Geraldo de Barros, Pampulha, Sao Paulo, Brazil,
[From the Series Fotoforma], 1949
Silver gelatin, 29 x 28 cm
Edition 5 of 15, Print 2006

September 8 – October 6, 2010

Rubem Ludolf, Untitled, 2004
Oil on canvas
80 x 100 cm

Considered one of the top names in Brazilian neoconcretism, painter, architect and landscaper Rubem Ludolf died aged 78 on Monday, July 26, in Rio de Janeiro. Victim of an aneurysm in the aorta, the artist was admitted for ten days in the Samaritan Hospital.

Self-taught in the early career in the mid-1950s, Ludolf was a student of Ivan Serpa Free Course in Painting from the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ). Along with Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape and Aluisio Coal, he joined the Grupo Frente, looking for creative freedom and experimentation in different languages of geometry and colors. With the group, attended the 3rd International Biennial of Sao Paulo in 1955, returning to the show in five editions between 1959 and 1973, receiving the Purchase Award in 1967.

Among his most recent exhibitions are individual in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro in 2002, the gallery Berenice Arvan, in Sao Paulo in 2005. In early 2010, the Caixa Cultural do Rio de Janeiro had a retrospective celebrating 60 years of career Ludolf.

On account of death, the exhibition “Dialogues” opened in the presence of the artist on the last day on June 9 Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud (SP), was extended until July 31. (source: UOL)

Helio Oiticica & Neville D’Almeida
Block-experiment in Cosmococa, CC1 Trashiscapes, 1973
Room installation with slide projectors, sound, mattresses, pillows & nail files

February 4 – May 1, 2010

The Hunter College Art Galleries presents an exhibition featuring a rare glimpse into the collaboration between artists Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida Beyond Participation: Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida in New York.

The collaboration between renowned Brazilian artists Hélio Oitica and Nevielle D’Almeida from the late 1960s though the 1970s changed how audiences perceived art, shifting them from passive viewers to active participants. Exhibited for the first time together, the slide-show environment Cosmococa—Programa in progress, CC1 Trashiscapes (1973) is shown alongside D’Almeida’s film Jardim de Guerra (1967), as well as two of Oiticica’s notebooks from 1973 reproduced in facsimile. The dynamic installation CC1 Trashiscapes comprises two projectors flashing 32 slide-photographs onto opposing gallery walls, accompanied by a soundtrack including forró music (typically from the Northeast of Brazil) such as Luis Gonzaga’s baião, Jimi Hendrix songs, street sounds, and voices. Mattresses line the floor, and nail files are available for use by visitors. The audience is invited to relax and recline horizontally while filing their nails in the dark as they watch the images on the surrounding walls. The slides themselves consist of three distinct photographic series: Luis Buñuel’s face on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, a series of black-and-white photographs of Luis Fernando Guimarães (an actor and friend of Oiticica) wearing Parangolé 30 Capa 23 M’Way Ke, and the album cover for Weasels Ripped My Flesh by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, all manipulated with white line of cocaine by the artists’. This work is an important progenitor of early video and installation art and influenced subsequent generations of artists tremendously.

CURATOR OF THE EXHIBITION:
Jocelyn Meade Elliott completed the coursework toward her MA in Art History at Hunter College and is working on her Master’s thesis on the subject of Hélio Oiticica’s filmic work made during his years in New York from 1970–78. She is an independent curator working in New York City.

PUBLICATION:
The exhibition will be accompanied by a color catalogue featuring an essay by Jocelyn Meade Elliott, an interview with Neville D’Almeida, and text and images by Hélio Oiticia and Neville D’Almeida. Images are available upon request.

Helio Oiticica
Vermelho cortando o branco, 1958
Oil on canvas, 52 x 60 cm
The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art
at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston & Projeto Helio Oiticica

November 19, 2009 – February 21, 2010

Haus Konstruktiv completes its exhibition programme for 2009 with the presentation of one of the most significant collections of Brazilian Concrete-Constructive art: “Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil” showcases for the first time in Europe “The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston”. Although individual works from Mr. Adolpho Leirner (born, 1935 in São Paulo) have been shown frequently in the past years, this will be the first time the entire Adolpho Leirner collection is exhibited outside of Brazil or the United States. The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the MFAH, which owns the Adolpho Leirner collection since 2007.

