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4/10/2006

Concrete Art and Neoconcrete

DAN Galeria, Sao Paulo

From Construction to Deconstruction

Ferreira Gullar

The concrete and neo-concrete art now belong to the Brazilian art history. Much has been written and considered about them, given their role through this history. For particular reasons, the critics and the art lovers usually associate these two movements as if one was a variation of the other, when in truth they are contradictory and conflicting.

The neo-concrete art could, under certain aspects, be seen as anti-concrete, if one takes into account that it emerged from the dialectic negation of the concrete art. Notwithstanding, the first would not be without the latter, precisely because the very expression "dialectic negation" implies the involvement with what is denied. In fact, the concrete art, as is appeared in Brazil in the beginning of the 1950's, caused a rupture with the modernist tradition, which had remained hegemonic since 1922. This rupture consisted of proposing, to the Brazilian artist, new questions related to the artistic conception and to the artistic language, leaving aside, as outdone, the values imposed by modernism. Instead of a national or regional thematic, and instead of a figurative language, a universal, rational thematic and a geometrical language. These were the new proposals which, making the formal issue the very theme of the work of art, would trigger a radical aesthetic process, which culminated in their negation. The emergence of the concrete poetry contributed to this in a decisive manner, extending to the literary field proposals similar to those of the plastic concrete movement. Here, the dialectic negation of the concrete vision also generated the search for new aesthetic solutions, which directly influenced the path of the neo-concrete art. This will be clarified further down.

The existence of the concrete movement ideas in Brazil was part of the renewal of the cultural interchange with Europe, which had been interrupted by the Second World War, from 1939 to 1945. The end of the conflict aroused a wave of optimism and renewal, which was reflected in the arts. The Max Bill exhibit in Sao Paulo, in 1949, created the first connection with the Ulm group, the heir of some ideas from Bauhaus and, particularly, of the concepts issued by Van Doesburg in his Concrete Art Manifesto, published in 1936. This new tie ended the long dependence on the School of Paris by the Brazilian art. In Sao Paulo, Geraldo de Barros and Waldemar Cordeiro, among others, turned to the new artistic experience which, in Rio, under the influence of Ma'rio Pedrosa, mobilized young artists such as Ivan Serpa, Almir Mavigner, and Abrahao Palatnik. Since the beginning, differences were perceived between the Sao Paulo and the Rio groups, the latter proving more eclectic, as verified by the composition of the Grupo Frente, which since then combined artists of geometric and figurative or abstract-impressionist language, and even naive painters. The Ruptura group of Sao Paulo, on the other hand, was more coherent in its concrete option. Perhaps there resides the explanation for the different development of the concrete ideas in each of these two groups. But this would only become evident later, when the birth of the concrete poetry brought new enthusiasm to the movement, from which resulted the I Exposicao Nacional de Arte Concreta, opened in Sao Paulo, in December 1956, and transferred to Rio in February of the following year. This combination of the works of the two groups in one single exhibit exposed the differences between them.

At that moment, the differences among the works themselves were still subtle, being more evident in the texts accompanying the exhibit, both in reference to the plastic arts and to the poetry. Among the paintings, the geometric language was common to all, but demonstrated a more objective elaboration in the "paulistas" [Sao Paulo group]. Concerning poetry, the differences between the Sao Paulo and the "cariocas" [Rio group] were greater, with a preponderant formalism prevailing in the elaboration of the poems of the first group; while the second group was more spontaneous, perhaps because they were less certain about the new poetry. And it was precisely among the poets that the rupture occurred, a few months later, caused by an article by Haroldo Campos, in which he announced the mathematic method of the future elaboration of concrete poems. The group from Rio considered that such promise was not viable, and decided to brake off. In truth, the attitude of the "cariocas" was already announcing the path their experiences would take, utilizing primarily subjectivity and body and, to a lesser extent, objectivity and reason. This was the first sign of what would later become known as the neo-concrete art.

By then, it should be observed that the generic designation of "paulista group" [from Sao Paulo] and "carioca group" [from Rio] did not reflect the individual characteristics of the artists that composed them. In truth, it should be said that not all the concrete artists of Sao Paulo guided themselves by Waldemar Cordeiro's theses. Fiaminghi should not be confused with Sacilotto, nor Nogueira Lima with Cordeiro, and we should definitely not ignore the particular paths taken by Lothar Charoux and Willys de Castro. The carioca group was also composed by very distinctive personalities, such as Ami'lcar de Castro and Franz Weissmann, Palatnik and Carvao, Lygia Pape and De'cio Vieira, He'lio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. Precisely for this reason, as time went by, each one of them gave a particular direction to his or her work, where Lygia and Oiticica developed further than any other the expressive potentialities which were latent in the neo-concrete ideas. Palatnik, more akin to the mechanical technological features than his colleagues, sought from early on to replace the virtual movement with the real movement in his work, by creating in 1951 the Aparelho cinecroma'tico[Cinechromatic Machine], displayed at the I Bienal de Sao Paulo.

