Artes

Studies of Latin American theater often lament the fragmentary, “failed” nature of theater projects during the 1920s and 30s, a critical period of national integration; critics of the vanguardias and Brazilian modernismo, too, dismiss theater by noting that most pieces written for the stage were never performed. In The Unfinished Art of Theater I argue that the unfinished form of theater lay at the contentious intersection of mass culture, the consolidation of the modern state, and the rise of an international avant-garde. My readings reveal that precisely because it lacked a clear institutional identity, theater became a key site for intellectuals to reimagine art’s role in relation to an emerging mass public. I draw on a rich array of archival sources discovered during research trips to São Paulo and Mexico City: judicial proceedings, performance reviews, memos and proposals by avant-garde bureaucrats, and reports by police informants that reveal why other pieces remained “unfinished.” Chapter one begins with a critical genealogy of the ensayo (an essay, but also a rehearsal or sketch) and offers a novel interpretation of José Vasconcelos’s theory of the cosmic race through the lens of his play Prometeo vencedor and the “theater-stadium” he built as director of the Secretaría de Educación Pública. Chapter two focuses on the Semana de Arte Moderna, Brazilian modernismo’s foundational event. It draws out the queer performativity of Mário de Andrade and its connections to opera, theorizing both in relation to Roberto Schwarz’s notion of liberalism in Brazil as an idea “out of place.” In chapter three I explore the afterlife of the ephemeral estridentista movement and illuminate tensions in the Communist Left’s practice of avant-garde pedagogy by tracing connections between radio and puppetry in the thirties. I end by taking issue with total theater, a discourse that has driven the belated canonization of Oswald de Andrade’s plays. Through a reading of his 1933 “spectacle in nine tableaux” and the events surrounding its non-performance, I point toward an alternative model of envisioning the Latin American avant-gardes—one that illuminates their role in political and economic processes that played out across the globe.

This dissertation analyzes the artistic expression and exploration of Brazilian urban reality in the short stories of Dyonelio Machado, Antonio de Alcantara Machado, and Mario de Andrade. The authors' fictional portrayal of the urban environment of the 1920's and 1930's is compared with the social reality of Porto Alegre and Sao Paulo, their cities of residence. The themes, narrative strategies, and stylistic and linguistic elements of the short stories which constitute or enhance their urban nature are examined. An analysis is presented of the authors' differing perspectives on the societal ramifications of Brazil's emergence as a modern urban nation, as revealed in their short story sequences. The presentation of the social reality of Porto Alegre and Sao Paulo in this study is based on census data and social science research. The thematic and stylistic analysis of the short stories is founded on insights gleaned from the works of several critics of the genre. This eclectic approach is designed to achieve coherent investigation of all components of the narratives which form their urban character. Chapter one presents a socioeconomic, demographic, and cultural sketch of Porto Alegre, and the provincial capital's fictional representation in the short stories of Dyonelio Machado. Chapter two analyzes his narratives, heretofore ignored by critics. Chapter three provides a synopsis of Sao Paulo's development as a metropolis, and describes the city, its population, and its cultural environment in the period in question. Chapter four first discusses Antonio de Alcantara Machado's fictional portrayal of Sao Paulo, and then analyzes the role of the city in his short stories. Chapter five presents Mario de Andrade's recreation of Sao Paulo as a setting for his short stories, and examines the author's urban perspective in his narratives.

The dissertation explores cultural representations of the new Latin American city that has emerged since the waning of national-popular development and the advent of neoliberal globalization. The discussion focuses on Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City in the 1980s and 1990s. The main argument is that, with the withering of the modern city and its narratives, new (post-civil and post-national) subjectivities have emerged, and that cultural cartographies of the city can help us to better grasp these new configurations. The first chapter, "A Totality Made of Fragments," examines the construction of the image of the city in Modernist culture as an allegory for the totalizing and integrating impulse of the nation in the work of Fuentes, Sábato, and Vargas Llosa. The second chapter, "Reading the City Like a Text," explores the relationship between walking in the city and writing about the city in Rubem Fonseca's and Clarice Lispector's texts on Rio de Janeiro, focusing on these texts' critique of literature and literacy. The third chapter, "Public Spaces and Urban Geographies of Civility," engages uses and figurations of public spaces as sites for the expression of civil society. By reference to Poniatowska's chronicle-testimonio about the student massacre at Tlatelolco in 1968 and Eltit's novel about Santiago de Chile under dictatorship in the 1980s, this chapter offers a critique of the normative ideologies of civil society and public space. The fourth chapter, "Homosexual Desire and Urban Territories," examines a novel by Zapata (1979) and an ethnographic study by Perlongher (1987) in order to map out how cartographies of queer desire in Mexico City and São Paulo disrupt public space's drive towards closure and universality. The fifth and final chapter, "Deterritorialization and the Limits of the City," concentrates on neoliberal globalization in the 1990s in Buenos Aires. It combines analyses of cultural theory, fiction, and film in order to show the emergence of new, post-national subjectivities that are reshaping the city in ways that depart radically from Modernism's drive towards integration, citizenship, and national culture.

