Page 105 - ARTE!Brasileiros #43

Chile, Mexico and Peru for the idea of determining a room for exhibitions of Latin EXHIBITION SÃO PAULO | PAGES 36 TO 38
Understand that the museum is a bridge, open collaborative agreements with DIAS, GERCHMAN AND BARROS:
American historical women, to create studies of gender, geopolitics and environment.
embassies and biennials. A RESCUE OF FIGURATION
A!B: In your opinion, what is the key moment of your participation, or the moment THE THREE ARTISTS THAT WAS ON AN EXHIBITION AT SESC PINHEIROS
that allows you to say, well... “now I can leave”?
This moment is Verboamérica, the new presentation of the permanent collection MADE USE OF EVERYDAY IMAGES AS A WAY OF EXPRESSION AND
that, Andrea Giunta and I do for the 15th year of the museum. A GROWING APPROPRIATION OF THE GRAPHIC LANGUAGE
Verboamérica was the sedimentation, the systematization of the work we had been
doing. The work shifted and was seen and appeared in the modules of exhibition BY MARIA HIRSZMAN
bodies, affections and emancipation and on feminism, in room three. Or with Ximena IN ART HISTORY, transition periods are always somewhat neglected. In an
Garrido-Lecca that brings to the fore the extraction of minerals, in a module that effort to present perfect syntheses of the dominant movements in a given period,
talks about maps, geopolitics and extraction. A module that speaks of multitude, researchers forget to illuminate gray areas, hybrid processes, jumping from
work and endurance. That is why Alexander Apóstol appears with the questions of certainties to certainties. Fortunately, from time to time, some efforts are made
the workers. Or the Queer questions, so we understand why we made General Idea. to understand the transient moments, as can be seen in the exhibition Between
That is to say, to understand that Verboamérica, came to understand that America Construction and Appropriation - Antonio Dias, Geraldo de Barros and Rubens
Latina is not the object of study but the subject. It is the subject that studies the Gerchman in the 60s, which was on display at Sesc Pinheiros until June 3rd.
object itself. It means that we can see ourselves from within ourselves. Understand It is not a reminiscent exhibition nor the conjunction of three mini-retrospectives.
the nomenclatures no longer Europeanist or Anglo-Saxon. Decolonize the museum. Constructed with vagueness and attention, the show proposes a complex plot
Where the postcolonial history is narrated, where colonial history and traditional between the work of the three artists and the artistic and cultural scene of
modernity are assumed, but where “margins” are also studied. Everything you do Brazil in the 1960s. At the same time that each of the contemplated poetics are
not want to see. Negritude, women, the favela and the indigenous people. unique, they are also strongly revealing of the deep tensions that the country was
We have managed to create a link between curatorship, exhibitions, acquisitions and experiencing at that time, both in cultural and political terms, as well as in relation
how to work with education. The catalog begins with a glossary of terms, which link to the transition process between the predominant type of art in the previous
to the collection. The public can access and make suggestions. decade (constructivism) and the gestation of a kind of artistic expression more
It is very beautiful to see now that I am leaving something that makes sense as a linked to pop art, a movement that originated in England in the 1950s and which,
whole and, fundamentally, for those who work in the museum. from the following decade, spread throughout the world under American primacy.
A!B: What happens from your exit? As the visitor is remembered in a careful timeline assembled from texts and period
From my departure, everything that has been implemented remains. The public images that embraces the exhibition, listing several important events between the
programs, the board. The president asked the curatorial committee to continue years 1960 and 1968, it is a time marked by violent cultural transformations, by an
the project. What can change is the content. I do not know what can happen in the influence growing mass culture, for the struggle for individual freedoms throughout
future, I have a kind of vision. There may come another artistic director whose the world, at the same time as violence and repression internally created a boiling
interest is different in certain themes. What interests me is having been able to atmosphere.
implement a working methodology. And this would be so good to stay. Whether it will Explaining such an environment makes it easier to understand the moment of
be maintained or not will depend on the decisions of the presidency and the board. transition experienced by the three contemplated artists. If the rapprochement
But the pedagogical and educational idea, transversal, research, cataloging, would be between the productions of Antonio Dias, Geraldo de Barros and Rubens Gerchman
very important to prevail. Many things remain to be done, and the ideal would be to is not evident, to think them inserted in the wider cultural context makes the
expand this quest. Have a “look to the future”. It is, yes, to continue the cataloging, dialogue between them more explicit and makes their particular readings richer.