Under the Maxbillian conception, which had no influence at all on Brazilian artists, the concrete art had a tendency to explore formal and chromatic variations without seeking any transcendence, either symbolic or emotional. It disconnected itself from all subjectivity and proposed the pure pleasure of seeing, as if the eyes were captured by the two-dimensional surface of the painting, with no other alternative than to travel through those two dimensions, moved by the energy of the field of vision. Charoux was the one who explored well these possibilities, stressing line more than color. One of the future alternatives of this language had to be the optical art of Vasarely. Another alternative was explored by Josef Albers with his virtual cubes, which inspired Lygia Clark to create her modulated surfaces. Some of the Weissmann's sculptures of that time used serial forms, also exploring the optical effects, what did not occur with Ami'lcar, who was more radical in his option for the essential form, which in his case was the two-dimension plaque, which he simply cut and folded. Ami'lcar's experience was more independent from the imported concrete movement than that of his colleagues, and already contained the seed of the impulse to outdo the optical effect, as well as to explore the void, as verified on Bill's sculptures. This same radical style that turned the two-dimensional plaque into the mater element of his sculpture prevented him from progressing further, like Lygia and Oiticica. Opposite to them, Ami'lcar, instead of giving in to seeking the new just for the new, preferred to explore all possibilities of the path he chose. Not as inflexible, Weissmann also dedicated himself to the virtual characteristics of the concrete language in his dialectic exploration of the level surface and the empty space, adding color to this dialogue.

The concrete painting, as it is well known, derives from the constructive avant-gardes of the early 20th century, which appeared as alternatives to the figurative language, which was disassembled by Cubism. The issue that presented itself to some painters such as Malevitch consisted of providing a spiritual content to a non-figurative language, which was not attached to any imaginary of metaphysical reference; in other words, how to transcend the game of formal relations and mere visual colors. Kandinsky tried to provide an answer in his book The Spiritual in Art; and Malevitch in the Suprematism, which intended to express the "sensibility of the object's absence". Such concerns led him to paint white on white, and then to proceed to his suprematist architectures, built with colored plaques in a three-dimensional space.

This same type of problem presented itself to the concrete movement, and particularly to Lygia Clark, who tried to outdo the two dimensions of the canvas with the virtual Albersian volumes. Following this, facing a blank canvas, she chose an attitude even more drastic than Malevitch's: instead of working the canvas as a virtual space, she attacked it in its materiality: cutting it, stuffing it, and then deconstructing it and transforming it in what she called "bicho" [beast], which was a three-dimensional object that could be handled, built with articulated plaques with hinges, which slid over one another.

To better understand what happened in the neo-concrete art, we need to turn to the work of the poets, who were not limited to the "verbivocovisuais" [verbal-vocal-visual] compositions of the paulista group, but rather chose other paths, assigning greater value to the book than to the page as the vehicle for the poem. It was around this that the "livro poema" [book-poem] was born, created by me in 1959, and which exerted decisive influence on the unfoldings of the entire movement, by introducing the participation of the spectator (in this case the reader) in the work of art, which is a particular trait of the neo-concrete art. This is an aspect that the critics have failed to address, precisely because the "book-poem" was scarcely publicized and rarely shown to the public. However, if given some thought, nothing is more logical than that this participation should have been born from the book, which could itself be handled. From the "book-poem" I moved on to the "poemas espaciais" [spatial poems] ­ "poemas objetos" [object-poems] built of wood ­ which forced the spectator to handle it to discover the hidden word under the cube or under plaques. As a consequence, I invented the Poema Enterrado [Buried Poem], which consisted of a room built underground, accessible through stairs; inside the room-poem there were loose cubes inside one another, with only one word, revealed through the handling of the cubes. This poem was built in He'lio Oiticica's house. He was filled with enthusiasm by it, seeing that poem as a step forward in the neo-concrete experiences: the manual participation was substituted by the corporal participation, since the "reader" was induced to walk into the poem. From this poem came the stimulus that led Lygia and He'lio to future experiences with the "objetos relacionais" [relational objects] and the labyrinths of the "caes de caca" [hunting dogs] project.