In the 1950s Brazil experienced transformative changes including the nascent emergence of democratic elections after 15 years of repressive dictatorship, the suicide of its President and the construction of a new federal capital city in Brasília. Optimism and a forward-looking spirit, summarized in the 1956 Presidential motto, "50 years of progress in 5," suffused all spheres of the national experience. The modernization of Brazil would translate into the end of underdevelopment and a structure of dependency put in place with colonialism. My dissertation explores this historical moment through the Rio de Janeiro-based geometric abstract art movement, Neoconcretism. I study how this group of artists intersected with and contributed to the growing network of modernizing institutions that held the promise of a Brazil finally "catching up." Influenced by early twentieth century European avant-garde art styles, Neoconcrete art brought together an art practice and theory based in expressiveness, intersubjectivity and sensorial experience, which continues to influence contemporary Latin American art production today. In this project I argue that Neoconcretism was a transformative cultural force that shaped Brazilian modernism and national culture. Neoconcrete artists and aesthetic ideals contributed to many areas of national production including literature, the newspaper industry, education, and architecture and urbanism. Departing from scholarship that examines Neoconcretism within the internationalization of Latin American art, I am especially attentive to the influence of local discourses on its stylistic and intellectual formation. Given the group's collaborative nature, I use an interdisciplinary and cultural studies methodology to examine the artworks and writings of the group members in relationship to the national project of modernization and nation-building developed by the governmental sectors, private institutions and the intellectual and cultural classes. My dissertation underscores the way culture operated as an essential political tool, distinct from traditional genres such as propaganda, in the production of the "national". The collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of the Neoconcretists structures the organization of the dissertation and each chapter is conceived as a dialogical relationship between members of the group and Brazilian society. Chapter one establishes the broader Brazilian concrete project, and positions the emergence of abstract art in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro as directly tied to the developing political and social climate proposing the construction of a "new" Brazil. In chapter two I argue for the equally generative roles of word and image in the production of meaning in Neoconcretism through an analysis of Neoconcrete poetry and the two main theoretical texts that defined Neoconcretism. I demonstrate how the movement was marked by positions of anti-progress and anti-rationalism that challenged the dominant political ideology. Chapter three turns to the Brazilian newspaper, Jornal do Brasil, which served as a place of employment for Neoconcrete artists, as well as a place of publication and circulation of Neoconcrete artworks and writings. I argue for the paper's generative role as a site of publicity for the group and its significance as a place of translation between high art and popular culture. Chapter four puts Neoconcretism and the construction of Brasília into direct engagement to argue for the influence of the national architectural boom on the artistic production of the Neoconcrete artists, but also to demonstrate how their works performed a critique of the state-sponsored project of modernization. In the dissertation I argue that the study of Neoconcretism unsettles any single narrative of Brazilian modernism and provides a lens to re-evaluate Brazil's "Years of Confidence" and the making of the nation through industrialization.