The Leirner Collection comprehensively documents how starting in the early 1950s, artists from the Brazilian avant-garde assimilated and contested the tenets of international Con-structivism, developing a unique Concrete-Constructive art. “Collecting is like a love affair. It means making discoveries in a huge game of hide-and-seek. Each and every one of these discoveries represents an important part of my life,” says the passionate collector Leirner. Painstakingly assembled since the late 1950s, the collection includes works that trace the beginnings of non-figurative art by artists such as Cícero Dias (1907–2003) and Samson Flexor (1907–1971), as well as works by members of “Grupo ruptura”, “Grupo frente” and Neo-Concretismo in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, respectively. The latter of which include such artists as Lygia Clark (1920–1988) and Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980), rediscovered in recent years by the international art world and honoured with large solo exhibitions.

“Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil” will enable a broad public to gain fascinating and informative insights into the development of Concrete-Constructive art in Brazil, while sim-ultaneously revealing so far little-known cross-connections and artistic dialogues with Swiss concrete art.

The exhibition directly ties in with Haus Konstruktiv’s incorporation of art history initiated with the grand jubilee exhibition “max bill 100″ (winter 2008/09): the reconstruction of the first Bill retrospective from 1951 in São Paulo already showed how the artistic exchange between concrete artists working in Europe and Brazil intensified from the 1950s onwards with Max Bill as a central figure.

Accompanying the exhibition, is the major publication Building on a Construct: The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the MFAH. Edited by Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (distributed by Yale University Press), the volume assesses the research of avant-garde artists and groups of Concrete and Neoconcrete tendencies in post-War Brazilian art, and generates updated frameworks and new lines of investigation for the interpretation of these interrelated ten-dencies. It comprises of thirteen essays that were commissioned by a group of distinguis-hed artists, critics, and scholars from Brazil and the United States. The publication was designed by the noted Brazilian designer and artist Alexandre Wollner.

Helio Oiticica, Metaesquema 167, 1956
Gouache on board, 16 x 16 1/8 inches

December 17 – February 6, 2010

Drawings, 1954–58 brings together over twenty rare works by the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980), a pioneer in Modernism and multi-disciplinary practice whose works-on-paper have not yet been exhibited independently. The exhibition features works from the artist’s three major drawing series: Grupo Frente, Sêco, and Metaesquema. Hélio Oiticica: Drawings, 1954–58 will be on view at Galerie Lelong from December 17, 2009, to February 6, 2010.

Oiticica’s works form a bridge between painting and sculpture; furthermore, they connect the Modernist utopia of the 1950s with the more fractured period of social and political tensions of the 1960s and ’70s. His revolutionary performances, sculptures, and installations—-most notably, the series Parangolé, Bilateral, Relevo Espacial (Spatial Relief), Bólide, and Penetrável (Penetrable)—-outline a cohesive, sustained investigation of color and abstraction as a framework for spatial experience. The delineation of architecture in two dimensions is most visible in his drawings.

From 1955 to 1956, Oiticica was associated with Grupo Frente, a group of avant-garde artists including Ivan Serpa, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape. Though Oiticica was still a teenager and the youngest member of the group, his Grupo Frente drawings demonstrated an intuitive response to color matched with rigorous discipline-—a distinctiveness that would remain until his last works. The Sêcos (1956–57) establish Oiticica’s engagement with space as structure; in these he used color more economically, concentrating on symmetry and asymmetry. Years later, Oiticica’s Penetrables would make tangible the spatial relationships that are hinted at in the drawings. In the Metaesquemas (1957–58), with which viewers may be most familiar, he layers color in sharp precision, suspending the forms in a space that is perceived beyond the drawings’ borders.

The timing of the exhibition is made poignant by a tragic event: on October 17, 2009, a fire broke out at the Projeto Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro, including the storage facility where Oiticica’s works were kept. Though initial reports of the damages were devastating, it has since been deemed that a number of works can be restored. Hélio Oiticica: Drawings, 1954–58 allows the public unique access to the visionary basis of Oiticica’s groundbreaking work.

Photo: O Globo

From ArtForum.com
O Globo’s Eduardo Fradkin reports that more than a thousand works by Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica (1937–1980) were destroyed Friday in a fire at the house of his brother, César Oiticica, in Rio de Janeiro. His brother was responsible for the artist’s collection; he estimates that 90 percent of the collection he held was lost. In 2007, the Tate Modern and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston staged major exhibitions of Oiticica’s work. The fire also destroyed all the pictures and film negatives in the house made by José Oiticica, Helio and César’s father and an important Brazilian photographer.