The influence exerted by the poets on the plastic artists, and theirs on the poets, was a constant in the neo-concrete movement. The group members met frequently at Ma'rio Pedrosa's or Lygia Clark's apartment, to find out what each was doing, talk and exchange ideas about the work in progress. There is no doubt that, without this continuous interchange, the neo-concrete art would not have had the same scope of proposals and achievements. Most of the fundamental ideas of the movement, expressed in the Neo-concrete Manifesto and the Teoria do nao-objeto [Non-object theory], derived from these meetings and discussions, but also ­ and fundamentally ­ from the reflection about the works produced. Opposite to most avant-garde movements, whose theories intended to be directives or promises for the future, the theory of the neo-concrete movement came after the works, arising from them, even if it, naturally, after being conceived, influenced the artistic creations. This fact derives from the very nature of the movement, based much more on creative intuition than on precepts and formulas, which explains the variety of new accomplishments and proposals of the group.

Notwithstanding, the importance of the theoretic factor for the development of neo-concrete art should not be underestimated, since without it Lygia and He'lio would hardly have broken the limits of the canvas and undertaken an adventure that would lead them to experiences that had nothing to do with the questions of the plastic arts themselves. I believe that the new rupture started when Lygia decided to put down the characteristic instruments of the painter (to create compositions of shapes and colors) to use plywood plaques, paint pistol, liquid paint, and, instead of painting, materially invested on the picture, which then became the object of the painting. At first, she stuffed the plaque and created "casulos" [cocoons], and then abandoned the picture and built, with metal plaques, a new, three-dimensional object in real space, but which was not a sculpture, since it was born from the painting, from the crisis of the pictorial language, from the deconstruction of the easel painting, and which I named "non-object".

He'lio did not follow the same path as Lygia, but rather exchanged the canvas for constructions of painted wood (overlapping plaques that created hidden spaces) suspended in space, and which he named "contra-relevos" [counter-relief], in a reference to the suspended constructions created in Russia by Vladimir Tatlin, on the second decade of the 20th century. The next step was the creation of the "bo'lides" [bolides] and the"ninhos" [nests], followed by the Parangole', when he also exceeded the limits of the plastic language to enter the field of happenings. I believe the bolides were He'lio Oiticica's borderline creations where, joining rational shapes (cubes) and rags in a reference to viscera, he reached the critical point of contradiction that impelled the neo-concrete art (body and mind, reason and sensation) and, not outdoing it, escaped by discarding it. The parangole' is essentially this; a leap to the gratuitous action, the shape's dance in space. Oiticica freed himself from the making and from the object-work, and became the causer of sensations.

If it is true that the concrete painters, both in Sao Paulo and in Rio, found in the concrete vocabulary their own expression ­ of which I note the innovations of Willys de Castro with his "objetos ativos" [active-objects]; Aloi'sio Carvao with his "cubo-cor" [cube-color]; and Palatnik with his "quadros-mo'biles" [mobile-paintings] ­ it was with the neo-concrete art that the Brazilian constructive experience of the 1950's and 1960's led this new language beyond the limits up to then maintained by the avant-garde. Yet the Teoria do nao-objeto (1959), by proposing this new designation to neo-concrete works, verified the obsoleteness of designations such as painting, sculpture and even "work of art" to designate the new creations of the group. This was an ascertainment and, at the same time, an indication of the potential changes of the new proposals, especially in what the poets and Lygia and Oiticica were concerned.

In poetry, the neo-concrete experience practically ended after the "buried poem", while most sculptors painters of the group turned to deepening their own searches, to exploring the path that each had found, but still maintaining the traditional support. Lygia and Oiticica, on the other hand, completely abandoned the usual means and procedures to venture into uncharted terrain. With her "relational objects", Lygia gave up creating the work of art ­ an object for contemplation ­ to, instead, invite people to handle certain objects such as masks, gloves, tubes, etc. which, according to her, given the unusual characteristic of the experience, should provoke repressed or subconscious impulses in them, which would reveal their deep inner self. She called this experience the "structuring of the self". With his parangole', Oiticica intended rather to cause on those who used it a new perception of the body and of the moving cape.

The neo-concrete movement produced works of art and a theory, which are now recognized as significant contributions to the contemporary arts.

Image: Ivan Serpa, Untitled, 1956, oil on particle board 55 x 55 cm

DAN Galeria
Rua Estados Unidos, 1638 Sao Paulo Brasil

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