This dissertation traces the tensions surrounding indie music production in Santiago, Chile and São Paulo, Brazil. I conducted several years of ethnographic research on locally situated, yet transnationally interpolated, musical production, circulation and listening practices in Santiago and São Paulo. I open by detailing the expansion of the indie touring market from the global north into both cities, theorizing the enlistment of affect as a neoliberal technique for producing monetary value. The next chapter considers spaces for musical association as forms of infrastructure that both emerge from and themselves help constitute musical-social networks in Santiago. I follow by showing how the history of Brazilian individuals' engagement with particular sets of indie sounds from the global north bear upon the contemporary formation of infrastructures of social relations, musical aesthetics, and places for musical and social association. Finally, I detail how the tensions between the construction of audience, value, aesthetics and circulation arising from new production structures manifest in the politics of a new type of Brazilian institution called Fora do Eixo. Here, I inspect the logics of aesthetic valuation in building structures for music production within a complex state-private nexus of cultural funding in Brazil. As a whole, this dissertation explores the political struggles emerging as actors seek to establish new structures for participating in live shows and for playing music as both a creative practice and as an economic activity within emerging forms of communication and cultural circulation made possible by digital media. Each struggle is simultaneously interpolated by the messy articulation of transnationally-produced notions of aesthetics, authentic modes of engagement with music, and moral-ethical ways of organizing music production, circulation and remuneration as a social practice. The dissertation thus highlights the way new media and economic logics build upon and clash with historical practices of production, evaluation of aesthetics, and regimes for mediating the artistic, the economic, and the social.

Critical Geographies of Globalization examines the trans formations of urban space and culture in turn-of-the-millennium Latin America. More specifically, the study focuses on critical approaches to discourses of globalization as they appear in literature, art and other forms of cultural production in and about Buenos Aires and São Paulo. This study contends that recent Argentine and Brazilian literature and other cultural texts register a (re)organization of urban spaces and interpret its local effects by critically looking at the portrayal of the urban effects of globalization. This project responds to a vital need to attend to the study of Latin American cities as they provide us with important sources for analysis of overarching questions of national identities, race and ethnic identities, gender identities, and class identities in Latin American societies from the perspective of culture. By working across disciplines and national experiences, my project contributes to the task of producing cultural interpretations focusing on critiques of globalization in two of Latin America's principle cities. There are four chapters that comprise this study, the first two chapters deal with discursive and territorial transformations of Buenos Aires with respect to experiences of neoliberal restructuring as seen in Puerto Apache (2002) by Argentine novelist Juan Martini and Invasión live performance by the Grupo de Arte Callejero, staged in December of 2001. The third and fourth chapters look at São Paulo as a space of critical reflection that helps us understand the political and ideological impacts of the global city narrative as they appear in the novel eles eram muitos cavalos (2001) by Brazilian author Luis Ruffato and in the 28th São Paulo Biennial of 2008.

In this thesis I examine the divide between graffiti writing and graffiti art in São Paulo, Brazil, arguing that privileging graffiti art perpetuates the marginalization of graffiti writers, especially in the context of São Paulo positioning itself as a 'creative city.' The actions of graffiti practitioners can be connected to those of artists during the military dictatorship (1964-1985) in Brazil, as interventions in the city and society. The contemporary graffiti scene in São Paulo, as is also observed in other major metropolises, is an unequal one: graffiti art is praised while graffiti writing is criminalized.

This dissertation documents the ways in which communication theory and mass media influenced artists' turn away from object-oriented art to more experience- and idea-based art practices in Brazil during the 1970s. Spanning the most repressive decade of the Brazilian military dictatorship, this investigation chronicles the artists' turn to conceptual strategies that included poetry, their bodies and new media, within the unique historical specificities of the Brazilian context. Focusing on artworks produced in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, this study includes works by Sonia Andrade, Arthur Barrio, Paulo Bruscky, Analívia Cordeiro, Fernando Novaes Correia, Anna Bella Geiger, Nelson Leirner, Anna Maria Maiolino, Antonio Manuel, Cildo Meireles, Geraldo Anhaia Mello, Leticia Parente, Julio Plaza, and Regina Silveira. Influenced by information and media theories, particularly as expounded by Marshall McLuhan and Décio Pignatari, Brazilian artists sought to encourage an awareness of the structures shaping knowledge as well as those maintaining political power and class inequality. Within a repressive system marked by censorship, the visual arts provided a platform to voice defiance to existent aesthetic, political and social boundaries and fomented unexpected pockets of freedom. This study eschews the biographical model of narrating art history and privileges the artwork and its attendant social, aesthetic and political context. The narrative unfolds by establishing the circumstances around which the selected artworks emerge and in which they interact and circulate. Chapter one serves as an introduction to the historical and artistic concerns of the 1960s and, in particular, describes the conditions in which the Brazilian avant-garde emerged. Chapters two to four clarify how the encounter between art and information can intervene in established media circuits. Brazilian artists' invocation of bodily, electronic and graphic interventions not only challenged restrictions put in place by censorship sanctions but also inaugurated new aesthetic possibilities for Brazilian art.

