Conceptual encounters: Art and information in Brazil (1968–1978)

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.