Constructing an Avant-garde - 9780262019262

Brazilian avant-garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental butproductive out-of-jointness. They were modernist but distant from modernism. Europeans and NorthAmericans may feel a similar displacement when viewing Brazilian avant-garde art; the unexpectedfamiliarity of the works serves to make them unfamiliar. In Constructing anAvant-Garde, Sérgio Martins seizes on this uncanny obliqueness and uses it as the basisfor a reconfigured account of the history of Brazil's avant-garde. His discussion covers not onlywidely renowned artists and groups -- including Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, andneoconcretism -- but also important artists and critics who are less well known outside Brazil,including Mário Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Amílcar de Castro, Luís Sacilotto, Antonio Dias, andRubens Gerchman.

Martins argues that artists of Brazil's postwar avant-gardeupdated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American arthistorical narratives. He describes defining episodes in Brazil's postwar avant-garde, discussingcrucial critical texts, including Gullar's "Theory of the Non-Object," a phenomenologicalaccount of neoconcrete artworks; Oiticica, constructivity, and Mondrian; portraiture,self-portraiture, and identity; the nonvisual turn and missed encounters with conceptualism; andmonochrome, manifestos, and engagement.

The Brazilian avant-garde's hijacking ofmodernism, Martins shows, gained further complexity as artists began to face their internationalminimalist and conceptualist contemporaries in the 1960s and 1970s. Reconfiguring not only arthistory but their own history, Brazilian avant-gardists were able to face contemporary challengesfrom a unique -- and oblique -- standpoint.