From Wikipedia
On October 16, 2009, a fire destroyed about two thousand works by the artist – about 90% of the whole collection that was held at the residence of his brother César Oiticica in the neighborhood of the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden. In addition to paintings and the famous “Parangoles”, the artist’s archive material including drawings, notes, documentaries and books were stored in the collection. “I wanted to die together with the works. After the death of Hélio in 1980, I was responsible for the collection. It is very sad! I have no doubt, the only victim of this terrible fire was the Brazilian Culture,” said Cesar Oiticica. The fire took three hours to bring under control. Key works such as Bólides and Parangolés, including some shown at the 2007 Tate retrospective, were lost. The cause of the fire is unknown. The building was equipped with fire alarms and other safety systems. Brazilian Tourism Minister, Jandira Feghali, called for an investigation into the causes of the fire and whether any works can be recovered. The works were stored in Cesar Oiticica’s house following a dispute over money and the adequacy of storage facilities at the Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica. The works were uninsured due to the cost. Cesar Oiticica later discussed the possibility of reconstructing some of the works but ruled out reconstruction of the Parangolés.

From O Globo (translated using Google Translate)
RIO – A fire at the family home of artist, painter and sculptor Helio Oiticica late on this Friday, the Botanical Garden, South Zone, destroyed 90% of the collection of works of art from the artist, one of the founders of the movement neoconcretist. According to the architect Cesar Oiticica, 70, brother of Helio, about two thousand pieces of the artist, who died in the 1980s, were burned, a loss estimated at U.S. $ 200 million. No one was injured, but the cause of the fire are still unknown.

Municipal Secretary of Culture, Jandira Feghali, laments the destruction of works. According to Caesar, the fire started around 22h. He said he dined with woman and a group of friends when he felt a strong smell of burning. Fire Humaitá the barracks were called to extinguish the flames. Shaken, Caesar said that 90% of the collection of the brother – estimated at 200 million dollars – was destroyed by fire.

What is the justification that we find a tragedy like this? Regretted architect. It was the greatest tragedy that could happen to the Brazilian culture. Without doubt, the only victim of this tragedy was the Brazilian culture.

The architect, however, ruled out an arson. According César Oiticica, the studio had control of humidity and temperature maintenance works, and present alarms and anti-fire. Lieutenant Corps
Yuri Manso Firefighters said the flames consumed the works quickly. Also according to the official, only a technical opinion is that you can discover the cause of the fire.

According to César Oiticica, the works were destroyed by fire tables documentaries and books. Works established as Bólides and Parangolés – the first manifestation environmental conference involving covers, tents, banners and Mangueira samba dancers, the show Opinion 65 – were also destroyed. Only saved the jobs that were stored on CDs and computer in the house. All photographic collection of the artist’s father, the renowned José Oiticica Filho, also would have been lost in the fire.

Considered one of the most revolutionary artists of his time, Hélio Oiticica born in Rio de Janeiro in July 1937. He died in March 1980, after suffer a stroke. Along with names like Lygia Clark, Amilcar de Castro and Ferreira Gullar, Helio neoconcretist participated in the movement and had works exhibited in internationally.

Among his best known works are the Parangolés (sort of covers colorful art to be worn) and penetrable (facilities). He is the author of the known phrase “Seja marginal, be a hero,” he wrote in a banner over a picture of a dealer killed a newspaper published in Rio in 1968 during the dictatorship, and was a major underlying the Tropicalia movement with his work “Tropicalia.”

The artist lived in New From 1970 to 1978, Oiticica lived in New York, where Information participated in the fair, held at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art).  In 1981, a year after his death – on March 22, 1980 – was created in Rio de January Project Hélio Oiticica, to preserve the artist’s work. The Secretariat City of Culture created the River Arts Center Hélio Oiticica in 1996.

For the director of the Bolsa de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, Jones Bergamin, the greatest legacy of
Oiticica were his projects and notes. - The problem is that his works are scattered in private collections and museums around the world, but their designs were all here. The artistic value is much larger than the financial. It is an incalculable loss – said in Bergamin interview Globonews.

Cildo Meireles, Cruzeiro do Sul, 1969-70
Courtesy of the artist

February 11 – April 26, 2009

The MACBA presents the largest exhibition in Spain of the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles. On the floor, a sea of broken glass, which crackles and crunches underfoot time and time again. Before your eyes, a maze in which there are no walls, only prison bars, fences, curtains, aquariums with translucent fish swimming around, their bones easily visible to the naked eye, mosquito nets, metal stakes and chicken wire… In the middle, a giant ball of crumpled cellophane paper. It is uncommon for the spectator to be able to penetrate Através (Through, 1983-1989), a work that is also a puzzle and which, due to its enormous size, is almost never exhibited. But the public can now stroll through it in the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), as a result of the largest international exhibition ever dedicated to the work of the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles (Río de Janeiro, 1948), awarded last year with the Velazquez Prize for Visual Arts. This is possible not only because the display presents the biggest collection of “large-scale” works by this pioneer of the installation ever assembled in one setting, but also because it enables the public to review his entire artistic career, from 1967 to the present day, by means of some eighty pieces both large and small: from a “ring bomb” which houses a capsule of compressed gunpowder in its interior, is fitted with a lens and explodes when exposed to sunlight, to the immense 175m2 room that is Através (Through). The exhibition, which was inaugurated last October at the Tate Modern (London) and may be seen in the United States and Canada following its stay in Barcelona, occupies the Museum’s entire second floor as well as the interior of the MACBA Capella.

