CONCEPTUAL ART AND THE BAHIA OF TRADITIONS Almandrade Brazil’s history of art narrates the events that happen at the big centres. In fact, with few exceptions, art always depended on those cultural centres for information and promotion. In a country like Brazil, with a vast territorial extension and a contradictory cultural diversity, it is difficult to have sufficiently accurate information and a critical reading of what is going on in all of its regions. What was common was a distanced outlook, managing to only notice the visually regional and exotic repertoire. In the cultural scenario of the city of Salvador, the incipient contemporary art scene of the 1970s went pretty much unnoticed, like a joke. From that decade onwards, with “conceptual art”, the work of contemporary visual artists started to encompass the mental and reflexive order, articulated through a wide array of different media for artistic expression. The audience stopped being a passive observer, and was forced to reflect on the artwork, its interpretation no longer being a straightforward one. Bahia, lagging behind these changes, was hostile, in a very provincial way, to any artistic manifestation that didn’t fit into the well-behaved established idioms of the “Fine Arts”. In the manifest “Art-Bahia-Stagnation”, published in A Tarde newspaper on 12th February 1979, we attempted to register this lag: “In order for a critical avant-garde to exist, adequate artistic institutions, galleries, well equipped art schools and a market must exist in order to allow the production, circulation and consumption of new information that will help widen the repertoire of artistic signs. In Bahia, we can witness the absence of all these factors, while the process of developing new repertoires is hindered by a false patrimony used by the economic elite to show off their status and thwart culture, controlling its ideological production. “The promotion of art in Bahia is only possible when artists accept the rules imposed by the market and by those groups that control the established institutions. An example that confirms this situation is the Summer Exhibition, initially conceived as an exhibition open to any kind of artwork, but, at the last minute, the organizers changed the rules imposing a selection procedure. We are not against implementing some sort of selection procedure, but we are against this selection being based not on objective criteria, but on private, political and bureaucratic principles. Even the alternative exhibition show that came out of this situation manages to reproduce the very same defects of the official exhibition when it comes to establishing criteria for selecting artistic production. “The art scene in Bahia got stuck in the 1960s, cut off from all discussions and creative processes of the 1970s, such as conceptual art, ecological art, and body-art, amongst others. This detachment between Bahian art and new artistic currents, left Bahian artists out of the main artistic scene, leading to an alienated cultural practice”. “Opening up a space for the arts should not be done the way the Cultural Foundation proposed, with its Summer Exhibition. Instead, a space for open discussion should be created, encouraging new routines of production and interpretation. “With this text, we aim to contribute to the discussion of the alienating practices that still reign in Bahia, discussing the need for the artistic production in Bahia to dialogue with and be included within the main production centres as well as searching for ways to improve the Bahian market. We cannot help but mention the lack of an ideological stance adopted by artists themselves. All in all, it is necessary to poison an existing mediocre cultural tradition and its tactics. “In order to revitalize the now stagnated Bahian cultural production, it is fundamental to take into account that the artistic endeavour is a practice that deals with the established languages that exist within social structures; our questioning should be directed at this level, politicizing the arts, its meanings, and the ways in which the arts move.” Almandrade and Haroldo Cajazeira Alves ----- In the field of Brazilian visual arts, Bahia went through a slow consolidation process before incorporating modern idioms, promoting the renewal of its artistic field and enabling it to compete with the artistic production coming from big centres. The main characteristic of Bahian artistic production was a tendency towards regionalization, refusing universality in its search for a “local, regional modern” style. Art was set within the limits of the early modernist expressions and within an imagery scheme that aspired to return to its “cultural roots”, ignoring the ongoing transformations at play in the passage from the avant-garde to the contemporary scene. Adapting to the new paradigms didn’t happen in a systematized way, establishing links with local, regional issues. The contemporary turn in arts took a while to reach Bahia and, once it did, it was incorporated without a real assimilation of the main questions it raised, as an easy way out of the impasse between art and novelty. A contemporary art without history became instant and disposable. Conceptual art demanded a lot in order to produce anything and, as such, could not be digested. During the second half of the 1960s one could find in Bahia a strong willingness to join in the diversity of the Brazilian avant-garde. There wasn’t an established avant-garde practice, and neither an avantgarde way of thinking, it was a rather critical unconformity of the state of affairs in which the state of Bahia was in and a dialogue with some of the manifestations of unrest of the time: counterculture, tropicalia, experimentalism and breaking off with traditional bases of support. The attempt to establish a dialogue with the avant-garde resulted in the Bahia Biennales, in which most of the more relevant artistic currents of the time were present: concretism, neoconcretism, tropicalia, and so on, turning Salvador into the main centre for Brazilian visual arts. Even the local cultural scene was shaken, a scene that was quite reluctant to enacting any kind of change. However, in the context of the opposition to cultural openness of the ruling political regime at the end of the 1960s, the Second Biennale