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| Opening remarks for Day 1: The ‘New’
History of the Avant-Garde’s Last Stand Irene Small |
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| Avant-gardism is dead. All that’s left is to bury it. -- Ferreira Gullar[1] On March 22 1959, on the occasion of the First Exhibition of Neoconcrete Art in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian poet and critic Ferreira Gullar published the “Manifesto Neoconcreto” in the pages of the Suplemento Dominical of the Jornal do Brasil. In the narrow sense, Gullar’s manifesto was a polemic against Brazilian Concretism, a set of practices and theoretical positions developed in Rio and São Paulo in the mid-1950s. On a broader level, the document was a manifesto about interpretation, about the function and generative possibility of historical re-evaluation for the creative process of artistic production. Like Concretism, Neoconcretism situated itself in relation to the non-objective art of the pre-war European avant-garde. Neoconcretism, however, posed a reinterpretation of these movements for the purposes of a newly historicized “now.” The same week as the publication of the “Manifesto Neoconcreto,” Gullar began a new series of articles in the art page of the Suplemento Dominical under the title “Etapas da arte contemporânea,” or “Stages of Contemporary Art”. This series, which would continue in weekly installments until October 1960, was intended to provide what Gullar called a new “orientation,” a “general vision of contemporary art.”[2] As he wrote, “Starting today, we will attempt a retrospective of the most important innovative movements, since Cubism… in the field of visual arts. We do not intend… an exhaustive survey, but a…modest introduction which will facilitate comprehension of what is being done today in the world, and in particular in Brazil. This endeavor,” he continued, “can also be seen as a necessity dictated by the attitude that we assume in the face of Concrete art – and its roots – with the Manifesto Neoconcreto.”[3] In the absence of any Portuguese-language textbook of modern art, the “Etapas” had a distinct pedagogical function. As Gullar noted when the articles were first gathered together as a book in 1985, however, the “Etapas” were not intended as a history of modern art, but a “revision” – a “new reading” of the avant-garde.[4] Movements like Surrealism and Expressionism were therefore excluded in favor of the inexorable march of a particular avant-garde, an avant-garde starting with Cubism and Futurism and continuing with Russian Movements, Neoplasticism, Concrete and finally Neoconcrete Art. Each chapter of this story was told in a series of episodes that unfolded week by week within the newspaper pages, followed by a “Tentativa de compreensão”, or “Attempt at Comprehension”, in which Gullar summarized and synthesized each movement’s general trends. This “Tentativa” also functioned as a vehicle of historiography in which theoretical arguments about a given movement could be evaluated according to their relevance for Neoconcrete art. Gullar’s “new” history of the avant-garde, thus, was one of explicit linear development, its destination, rather than its starting point, determining its path.[5] In Gullar’s “new” history of the avant-garde, the arrival at the continuous present is a logical result of decisions taken at the forks of various aesthetic roads, decisions that forged a singular legacy of radical, autonomous 20th century art inherited and ultimately advanced by Brazilian Neoconcretism.[6] The vision of art that emerges from the “Etapas,” is therefore a process of interpretation in which fundamental concepts contained within works of art as potential are only realized through a subsequent process of argumentation, critique, and revision. There is a growing sense of impatience to reach the story’s end, the moment when historical destiny dissolves into the present, when Neoconcretism, a historical movement having itself been just declared, is directed towards its future rather than its past. Indeed, it is only this last episode of Gullar’s story that is not capped with a “Tentativa de compreensão.” “Neoconcrete art still doesn’t have history,” he wrote, “as it is just being born.”[7] In her landmark 2004 exhibition Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, Mari-Carmen Ramírez has argued that Latin American artists have approached the avant-garde as a series of problems to be taken up, a strategy with clear affinities to the position elaborated in Gullar’s “Etapas”. In Ramírez’s account, the teleological character of Gullar’s story is replaced with the idea of the “constellation,” a rhetorical figure adopted from Theodor Adorno which aims to dispense with the linear, positivist assumptions that define the very notion of the avant-garde.