In a relatively new and peripheral country, without an organised and structured past, the effort to build and rebuild history is in itself an engagement with the present. When we in Brazil discovered that the history of art was over, we were sorry and felt it very unfortunate because we had not yet started what was said to be already finished. Thus my ideas will follow a coherent path to meet our historical needs, or perhaps only to meet my own idea of history. In Brazil, we must follow the example of Proust: we have to assign meaning to the lost time and images created along the years. "The crisis of a art as a European science" is a concise formula to describe a condition that has lasted, I think, for almost fifty years without finding a way out. This crisis has led to a new civilisation of images, which is still developing. Sometimes I wonder if reality itself has not been replaced by its own image, disguised as a so-called simulacrum. Seventy years ago, Walter Benjamin wrote a famous essay with the title: "The work of art in the era of technical reproduction", in which he stated that technical reproducibility (photography and cinema) destroyed the "aura" of the work itself, thus also destroying its uniqueness and jeopardising the cult value of the original. However, only the existence of the original enabled its reproduction. Benjamin did not live to see the extreme consequences of the phenomenon that he was one of the first to observe. It is no longer possible to imagine an original which has not already been reproduced. As the culture of the image progresses, the situation changes, and now it is the opposite: the reproduction confirms the existence of an original. Today there is an increasing number of reproductions of non-existent originals. Thus the civilisation of images seems to offer a funny conclusion to the myth of Plato's cave: reality is replaced by a world of images which have been created by ourselves. Let us build our own cave with the most sophisticated technology, so that it will no longer be dark but constantly enlightened by images. Recently we have watched images on television of extreme violence: the Gulf War. In another text Benjamin wrote that the horror of the World War I silenced human beings. So what can be said of a war waged far away through images? The "crisis of the art as a European science" is not a phenomenon restricted to Europe; on the contrary, it has particularly hit the "non-European" or "para-european", changing our frame of reference, which tended toward the "Universal European" principle. This crisis has changed the traditional frame, which gave birth to our culture, of a peripheral country which is neither "outside" nor "inside", placed in a very precarious and unstable site. After the end of World War II, as the cultural power shifted from Europe to the United States, a civilisation of images began on a large scale. We had hardly begun to adjust ourselves to the modern changes and get acquainted to the new languages and visual tools which had replaced the traditional languages when suddenly, the visual, cultural, and ruling order changed again. We witnessed_powerless and with no choice_the replacement of a European tradition with which we had been linked since colonisation, with an accelerated North American capitalism. The hope had been alive since the end of colonisation to reach a compromise between radical economic change and the lethargic tropical environment of patriarchal rule. Brazil was thinking of making plans for its future, but the traces of an archaic past were still being depicted in its first modern images. These images, dating back to the twenties, show how Brazil had been interpreted again as a tropical environment by the local modern cubists of the dizzy 20th century _not by those of the 16th and 17th centuries_avid consumers of the coloniser's culture, as suggested in the modernist manifestos of the twenties. We Brazilians seemed naturally doomed to modernity, or rather, modernity was a necessity for us. Modern achievements were also to save us from our deep-rooted psychology of the past, based in slavery and colonisation. The historical avantgardes, with their concepts and contradictions, offered a first answer to a world in which the image was to rule; besides, they helped to create modernity under adverse circumstances. The avantgardes realised immediately that something new was going to disturb the world: instability. Everything had begun to be come irremediably unstable: knowledge, communication, consumption, production. The ego itself was "destabilised". The man of traditional societies, who was used to immobility, was even more vulnerable, less flexible and more susceptible to instability. It went beyond his usual sensory limits and gained an almost supernatural aspect, both tempting and threatening at the same time. As instability increases in life, a taste for provisional situations and unsteadiness grows: nothing can be stable any longer or permanent nor eternal. In a way, the trauma and the sensory shock caused by instability have trained the sensory system to a culture in which the image was to rule. The modern image was becoming, then, the problematic visual structuring of instability. The positions of the historical avantgardes had the advantage of being radical, mainly with regard to their contradictions and inconsistencies. But our cultural reality was fairly different from the European environment where the avantgardes showed themselves in a negative and destructive way. Our modern impetus is constructive before being destructive, and positive before being negative. The past itself was something to build and understand. In Brazil, everything was yet to be built up. Everything seemed provisional, unstable and intermittent. The scandal, as a tactic, can be found both in European avantgardes (such as Futurism) and in Brazilian Modernism. In culturally backward and conservative societies, the scandal has a cultural value which should not yet be forgotten. It could be said that the scandal is the traumatic consequence of an image which has not been institutionalised or stabilised. It is its muscular stage, the pre-visual moment of the image with its provisional consequences. Nowadays, the scandal has lost its cultural value: instability is ruling all over the planet, as it had been announced by the avantgardes at the turn of the century. The experience of shock, the intimate scandal, which was the model of the "Baudelairian flaneur" in the big city at the beginning of the century, has changed into the inert contemplation of shadows in the new Platonic cave built by a society of images. In Brazil, modernity came late and began to become effective only in the fifties. Only then did we get rid of forever archaisms and the latest traces of colonial idleness, and fall into line with modern forces capable of transforming reality. Industrialisation and urbanisation progressed very quickly, forcing the growth of big cities and the end of the country's rural tradition. In this context, "constructivism" turned