In the works of Cildo Meireles, space acquires “physical, geometrical, historical, psychological, topological and anthropological” connotations. There is no hierarchy of sizes or scales; or of materials. A minute object can become monumental, while an immense work can turn out to be oppressively limited. Like Cruzeiro do Sul (Southern Cross, 1969-1970), a diminutive wooden cube that encompasses an entire cosmogony, and Através (Through, 1969-1970) which, despite the enormity of its dimensions and the disparity of objects employed in its production, recreates an oppressive enclosure.

“I like to think of art in terms that are not limited to the visual” says the artist, whose works require more than a simple glance. You have to bring touch, hearing and smell into play. As in the 201 balls that form Eureka/Blindhotland (1970-1975), all seemingly identical but with a difference of 5 grams between every one of them, or more than 700 radios that make up the sculpture Babel (2001), each tuned in to a different station, or the fake smell of gas in Volatile (1980-1994). The huge amount of one particular element in many of his works is also noteworthy, as in the 2,000 bones, the 800,000 coins and the 800 communion wafers in Missão/Missões – Cómo construir catedrales (Mission/Missions – (How to Build Cathedrals), 1987). Another of his relevant features is the way in which many of his works are dated, often over several years.

Meireles once stated: “For me, the artistic object must above all be instantaneously seductive”, and his work is an essential piece in understanding post-war Brazilian artistic avant-garde. Worthy of note among the artists he takes as references are the Neo-concretists Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape who, in the late 1950s rejected the extreme rationalism of abstraction to create more sensorial, participatory work which appealed not only to the mind but also to the body. But the utopian optimism of these artists was shattered following the 1964 coup d’état in Brazil, which paved the way for an iron-fisted military dictatorship. Meireles’ generation came to light towards the end of the 1960s through more politically engaged works, the extremity of their actions mirroring the extreme political situation. “In a certain way you become political when you don’t have the chance to be poetic. I think human beings would much prefer to be poetic”, he says.

Meireles is frequently characterised as being a conceptual artist; a label which completely fails to convince him. “I don’t like to call myself a conceptual artist, though I have a lot of works which border tangentially on conceptual issues and I have formed part of exhibitions of that movement. One of the reasons why this art proves difficult for many is its excessive verbal rhetoric. People don’t like to go to galleries and read explanations”, explains the artist for whom fun plays an important part in his works. As in Volatile (1980-1994) which, though reeking of a danger that hits spectators on entering this darkened, U-shaped room smelling of fake gas, still fails to stop them from enjoying the experience and attempting to move around in that huge mass of talcum powder.

Hélio Oiticica, Metaesquema No. 348, 1958
Gouache on board, 18 1/8 x 22 3/4 inches

New Perspectives in Latin American Art, 1930–2006: Selections from a Decade of Acquisitions

thru February 25, 2008

This exhibition presents some two hundred works by Latin American artists that have been added to the collection over the past ten years. The works on view embrace several artistic mediums and comprises a variety of styles, from early modernism and geometric abstraction to informalism and conceptual art. New Perspectives in Latin American Art surveys the wide range of these recent acquisitions and features both historical and contemporary Latin American artists, including Joaquín Torres-García, Alejandro Otero, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Carmen Herrera, Geraldo de Barros, Leo Matiz, Willys de Castro, León Ferrari, Gego, Gerd Leufert, Mira Schendel, Waltercio Caldas, Anna Maria Maiolino, Victor Grippo, Guillermo Kuitca, Arturo Herrera, Gabriel Orozco, Carlos Garaicoa, and Santiago Cucullu.

50 Years of Helvetica 

thru March 31, 2008

2007 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Max Miedinger and Edouard Hoffmann’s design Helvetica, the most ubiquitous of all typefaces. Widely considered the official typeface of the twentieth century, Helvetica communicates with simple, well-proportioned letterforms that convey an aesthetic clarity that is at once universal, neutral, and undeniably modern. In honor of the first typeface acquired for MoMA’s collection, the installation presents posters, signage, and other graphic material demonstrating the variety of uses and enduring beauty of this design classic. As a special feature in the exhibition, an excerpt of Gary Hustwit’s documentary Helvetica reveals the typeface as we experience it in an everyday context.