[8] Such a figure offers an elegant solution to reductive models of delay, derivation, and copy that have plagued the discourse of Latin American art since the formation of the national academies in the 19th century. In favor of a center-to-periphery model, it suggests relations that stretch in multiple directions across time and space. In these introductory remarks, however, I want to underscore the historical backdrop against which Gullar’s ideas about history took form, one in which new-ness, last-ness, and historical inevitability are loaded, but necessary, terms. This historical backdrop involved not simply a perceived inheritance of the European avant-garde, but the politics of developmentalism and dictatorship that shaped Brazil in the years leading up to and following Gullar’s “Etapas” of 1959-1960. I want to call particular attention to the peculiar resonance between the “Etapas” and a think tank called ISEB, the Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros, or Superior Institute of Brazilian Studies, whose explicit aim was the elaboration of an “ideology for development” suitable to Brazil.[9] ISEB’s integrants believed that development was inevitable. They differed, however, on how this development was to be achieved, some calling for deregulated participation in the global economy, others advocating an “autonomous” process of national industrialization with foreign influence closely controlled by the state.[10] As part of these discussions, ISEB spearheaded a number of research and pedagogical initiatives including graduate-level history classes offered to the public. From 1954 to 1957, these history classes were given in the auditorium of the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio, the same building out of which the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro had operated since the early 1950s and the First Exhibition of Neoconcrete Art shown in 1959. These classes were the basis for a series of textbooks written by ISEB-affiliated authors in the early 1960s called História Nova do Brasil, or the New History of Brazil.[11] These textbooks offered a revisionist, Marxist-oriented narrative counter to official historiography, a “new” history upon which the logic for an “autonomous” model of Brazilian development could be based. The first five of these textbooks were published in March 1964, less than a month before the coup that launched Brazil into a military dictatorship for more than 20 years. Within days of the coup, ISEB offices were invaded and manuscripts for the remaining series confiscated. By 1965, many of the authors were imprisoned or forced into exile and the New History banned. In 1965, police forces also invaded Ferreira Gullar’s house, confiscating, among other material, the collected articles of the “Etapas de arte contemporânea” gathered in a folder marked “From Cubism to Neoconcrete Art.”[12] This bizarre seizure, as Gullar would later quip, may have had to do with a confusion between “Cubism” and “Cuba,” the polícia militar not always being particularly bright. For our purposes, however, it illuminates a peculiar moment in which “new” histories of art and development crossed paths. By 1961, the Neoconcrete movement had already begun to dissipate. It was dealt a final blow when the Suplemento Dominical stopped publication the same year. Gullar, Neoconcretism’s mouthpiece, soon joined the leadership of the CPC, Centro de Cultura Popular, or Center for Popular Culture, a leftist cultural organization which sought to bring culture “to the people” much in line with ideology of development promoted by ISEB. In this capacity, Gullar’s ideas about art underwent radical revision, culminating in the publication of “Cultura Posta em Questão”, or “Culture in Question,” in 1964 just before the military coup. This essay was intended as an explicit, polemical rupture with the artistic vanguard and a theoretical justification of the use of art in the ideological struggle. As he wrote, “The Brazilian intellectual…is living at an instant of option…to participate or not in the struggle for the economic liberation of the country.”[13] Gullar’s condemnation of non-engaged art in “Culture in Question” came with a new alignment between art, nationalism and the radical left. No longer was radical Brazilian art understood as the culmination of a historical tradition initiated by the European avant-garde. Instead, it was the product of autonomous national production fiercely resistant to external influence. Gullar’s renouncement of the avant-garde thus hinged on a reversal of the historical vectors. History no longer arrived at Brazil, it was to be generated from Brazil through a recasting of the category of “the new.”