA, On the Affective Nature of Form in the Work of Art, in idem, Form and Aesthetic Perception: Selected Texts II, org. Otília BF Arantes, São Paulo, Edusp, 1996, pp.105-230. Among historical studies, see A. AMARAL, “Emergence of geometric abstraction in Brazil”, in idem, Constructive Art…, op. cit., p. 58; AM BELLUZZO, “Rupture…”, op. cit., pp. 108, 114, 122; idem, Waldemar…, op. cit., p. 130; Otília Beatriz Fiori ARANTES, “A Brazilian chapter on the theory of abstraction”, in idem, Mario Pedrosa: Critical Itinerary, op. cit., pp. 51-106.
[xii] A testimony by the concrete poet Augusto de Campos (1931) confirms the free passage of good form from one universe of language to another: “I was greatly influenced by painters […] once we began to work with less syntactic or even asyntactic structures, I often came across the problem of arranging these words on the page, of creating, let’s say, reading paths […], good form, pregnant form, many things came through the painters’ projects […]”. Cf. A. de CAMPOS, “Depoimento de Augusto de Campos ao autor e a Agda Carvalho”, 1992, in E. SACRAMENTO, on. cit., P. 67.
[xiii] On the notion of “materialist form”, see Antonio CANDIDO, “Dialética da Malandragem”, inThe Discourse and the City, Rio de Janeiro, Ouro sobre Azul, 2004, pp. 28 and 38; for Schwarz's comments on the subject, inseparable from the notion of objective way for the latter, see Roberto Schwarz, “Assumptions, if I am not mistaken, of the Dialectic of Malandragem”, in What time is it?, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1989, pp. 129-55, especially p. 142; see also, idem, “National adequacy and critical originality”, in idem, Brazilian Sequences: Essays, New York, New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 24-45, especially pp. 28, 35-6 and 41.
[xiv] Cf. idem, “Adequacy…”, op. cit., p. 35.
[xv] Celso Furtado, author of Economic Formation of Brazil (1958), after joining CEPAL from 1949 to 1957 as director of the development research division, he held several public positions in Brazil in the area of planning, in the governments of Juscelino Kubitschek (1955-60) – for whom he conceived and directed the Superintendence for the Development of the Northeast (Sudene) – and João Goulart (1961-64), in which he served as Minister of Planning. On his comprehensive interpretation of Brazilian economic history, see C. FURTADO, Economic Formation of Brazil, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2007. Furtado also produced other studies on Brazil in the 1950s: Brazilian economy (1954); A Dependent Economy (1956); Brazilian Economy Perspectives (1958); An Economic Development Policy for the Northeast (1959). For Furtado’s account of his research at CEPAL, see idem, “A Fantasia Organizada”, in idem, Autobiographical Work by Celso Furtado, Rosa Freire d'Aguiar edition, volume I, Rio de Janeiro, Paz e Terra, 1997, pp. 87-359; for his experiences as head of Sudene and in other state positions, in the Kubitschek and Goulart governments, see idem, “A Fantasia Desfeita”, in idem, Autobiographical Work…, op. cit., volume II, pp. 27-306.
[xvi] Francisco de OLIVEIRA, Venturosa Navigation: Essays on Celso Furtado, Sao Paulo, Boitempo, 2003.
[xvii] See Idem, pp. 12-3.
[xviii] For Furtado's intellectual optimism in the 1950s, see below. The military coup and exile led him to a major revision of his thinking. See Francisco de OLIVEIRA, The Venturous Navigation, op. cit., pp. 11-38.
[xx] The essay “The Brazilian Economy: Critique of Dualist Reason” was first published in Cebrap Studies, n. 2, São Paulo, Brazilian Center for Planning Analysis, 1972, republished as F. de OLIVEIRA and Francisco SÁ Jr., Cebrap Selections 1/ Questioning the Brazilian Economy, São Paulo, Cebrab/ Brasiliense, 1975-6, and transformed into a book: F. de OLIVEIRA, The Brazilian Economy: Critique of Dualistic Reason, São Paulo, Cebrab/ Vozes, 1981. For a recent reissue, see idem, Criticism of…, op. cit.
[xx] Oliveira's emphasis. Cf. F. de OLIVEIRA, A Navigation…, op. cit., p. 13.
[xxx] Oliveira's highlights. See Idem, P. 13.
[xxiii] For Furtado, industrialization would solve the problem posed in the front external through the Gordian knot of foreign trade – exclusively of primary goods whose prices continually deteriorate and configure unequal or unbalanced exchanges. At the same time, in front internally, important economic and social changes would be promoted: the implementation of an urgent agrarian reform program and, consequently, the creation of an internal market, the increase in the food supply, etc. The sum of these factors would reinforce the development of industrialization as a sustained process. See Idem, pp. 14-5.
[xxiii] View Idem, pp. 109-10.
[xxv] Oliveira's emphasis. Cf. Idem, P. 15.
[xxiv] When discussing Furtado's ideas in The Brazilian Pre-Revolution (1962), Oliveira states: “Furtado tries to demonstrate that, in relation to the level reached by the Brazilian economic, social and political process, any revolution will mean a setback”. Cf. Idem, p. 24; see also pp. 25-7.
[xxv] “[…] Strictly speaking, politics in the theory of underdevelopment is an epiphenomenon.” Cf. Idem, P. 18.
[xxviii] “[…] by not having incorporated Marx’s theorization on the internationalization of capital [Furtado] would only realize some time later that the industrialization advocated was carried out in most Latin American countries through associations with foreign capital […]”, which certainly does not lead to “any ‘antagonistic contradiction’ between countries producing raw materials and countries producing manufactured goods. In modern capitalism, the international division of labor is structured much less by a ‘division between nations’ than by an ‘internal division of labor’”. dual-structuralism will therefore fail, at the end of its developments, in the objective of “understanding the real articulations between the two sectors (the 'backward' and the 'modern') and the dialectical form of this coexistence.” Cf. Idem, P. 17.
[xxviii] Oliveira's emphasis. Cf. Idem, P. 18.
[xxix] See L. CHARROUX et al., “Manifesto… “, on. cit., P. 69.
[xxx] Sacilotto's discovery can also be understood as a demonstration of the vigor and consistency achieved in Brazil by the modern visual system, at that point already in an accelerated process of agglutination. Thus, Sacilotto's artifice of perceptive provocation, if it did not precede, ran, at the very least, on an independent track in relation to the characteristic operations of the tendency of "optical art”, as it would become internationally known. In fact, a year earlier, in 1955, Victor Vasarely (1906-1997) had published a manifesto (Yellow Manifest, Paris, Galerie Denise René, 1955) raising questions that would later give rise to such a name – but only after the exhibition that would take place ten years later, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: The Responsive Eye (New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 23.02 – 25.04.1965), cf. Vasarely Foundation: http://www.fondationvasarely.fr/. Accessed on 06.03.2009/XNUMX/XNUMX.
[xxxii] Cf. M. PEDROSA, “Paulistas and Cariocas”, in idem, Academics and Moderns: Selected Texts III/ Mário Pedrosa, Otilia Arantes (org.), New York, Edusp, 1998, p. 254.
[xxxi] I appreciate Regina Araki's review.
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