Purchase on Amazon.com

Colorful and playful kinetic sculptures, experimental objects designed to be catalysts for community building, manifestos calling for joy and the negation of melancholy: these are the elements that have shaped The Geometry of Hope. The title of this richly illustrated, 340-page volume brings together two threads that epitomize postwar abstract art from Latin America: on the one hand, geometry, precision, clarity and reason; on the other, a utopian sense of hope. The book contains new scholarship by an international cast, with examinations of six key cities–Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas and Paris–as well as insightful essays on individual works of art. It comes to us via the Cisneros Graduate Seminar, a collaborative program of the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas, and the renowned Fundacion Cisneros, and covers more than four decades of art-making with works by 52 artists, among them Lygia Clark, Gego, Jesus Rafael Soto and Helio Oiticica.

Waldemar Cordeiro, Idéia visível (Visible Idea), 1956
Acrylic on masonite, 59.9 x 60cm

September 12 — December 8, 2007

The Geometry of Hope comprises some 125 works of art from the collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) and provides the most comprehensive scholarly overview to date of Latin American Geometric Abstraction from the 1930s-1970s. Organized chronologically, The Geometry of Hope will focus on key cities in the development of abstraction in the Americas: Montevideo (1930s), Buenos Aires (1940s), São Paulo (1950s), Rio de Janeiro (1950s–60s), Paris (1960s), and Caracas (1960s–70s). In tracing the development of ideas from one socio-geographic context to another, the exhibition will challenge the view of Latin American art as a single phenomenon, revealing important differences and tensions among various artistic proposals articulated during the decades under examination.

The exhibition will include works by approximately 40 artists. Among them are Joaquín Torres-García, from Montevideo; Gyula Kosice and Tomás Maldonado, from Buenos Aires; Geraldo de Barros and Waldemar Cordeiro, from São Paulo; Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, from Rio de Janeiro; and Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez, from Caracas. The exhibition will also include a 300-page bilingual catalogue.

By the way, the Grey Art Gallery’s programming over the next year looks quite interesting, including the exhibitions Diebenkorn in New Mexico, dealing with the period 1950-1952 (January-April 2008); New York Cool: Paintings and Sculptures from the NYU Art Collection (April-July 2008); and Icons of the Desert: Early Paintings from Papunya, surveying Aboriginal art from the 1970s.

Guiseppe Penone, To Reverse One’s Eyes, 1970
Black & white photograph, 11.5 x 15.5 inches

May 9 — June 23, 2007

Zwirner & Wirth presents an exhibition of American and European conceptual photography drawn from a private collection. Spanning the years 1964-1989, the collection, which has been amassed over the last three decades, includes key examples of photo-based conceptual art by artists such as Vito Acconci, Giovanni Anselmo, John Baldessari, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Mel Bochner, Hans Breder, Marcel Broodthaers, Peter Campus, Robert Cumming, Valie Export, Fischli & Weiss, Dan Graham, Birgit Jürgenssen, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Meret Oppenheim, Hélio Oiticica, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Charles Ray, Allen Ruppersberg, Lucas Samaras, Laurie Simmons, Andy Warhol, and others.

Maurício Nogueira Lima, Rhythmic Object 2 (second version), 1953
The Adolpho Leirner Collection, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

May 20 — September 23, 2007 

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has acquired the Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art, a group of 98 works made in the 1950s and ‘60s by Sergio Camargo, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Alfredo Volpi and other Brazilian abstractionists and assembled by Adolpho Leirner (b. 1935). Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil: The Adolpho Leirner Collection is overseen by MFAH curator Mari Carmen Ramírez. The exhibition is accompanied by a 160-page catalog, as well as a larger book with essays by leading scholars to accompany an international tour in 2008-2009.

Maurício Nogueira Lima, Rhythmic Object 2 (second version), 1953
The Adolpho Leirner Collection, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has acquired the Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art, a group of 98 works made in the 1950s and ‘60s by Sergio Camargo, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Alfredo Volpi and other Brazilian abstractionists and assembled by Adolpho Leirner (b. 1935). “Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil: The Adolpho Leirner Collection,” overseen by MFAH curator Mari Carmen Ramírez, goes on view at the museum, May 20-Sept. 3, 2007. The exhibition is accompanied by a 160-page catalog, as well as a larger book with essays by leading scholars to accompany an international tour in 2008-2009.

Hélio Oiticica, B17 Glass Bólide 05 “Homenagem a Mondrian”, 1965
César and Claudio Oiticica Collection, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 

thru April 1, 2007

Hélio Oiticica, detail of Tropicália (1967)

Tropicália is an incredible exhibition — the first comprehensive survey of one of the most significant chapters in modern cultural history, a period beginning in the late 1960s when daring experiments in Brazilian art, music, film, architecture and theater converged. The exhibition features artists Lygia Clark, Antônio Dias, Nelson Leirner, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape, among many others.  Don’t miss it.