[14] “The new,” aligned during the time of the “Etapas” exclusively with formal innovation, now came to describe that political, social and economic order that would bring about a newly liberated Brazil. In 1969, Gullar elaborated and refined his arguments in an essay titled “Vanguard and Underdevelopment” introduced with a preface by Nélson Werneck Sodré, journalist, teacher, integrant of ISEB and leading author of the New History of Brazil. In this essay, Gullar questioned the very applicability of the avant-garde to a place like Brazil.[15] As Sodré wrote in his preface, “Can there be universality in vanguardism? Is it the same everywhere, in developed and underdeveloped countries?”[16] For the first time in his writings on the subject, Gullar examined the inception of the avant-garde as a historical phenomenon in Europe, a phenomenon dependent on the emergence and consolidation of the bourgeois in the wake of the French Revolution. In an account indebted to Lukács, Gullar noted that the avant-garde’s antagonistic relationship to bourgeois society was a result of its marginalization from the very class it helped to install, its claim for aesthetic freedom and formal autonomy an echo of the demands for political liberty that fueled the struggle against aristocratic rule. This historical analysis, of course, begs a historical question. If the European avant-garde was historically determined by the particularities of its class formation, how could its structure be translated to the economic realities of Brazil, a country whose ruling class was built on slave labor and which in the 1960s was still in the grips of this pre-industrial past? How could a vanguard art shock the bourgeois when it was “imported” as the cultural capital of this same bourgeois? How could a claim for political freedom transform into one for formal autonomy within a country that still struggled against neocolonial rule? How indeed, to posit a vanguard in underdevelopment within its own terms? If we follow the logic of “Vanguard and Underdevelopment”, Gullar’s earlier “Stages of Contemporary Art” is a case for the avant-garde’s last stand. For Gullar, the historical framework of underdevelopment rendered the very notion of the avant-garde inadmissible. The historic inevitability the critic had previously ascribed to the march of advanced art from Cubism to Neoconcretism was now a function of an economic order, the march of an oppressed society towards liberation, its future exhilaratingly close but just out of reach. Having finally “arrived” in Brazil with Neoconcretism in 1959, the avant-garde became by 1969, a historical impossibility, a smoke-screen for the political work at hand. Gullar’s analysis is certainly debatable, and it is, as I have tried to show, tightly subject to its own historical stage. As a case study, however, it reveals the stakes of history – of telling history, interpreting history, of making history a product of art. “Vanguard and Underdevelopment” ends with a disavowal of a Brazilian, or indeed, third-world, avant-garde. Instead, Gullar offers up the notion of the “open work”, a work realized by the viewer’s interpretation and determined by the viewer’s hand.[17] Poised between a dialectics of form and one of history, the open work, in Gullar’s formulation, functions as a formal model of history’s operations. It does not substitute for history, but acts as a figure of its hermeneutic demands. This symposium is based, in part, on this assumption – that art makes history at the moment of its production and at the moment of its reception, however distant that reception might be. Our aim was to gather young scholars whose work revisits the narratives and models we have used to frame Latin American art and its engagement with something we might call “the avant-garde.” This comes at a moment that Latin American modern art is enjoying increased exposure as a result of major exhibitions, themselves the result of scholarly work years in the making. We would here underscore that the history of Latin American art is now, as it was for Gullar, in a process of being made. Before we start, we’d like to thank our sponsors for the event, the Department of the History of Art at Yale, the Art History Department at CUNY, and PART, the CUNY graduate art history journal. We also want to thank our keynote speaker and respondents for agreeing to be a part of this conference; Olivier Debroise and Jesse Lerner, who have generously allowed us to screen their films; and of course our participants, who are all doing extremely exciting work within the field. Finally, I’d like to thank my co-organizer, Daniel Quiles, who has been an incredible interlocutor throughout.
Endnotes [1] Ferreira Gullar, 1997. Cultura posta em questão;
Vanguarda e subdesenvolvimento: ensaios sobre arte. Rio de
Janeiro: José Olympo Editora, 2002, p. 10. [O vanguardismo
é uma coisa morta; só falta enterrar.] All translations
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