out to be decisive. It was natural for a country like Brazil, which was changing its face and becoming attracted by an idea that possessed not only the assumptions of rationality but also the will to extend them to social issues. In Brazil, the European constructive plan had to face a particular environment and sensibility, whom and it was carried out with consistency and tenacity. If it is true that the essence of a people can be shown by its art, then the Brazilian art discloses our most intimate desire: the desire to be organised, coherent and rational. Our true image could be reflected only in this type of art. Between the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, at the extreme edges of the Brazilian constructive plan, there are the works by Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, christened by the critic Mario Pedrosa as the "experimental exercise of freedom". The Brazilian contemporary art was born as a liberating experimentalism. This experimentalism addressed both the "crisis of the art as a European science"_i.e. the crisis of the universality of art_and also the crisis of a unique and complex environment. The latest examples of constructive art occurred together with the timid local efforts to establish a Pop art. In a pre-industrialised culture lacking socially recognisable, highly convincing signs, the Pop strategy involved structural problems; it could portray only demure and timid images stemming from a domestic and provincial kitsch. The choice of the readymade, which in America was done by Pop artists using images drawn by consumer society and therefore repetitive, could not occur in our social context. In this regard, Brazilian efforts faced the impossibility of finding the signs and images produced by a mass society. Brazilian artists looked for their own signs in the grotesque aspects of the recently urbanised Brazilian society: its dreams, delusions, anxieties, injustice and poverty. For this reason, their images had an emotional lift, an unavoidable sentimentalism: nothing comparable with the radical cynicism and indifference of the Pop images announcing a new era of the civilisation of images. I believe that the contemporary Brazilian art is responding to the crisis of constructivism and to the impossibility of creating a Pop art. This is why it is creating neither a project to change the social environment nor a formal orthodoxy. In fact, it is proposing what was suggested with the "neoconcretism" of Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark: a thought in expansion, a kind of social commitment, a libertarian structure. This action was also careful, strategic and precisely marked by the effort to adapt a critical approach to a resistant and indifferent environment. We perceive in the precise and enlightening interventions of Marcel Duchamp a way to act which does not lead to the conclusion of the work of art. The construction of Duchamp as mythology was decisive as well. In a society where the art statute is still subtle and artistic signs disappear without leaving any trace, the artist very often has to build his own history, establishing the reference points to carry out a productive dialogue, without turning the mythology into his own personal myth. The Brazilian way to organise culture according to the personal impressions of the artist comes from the rare faction and fluidity of the local culture: the "Brazilian diarrhoea", as it was called by Oiticica. Brazilian contemporary art is a visionary, coherent, strict and flexible whole which manipulates both meaningless daily acts and large social structures. It is not visionary because it anticipates a new reality, but because it strongly lives out an experience which foretells details belonging to a distant reality. It would be wrong to look for superficial, illustrative or merely local images in these contemporary works of art. These are works looking for the strengths, tensions, and relationships below the surface. This is why the local subject is absent from any representations, forms, or images, while it can be detected in the process of creation itself. The local subject is consisted of the constant fight carried out by art to survive in an adverse environment. This fight gave birth to barely understandable works of art made of improbable almost impossible materials. These works could be everything and nothing, or both at the same time. In Brazil, just like everywhere else, the artists tried to preserve their autonomy in the artistic environment, and to achieve this aim they were forced to abandon the images from the world of media, running the risk of a permissiveness in which everything would be possible, including banality. Brazilian artists realised that the reaction to the avantgardes of the beginning of the century, a dialogue among conscience, was no longer possible in a world contaminated by a lack of decency and a cultural promiscuity that ruled over other cultures, where individual cultures appear as a fake and inauthentic signs of multiculture. Today, the figure of the artist seems to have changed in Brazil, just like everywhere else. The new civilisation of the image has assigned a new role to the artist. As Argan had already predicted, it is quite unusual to find the intellectual artist, one who is always looking for change and who understands the meaning of this research. I think that the artist of the so-called post-modern times, without distinction of origin and nationality, is nothing more than an image technician. As for the economic sphere of activity, which has to deal with a global economy, the modern artist acts in many places at the same time without belonging to any of them. He tries to find links and relations between images, depriving them of cognitive value and assigning them only a persuasion coefficient typical of the media. As he does not compromise himself with any image, he abdicates his cultural responsibility and the possibility to create or to transform. And if he chooses traditional technical tools, he does it to gain the cultural prestige they still possess. However, they are powerless if compared with the voracity of today's images which are often deprived of history, origin and identity. This phenomenon is occurring in every culture, there is no exception. Art that has always been a privileged means in the visual system is at disadvantage in the new civilisation of the image because of its complexity. There are only a few images of the modern world that can be compared with those written by Joseph Conrad in his book Heart of Darkness. The author describes the journey of a young Englishman who is going up the Congo to reach the heart of Africa. There, in the heart of Africa, the young Englishman found a man who knew the truth. I think that when the Platonic cave I mentioned before is finished, perhaps we will be obliged to repeat the words said by Kurts, the man who learnt the truth in the heart of darkness: "What horror, what horror".

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