Last June I met my friend Margaret Crane for lunch at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. We sat outside on a sunny Sunday afternoon, chatting and eating salad. It wasn’t too hot, the air was breathable—a perfect ladies’ date. Then we headed into the museum’s jewel-in-the-crown exhibition, Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s-70s. The show was huge, astonishing, including nearly 200 works by 130+ artists from Europe, North America, and South America. Jesús Rafael Soto’s bright overlays of geometric lines made our eyes blur; Bridget Riley’s wavy stripes made us slightly dizzy. Lucio Fontana’s canvas was sliced, with two gaping wounds down the middle just begging to be poked, but we knew better. We saw paintings in irregular shapes by Manuel Espinosa, Juan Melé, and Rhod Rothfuss; we saw plastic, neon, dangerously sharp metal edges; we saw Mira Schendel’s sheets of rice paper hanging from a nylon cord, all fluttery like parrot tulips. Margaret and I marveled at François Morellet’s diamond-shaped metal grids that squished up and expanded. We stood in front of a three-dimensional painting that shifted almost imperceptibly. “Margaret, am I crazy or did you see that thing move, too?” We delighted in Gianni Colombo’s rows of throbbing styrofoam rectangles. With so many kinetic pieces, the stationary art felt dull, static—like it just sat there taking up space. A number of artists worked with corners, none of them as eerily as when Joseph Beuys stuffed the corners of his studio with animal fat, but we did enjoy Fred Sandback’s single blue elastic cord that created a square of (empty?) space in a white corner and Enrico Castellani’s “Red Corner Surface,” which looked like giant red buttocks. We saw paintings that curved away from the wall, paintings with things hanging from them; we saw mobiles, first-edition concrete poetry books, Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photos of weird water towers, and Carl Andre’s shiny floor tiles that we could actually walk on without a guard hauling us away.

Lucio Fontana
“Spatial Concept-Waiting (59 T 104)” (1959)
Oil on canvas with incisions

With a big show like this, it’s impossible to take it all in. After a while the mind shuts down and visceral reactions take over, greeting the work with grunts and chuckles, or sometimes just the word “cool.” This shift can be intense, as the boundary between viewer and artwork falls away—you enter into a sense of intimacy with the artist, the intimacy of a sort of psychic licking rather than studied analysis. This happened to me at the Eva Hesse retrospective at SFMOMA in 2002, where her work profoundly moved me; but surrounded by so much cleverness and glitz, her pieces in Beyond Geometry felt stripped of resonance. Eleanor Antin’s “Carving: A Traditional Sculpture” is comprised of four long horizontal columns of photos of Antin’s naked body—front, back, and side views—taken over time as Antin loses weight. In the context of all this formalism, it emerged more as an exercise in seriality than a comment on women and body image. Standing before it, Margaret said, “Cool.”

The show’s press release touts the political influences on the work included. Under the subheading, “1945-1979: A Turbulent Time,” mention is made of the Cold War, Vietnam, civil rights, feminism, gay liberation, and “an activist youth culture.” In comparison, the exhibition catalogue (MIT Press, 2004) focuses more on the theoretical than on the political implications of this transitional period between high modernism and postmodernism, when the United States overthrew the shackles of European dominance and became a world-class art power. Though many of the artists in the show practiced a fervent regionalism, curator Lynn Zelevansky argues in her introductory catalogue essay that these works’ “radically simplified form and systematic strategies” comprise a global movement. “The international artists represented in exhibitions and publications around 1970 may have already been aware of one another’s work to varying degrees, but it is more significant that they shared sources and ideas to which they had been exposed locally. As a result, the conceptual basis of their art, often independently conceived, was nonetheless related.”

Bridget Riley
“Polarity” (1963)
Emulsion on canvas

Throughout her catalogue essay, Zelevansky argues with artist after artist. Discussing the American minimalists’ disdain for European art, Zelevansky notes that the minimalist embrace of the literal in art was actually a tenet of European concrete art, formulated way back in 1930 by Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. In response to the minimalists’ disdain for what they saw as Mondrian’s “geometric abstraction,” Zelevansky points out that Mondrian, in fact, created his work intuitively. In response to Swiss artist Max Bill’s assumption that “seeing is detached and rational, a straightforward biological mechanism that functions the same way in all people,” Zelevansky counters with, “As James Elkins makes clear, true seeing is actually ‘irrational, inconsistent, and undependable.’” One comes away from the Beyond Geometry catalogue swimming with information, one’s head stuffed with a vision of insular groups infighting and denouncing each other over rigorous issues such as “ideal” versus “presence.” Zelevansky’s typology of beliefs and oppositions is exhausting—minimalist, concrete, neoconcrete, Grupo Ruptura, conceptual, kinetic, and on and on—a big sense of no forest, all trees. What I longed for in the catalogue was a clearer and more in-depth exploration of what the exhibition’s press release describes as the “common intellectual and artistic concerns” that form the basis for “this unprecedented coming together.” How does this work emerge from its “turbulent time” other than with a vague sense that because of the threat of nuclear holocaust we’d better get rational?