was closed down after the passing of the institutional act AI-5, interrupting an important initiative and leaving the Brazilian art scene mourning. The 1970s witnessed the absence of channels for exchanging information, the lack of a strong support centre and a cultural policy that enabled the experimentation with new languages, thus not accompanying the significant changes that cultural and artistic production were undergoing. Between the years of 1972 and 1974, the Bahian language study group (Haroldo Cajazeira, Júlio César Lobo, Orlando Pinho and Almandrade), far from the problems of the local arts circuit, started a pioneer study group on semiotics, information theory, philosophy of art, concrete poetry, concretism, neoconcretism and conceptual art, leading to the publication of the magazine “Semiotics” (Semiótica), in July 1974. It was a onetime initiative, and didn’t cause much conflict with the local scene. Artists that started their work in the early 1970s, the post AI-5 generation, didn’t have many opportunities to publicize their work and follow what was going on in the main centres: discussions on conceptual art and arts’ structure. They could only count on the university organized exhibitions, which didn’t bring in many opportunities for exchanging information with artists from other regions, given that they were local events that only showed work from local artists lagging behind the latest up to date movements. The Goethe Institute was, at the time, the city’s main cultural centre, particularly with regards to experimental, up until the early 1980s. Initiatives were isolated and improvised, such as the “Parallel 78” (Paralelo 78) exhibition, organized in 1978 by Glei Melo that involved artists such as Humberto Velame, Mário Cravo Neto, Almandrade, Juarez Paraíso and Glei Melo himself, who exposed their works at the foyer of the Castro Alves Theatre. The exhibition was a mixture between modern and contemporary pieces, with photographed paintings, objects and several installations. The main broker at the circuit, from the economic point of view, was still the State, although it still gave more attention to the earlier generations of artists that had emerged before the 1960s, some of which had a certain presence in national circles. Without an effective cultural policy for the preservation and renewal of its cultural heritage, the city of Salvador was left with a lag in urban culture, isolated from the ongoing transformations in the arts. The Museum of Modern Art would only reopen its doors at the end of the 1970s, in order to claim back its role in the arts circuit, with a big exhibition that had no selection process, the “Database Exhibition” (Exposição Cadastro). A slip-up, although a necessary one, it was a showcase for Bahian art. Ever since the Biennales, an exhibition of that proportion had not been held in Bahia. The Biennales had brought together the main tendencies in avant-garde Brazilian art, and were set in a different context when compared to the turmoiled 1960s. The reopening of this venue and the ensuing opening of the art circuits was itself situated in the political overture the country was experiencing, returning to a state of democracy. A new cultural perspective was started: while the AI-5 closed off the Biennale, the political overture reopened the museum, within the process of reinstating freedom of expression. It was the beginning of a new era, the redemocratization of Brazil. However, the “Database Exhibition”, in spite of its best intentions, revealed that Bahia was still lagging behind existing contemporary art. With some exceptions, the concepts of modernity had not even been truly understood, still focusing on a “regional modern”. Conceptual art, which was not at the forefront, was still seen as scandalous. The exhibition “The Sacrifice of Meaning” (O Sacrifício do Sentido) was the first individual contemporary exhibition of a Bahian artist to be shown at MAM-BA. It showed pieces authored between the years of 1975 and 1980 “influenced, mainly, by conceptual trends popular in the 1970s and a constructivist legacy. Colorless drawings, objects and installations, everything in black and white”. Silence and reasoning. Strained objects. The machine that doesn’t see (A máquina que não vê) Monument to the photographic camera: a black box on a tripod. A subtle striptease of the photographic code. A laugh and a doubt questioning the existence of the photographed “reality”. (Almandrade, 1977) In the 1970s, things were more difficult, I was rejected from most of the exhibitions for making an option for “contemporary” art. The exhibition at the MAM-BA “The Sacrifice of Meaning” (O Sacrifício do Sentido), wasn’t well received by local provincial critics or by the audience. I paid a high price. Today it’s the opposite, contemporary art is everywhere, the demands artists face are not high at all. After all those years, in the national and international scene, there was a return of painting, a reunion between artist and emotion, with the pleasure of painting. A pleasure and an emotion solicited by the market in relation to an alleged inscrutability of the conceptual idioms that dominated the 1970s. Contemporary art became a subjective activity, as if art was a psychological or sociological accessory. The 1990s saw a change in media, with the predominance of three-dimensionality: sculpture, objects, installations, performances, amongst others, but art didn’t go back to reason. For a post-modern condition, the supporting media for artistic expression isn’t a key issue, the main concern being the meaning conveyed. It was only in the second half of the 1990s, after contemporary art reigned supreme in the art market, that Bahian art circuits, in a delayed way, took in the new idioms and concepts and started mixing them, in a relaxed way, with local traditions. “In the world of signs, the artist is a language worker or a language guerrilla warrior, armed with the theory of information and semiotics. He is always ready to struggle against academic language, proposing new sets of codes and involving the audience in the creative process.” (Almandrade, 1976) ---------------------------------------
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 19:33:10 +0000
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