the expansion of spaces to work and to exhibit. The collection has more than 700 Even coming from different generations and regions of the country, in the 1960s
works and we can only expose 180. But we leave a pre-proposal of what is needed. the three presented a redemption of figuration, the use of everyday images as
a form of expression and a growing appropriation of graphic language (which
A! B: Augustin, why are you leaving? all explore in parallel to plastic poetry), leaving the search for geometric-
My way out is joint. At my coming, there was an agreement where I would be between constructive rigor, hegemonic in the previous decade. “There seems to have been
three and five years old. In fact, there are personal questions. My companion and I an exhaustion of constructive poetics tuned with the national-developmental
are from Spain, we are a long time away from the family. But it is also necessary to project,” explains curator João Bandeira. The conception of the exhibition, which
understand that from a certain point of time there are small changes that I would purposely extends the reflection beyond the field of visual arts, emphasizes the
like to make and that the institution does not necessarily have the conditions to steps taken by them towards a more expressionist type of matrix representation,
follow, either for economic or ideological reasons. In this sense, with all that we in which the deformation of the human figure assumes an increasing importance.
have already done, it seems important to me to be clear that it is better to leave It is curious to note throughout the exhibition - purposely idealized as a sort of labyrinth
at the right time. It is very healthy to put a limit and close a story that was and is in which one poetic leads to the other - the nexus between particular research and
very good at the right time. general restlessness. According to Bandeira, in the period between the last neoconcret
exhibition (1961) and the anthological exhibition New Brazilian Objectivity (1967),
A!B: What do you intend to do now? which counts with the participation of the three artists contemplated, a growing
First I spend some time in Spain, and I want to spend some time managing projects awareness that what had been done in the 1950s did not would apply more to the
as an independent curator. I will settle in Madrid and I will travel to Buenos Aires, aesthetic interests of the moment.
Chile, Quito, Lima and Torino. From the veteran Geraldo de Barros (1923-1998), the exhibition brings a group of
works almost unpublished, in which there is an evident experimentation of new ways.
A!B: Would you like to do a Biennial? Do you believe there are exhausted models? The constructive forms of the 1950s give way to figurative compositions, such as urban
I am a person more institutionally linked to the Museum than to the Biennial. I am a flagrante. The serial character, strong mark in the work of Barros, is indisputable.
member of the board of the Istanbul Biennial. In fact, it is interesting for a curator All the paintings have the same size, were made on top of graphic material (giving
to put into practice other formats. I’ve already done the Biennal of Nicaragua. But the impression here and there the advertising grid) and using the colors yellow
I’m more interested in giving myself the time to find another institution. I have the and black. “Between one tendency and another, he got both,” jokes the healer.
ability to manage and to achieve coherence between the different challenges that Although a certain elegance deriving from the formal sensibility of Brazilian
are built in the long term. In this sense, the Biennials are like freaks and do not constructivism is more evident in Barros’ works, Bandeira makes it a point to emphasize
necessarily allow to leave a legacy. Still, it is necessary to reformulate the concept how the geometric pattern and the application of formal elements organizing the
of Biennial. What really is expected of them. space of plastic representation are also intensely present in the works of Antonio Dias
Just as the nineteenth-century museum is exhausted in its formulation and we have (1944) and Rubens Gerchman (1942). In this period, Dias’s production focuses on the
to go after public programs and permanent activations, go after the exhibition is a human body, which is rebuilt in pieces, rebuilt in three-dimensional shapes that leap
trigger beyond the artistic act, the biennials are trying to try other formats, calling from the canvases - in a mixture of eroticism, eschatology and violence - and which at
artists as curators, commissioners, that a healer calls another healer, but this has times makes direct allusions to brutality lived in the period of dictatorship, for example
already been done at various other times. We must think about the concept and in Carrasco, work of 1966 in which the legs of a hanged man are seen in the corner.
new models more immersive. Rubens Gerchman is perhaps the most directly associated with pop art in the trio, for his