At the beginning of Zelevansky’s essay is a photo of Hélio Oiticica’s Nucleus 6, which is made up of a group of monochrome pinkish paintings suspended at various heights, some of them at right angles to the others, creating a sort of enclosure. In the midst of them stands a guy in jeans and a short-sleeved black shirt, his arms down and slightly out from his body. We see him only from the shoulders down; the top half of his body is occluded by two horizontal paintings. Another long vertical painting wedged at a right angle between these two horizontal paintings appears to slice into and bisect his body in two, separating the left side of his chest from the right. The absolute stillness and stiffness of his stance reinforces this effect. There is a thin gap between two of the paintings, revealing a strip of the guy’s face—the hint of an eye and the corner of a mouth. He’s peering back at the viewer, but his expression is unreadable, ambiguous, as if he were rehearsing for a part in a Robbe-Grillet film. He doesn’t look like he has moved beyond geometry. He looks like geometry has trapped him.

Jesús Rafael Soto
“Almost Immaterial Vibration” (1963-64)
Wood, wire, and paint

In high school when I was a pulsing blob of emotion and intensity, László Moholy-Nagy’s 1947 Vision in Motion was my bible. Documenting the aesthetics of Chicago’s neo-Bauhaus Institute of Design, which Moholy-Nagy founded, the book is liberally illustrated with student and faculty experiments in form, as well as contemporary avant-garde art. I marveled at the streamlined angularity of art and industrial objects, at curvaceous biomorphic shapes that hinted at a titillating eroticism. Beyond Geometry’s catalogue credits Moholy-Nagy several times with being a precursor to some of the artists in the show, so I turned to Vision in Motion again, curious as to how it could speak so deeply to a Vietnam-era working-class teen in Indiana. What I found was an astute, frighteningly timely analysis of the dehumanizing effects of modern technology and global capitalism. In the wake of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Moholy-Nagy proposes a marriage of art and science in order to secure the heart and morality of the industrial world. Moholy-Nagy cites the US Declaration of Independence as an example of a utopian principle whose realization is limited by “the unconscious dependence upon the previous structure.” New forms of art can eradicate oppressive unconscious structures. “The fundamental concept and concern of the abstract painter does not seem to be involved in the details of ‘social reality.’ Consequently, abstract art is often interpreted by the social revolutionaries as the art of the escapists. But the artist’s duty is not to be always in opposition. He may concentrate his forces on the central problem of visually constituting a better world, yet to be born. . . . In a deeper sense, the interpretation of space-time with light and color is a truly revolutionary act.” “Abstract” art, by reprogramming the subconscious of the masses, will bring about nothing less than a new social order.

Vanguard art such as that in the Beyond Geometry exhibition has spurred us to appreciate increased viewer participation in the creation of the artistic experience. This work, committed to explorations of duration and seriality, an embrace of mathematics, suggests that (all?) meaning should reside in the object rather than the artist pointing to meaning outside the object. These are laudable aims, as are the erasure of the authority of the artist as creator, the prizing of process over product, and the urge to eradicate artistic categories. In the big picture, we can vaguely see artists all over the world working towards a leveling, possibly democratic, way of making art. But where is Moholy-Nagy’s revolutionary fervor? In the catalogue’s final essay, “Reality Rush: Shifts of Form, 1965-1968,” Inés Katzenstein makes explicit connections between Vietnam-era activism and developments in the art of Daniel Buren (French), David Lamelas (Argentinian), Hélio Oiticica (Brazilian), and America’s own Robert Smithson. Katzenstein provides a lively, enlightening analysis of the heroic efforts of these artists to break free of the confines of the gallery and take their formal experiments to the streets.

How this work engages its “turbulent time” feels especially pertinent to our current political climate, as 9/11 and the war in Iraq have propelled many writers and artists into a crisis of aesthetics. How can art address the enormity of such terror and chaos? Should it? Does formal experimentalism still make sense? Gay writers and artists experienced a similar crisis in the ’80s and ’90s in response to AIDS. I’ve been struck by the lack of irony in gay experimental narrative as compared to its straight counterparts—the McSweeney’s crowd, for example—and I’ve wondered if gay writers’ confrontations with AIDS aren’t, in part, responsible for that. Is irony possible in the face of mass crisis? Beyond Geometry may not have provided answers to my personal aesthetic soul-searching, but it did amuse Margaret and me. Perhaps laughter and delight are enough for two serious ladies on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Dodie Bellamy’s latest books are Pink Stream (Suspect Thoughts Press) and the re-release of The Letters of Mina Harker (University of Wisconsin Press). She lives in San Francisco. This article was originally published in NYFA Quarterly, the arts and culture magazine of the New York Foundation for the Arts.