In the late 1940s, as Europe lay smoldering in the ashes of the Second World War, Brazil entered one of its most optimistic periods in recent history. Nowhere was this more evident than in São Paulo, where the local press crowed about the city’s unprecedented growth with such headlines as “the locomotive of Brazil” and “the world’s fastest growing city.” Paulistano pride was particularly strong among middle and upper class boosters, a category that included an array of urban professionals and cultural producers. Inspired by, and in dialogue with, individuals and institutions driving New York’s own rise to international prominence, these Paulistanos envisioned São Paulo as the next world-class city. However, to become a New York in the tropics, elite Paulistanos believed that São Paulo had to undergo a drastic process of city remaking – both in terms of its aesthetic identity and built environment. “Making the Modern and Cultured City” explores this complex process of city remaking through a transnational investigation of artistic production, architecture, and urban planning in order to elucidate the opportunities, challenges, and consequences of overlaying a particular vision of the city onto a dense, and rapidly changing socio-cultural ecology. I argue that the selective appropriation and reconfiguration of ideas and practices associated with New York that were circulating in the years after WWII enabled leading Paulistanos to pursue an idealized urban sensibility at home, while projecting São Paulo internationally as modern and cultured. To these actors, this meant a city with modern art museums where local artists could engage in abstract art, a city with modernist skyscrapers, and a city that embraced scientific urban planning. However, I contend that this process of transforming São Paulo – aesthetically, architecturally, and spatially – revealed anxieties about race, class, and culture among leading Paulistanos, exacerbated existing divisions within the city, and triggered a response from other sectors of society including the urban poor. Equally important to this dissertation is an exploration of transnational currents flowing in both directions. Drawing on archival evidence collected in São Paulo and New York, this project uncovers the extent to which leading New York reformers and New York-based institutions not only inspired and collaborated with their Paulistano counterparts, but how their experience in and impression of São Paulo as a rising city and a center for the arts shaped developments in New York – from efforts to enhance MoMA’s visibility abroad to the revitalization of Manhattan’s Avenue of the Americas. By focusing on the networks of exchange between São Paulo and New York, and taking seriously the multidirectional flows of influence, this project illustrates how North-South elites worked together (not always harmoniously) to create a shared (but not identical) vision of the modern and cultured city in the postwar period.

Following a brief history of activist and political theater in Brazil with a focus on São Paulo, this dissertation sets out to evaluate the current status of activist theater in that city. It has become a commonplace to affirm that theater in general is a powerful vehicle for social change and it is generally agreed that an engaged, creative theater existed in Brazil during the military dictatorship. However, it is widely held by academics and observers of Brazilian theater that meaningful sociopolitically engaged dramatic production ceased with the end of the military dictatorship in 1985. This dissertation contends that recent years have seen significant growth in dynamic, engagé theater in São Paulo. Brazil occupies a special place with regard to "activist" theater due to the presence of Augusto Boal, who is probably second only to Bertolt Brecht in terms of his recognition as a leader in popular, engaged theater. In chapter one of this dissertation, following a theoretical discussion of activist theater with a focus on Brazil, I take a detailed look at how Boal and Brecht interact and how their efforts fit into the broader context of theater history. Chapters two and three each take a detailed look at one particular activist theater troupe. The focus of chapter two is Folias d'Arte and its production of Shakespeare's Othello. Folias is a fairly new theatrical group, yet it has developed significant interactions with other theater practitioners in São Paulo and has been instrumental in the organization and promotion of activist theater citywide. Chapter three deals with Teatro União e Olho Vivo (TUOV) and its staging of its own historically based play, João Cândido. TUOV is a much older and more established group, working in the poor, peripheral areas in the northern part of the city. Chapter four offers a more panoramic view of the current state of the overall contemporary activist theater scene in São Paulo, clearly showing that sociopolitically engaged theater is alive and well in that city.