Translated by Ludmila Porto
In my activities as an artist, I try to maintain the effort to emphasize the importance of political dimension on art. According to the American critic of art Chantal Mouffe, art is a political activity, as it reproduces a common sense that was already instituted or contributes to critical deconstructions.
This political dimension of art, in contact with different social dynamics, arouses critical processes that can generate public spheres of discussion. Analyzing the constitution of these public spheres, it is important to take into consideration artistic experiences, which throughout 20th century, have incited communication between art and other social contexts, and to be aware of the process of the specialization of symbolic fields in modern times,which according to Nestor Garcia Canclini, pointed out the distance between art and its public. Many experiences were promoted in order to minimize this distance by bringing together artistic practices and urban space. Therefore, many artists created different ways of performing, sometimes stating the instituted ways of thinking about the city, or being in confrontation to these ways, which implicitly expressed diverseways of understanding public space and public sphere – a discursive space in which individuals endeavour to discuss matters of mutual interest, establishing a critical debate.
When one thinks about these issues in a Brazilian context, it is not possible to lay aside the fact that the idea of public space is an essential element of the project of modernity conceived in Europe. Modernity is something that happens in a distinct way in the Latin-American context. Because of this, many of these elements, such as the idea of public space, also become only parameters of a model that does not completely applyin our continent. From this, we ask the question: how can we understand the public space in Brazil? This answer is always under constant construction. We are not dealing with trying to find out whether the types of relationships, which resulted in the concept ofpublicare or were experienced anytime in Brazil in the way it was idealized. This task would reaffirm the supposed hierarchy that sheds light into Eurocentric culture. Maybe the main effort is to understand how these differences contributed to our own way of thinking about the concept of public space.
The notion of public space involved in artistic production at the beginning of 20th Century, in Brazil, is mainly understood as a universal and accessible space to everyone and, as well as this, would represent a national identity or a Brazilian culture. At that time, according to Sociology, some authors, such as Sergio Buarque de Holanda and Gilberto Freyre, who contributed to the research on the formation of Brazil and of its cultural aspects, adopted contradiction as the elementthat identified any unit in what was supposed to be Brazilian. It is as if everyone shared the same references by presupposing a modelof public sphere, which also tries to involve a totality.
It was also in the beginning of 20th Century, during authoritarian government of GetúlioVargas that buildings that were prototypes of modern architecture in Brazil were built, for instance, Health and Education Ministry (1937-1945), in Rio de Janeiro, in which Oscar Niemeyer, Lucio Costa, Burle Marx and Portinari worked. However, it is not fair to say that those artists and architects worked on official government constructions to state the current authoritarian political point-of-view. What is said is that their performances represent a change of interests, because, according to Mario Pedrosa, they could “have their own place to work, from which they would spread out the revolutionary content that their work supported”. There is an unsolved contradiction between understanding democracy within the new modern architecture and the desire of the dictators to impose, although architects continued to say that they are and were completely opposed.
Nowadays, it is understood that to reflect on the understanding of Brazilian culture of that time worked as an integration element. Contradiction is identified,in some way, to combine their elements, and solve them. This perspective aims to summarize a standard of culture that can overcome those contradictions.
In the beginning of military oppression, it became evident to society and to the artists the need to create other public spaces, different from an official space that was symbolic in its connection to the State, which represents a single idea of Brazil or a Brazilian culture. The media, civil society and primary communication systems – the simplest of ways for interaction in our daily lives – would be the main dynamics of building these spaces, according to Sergio Costa. As the whole process does notobey an evolutionary manner, it is important to understand that these different ways of understanding public space overlap one another, as a sum up operation.
It must be understood that a critical position implies inevitable ambivalences; to be prepared to judge, to judge oneself, to choose,create, is to beopened to accept the ambivalences, seeing that absolute values tend to repress any freedom. I would say that to think on absolute terms is a constant mistake – to fatally get old; to take oneself to a conservative position (conformism, paternalism etc.) which doesn`t mean that you cannot choose firmly: the difficulty in taking a strong position has always been to assume the ambivalences and to specify bit by bit every problem. To assume ambivalences does not mean to put up with this state of affairs; on the contrary, it aims, then, to bring it into question. That is the issue.
This passage of the text “BrasilDiarreia” (1970), from HélioOiticica, reveals another approach of Brazilian culture, by facing in a distinct way the contradictions identified as a characteristictrace of society. This other way of understanding considers these contradictions as a condition previously offered. However, it does not make any effort to combine these elements, or to solve them. It so happens that the existing incoherencies become frayed and provoke performancesexecuted in an ambivalent manner.
If, on the one hand, the idea of contradiction is not enough to summarize cultural aspects of the country, on the other hand, it is not simply abandoned, as itcontinues to be recognized. The difference now is our posture in face of it, going on to assume the contradiction not just as a problem, but also as a condition, which leads us to act in an ambivalent manner. In other words, ambivalence is necessary to deal with different public spheres, in constant negotiation among themselves. One of those spheres is the artistic context and that is why these conditions are brought into the work process itself.
Throughout my artistic performance, I have created situations that try to insert themselves in the dynamics of daily livingand in its processes of constitution, without announcing immediately that it is a work of art. These performances point in a direction of understandingart in a way that neither the form of the work nor the public arepreviously established, but they establish a constant negotiation between themselves. I understand that these proposals invest on the importance of communicative primary systems, as referred to before, which constitute public spheres as well as media or State spaces.
Although I had concentrated on the scale and temporary aspect of the communicative primary systems, I realize that considering different notions of the public is more appropriate than of taking the risk of assuming an idealized meaning, of understanding it as unique and force its institution. It is much more interesting to keep the effort to understand different notions, although contradictory, and to state an ambivalent position, which allows us to move about between them not to minimize their differences, but to critically approach them and to constitute new public spheres.
*This text presents some ideas I developed in one of the chapters of my Master’sthesis, entitled Artist is Public, and presented in November 2009 atthe Art and Communication School of São Paulo University.