The following interview was published on MINUS SPACE in December 2003 in conjunction with Bibi Calderaro’s spotlight exhibition.

Rossana Martinez: Faith, fertility, atoms, soul, and emptiness are some of the things you mention in your statement. I am curious to know what faith means to you in your work? What does fertility mean in your work?

Bibi Calderaro: The idea that forms carry an inner balance, strength, and the potential for provoking thoughts and feelings is neither new nor original. Some call it spirituality in art, and I guess the term “faith” is closely related to these concepts. Faith to me is informed by tons of micro and macro pieces of information that shape our individual systems of belief. Faith does not need a group of reference in order to exist; it is not related to any particular religion or creed.

In my current body of work, faith is the hope that some plastic pieces, when arranged and assembled in a particular way, will direct the viewer’s attention to a set of beliefs that will enable feedback, transformation, and change. This process — or any in which one’s thoughts, feelings, ideas, and experiences are not left inert — will occur not only within one specific realm of experience, but hopefully beyond it. This is what I recognize as communication.

Fertility in my work is deeply related to the above; it is the possibility for this transformation to occur.

I would say that faith is in the mind of the beholder, while fertility is in the piece itself. Both forces need to be there in order for some change (communication, dialogue, etc.) to occur and be sensed. Both terms also carry a strong acknowledgement of the other, a concept that I believe is deeply neglected and existing in oblivion.

In a broader sense, faith is the mental forces involved in the development of the complex set of ideas that we call contemporary art practices. The whole of contemporary life, as we perceive it, involves faith as well.

[Whenever I think of faith, the image of plants comes to mind. Mostly trees...how they stay upright. I guess it is the same in us — how we grow upwards against gravity, even how we evolved into homo erectus. Although these are physical forces and faith is a mental force, I think the image still applies, since there exists some kind of will to be that is certainly embodied. No matter how dark the future appears to be, life expresses itself in spite of humankind's past and present efforts to destroy it. The words "construct" and "destruct" both carry the root word "struct" (as in structure) to which the prefixes "con-" (build/erect) or "de-" (annihilate/unmake) are added.]

RM: How did these abstract concepts become physical objects?

BC: It is hard for me to say which really came first. I think they were first physical objects, from which the abstract concepts sprang and then, in turn, transformed the physical objects. This process happened more than once and in multiple directions while I developed the work. There is a lot of back and forth in my practice.

RM: I know you move between video, installation, photography, etc. How did you determine which materials to use? How do each of these media relate to the other?

BC: In this particular body of work, I liked the idea of using banal, colorful, readily-available acrylic pieces. I think it strengthens the idea of the unavoidability of faith in every set of ideas and mental constructions.

I use various media to disguise my ultimate goal of deconstructing and exposing its particularities. I do this in order to acknowledge the systems of belief that sustain the specific medium, while inviting the beholder’s imagination to come forth and complete the pieces. This is something I don’t usually think about while working, but which is common to all my work no matter which medium I use.

RM: Your “Structures of Faith” were created over the past two years. How did your concept evolve during this time?

BC: In the beginning the idea of faith was not expressly present, although, in some ways, it was the only thing that glued the work together. I recognize, however, that I owe to the birth of my daughter not only the genesis of this project, but the inevitable push of that life force. At first the pieces were intended to be toys, with which my daughter could develop abstract concepts while playing with shapes and colors. After I realized they were my toys, they remained the same in form, but I suddenly didn’t know what to do with them.

They were not articulated with pins, but were just temporary forms held together by gravitational forces and tensions. They stayed like this for about a year until it became clear to me that I wanted the viewer to be able to handle the pieces. So I had to develop a way of keeping the pieces together on their own, otherwise it would have been frustrating rather than “fertilizing” for the viewer. At this stage it also became clear to me that the work as a whole was about male and female forces — how they interact and push one another. Thus, the pins and the shapes were developed accordingly as male and female parts that related to one another. It could also be said that the structures are about life and death and the transformation that occurs therein. I see the whole body of work as still in progress, and I want to explore further the scale, as well as the methods for standing and implementing the structures at various sites — institutions, public spaces, etc.

As for the video, my footage had been sitting around for two years without any ideas on how to edit it. One day, while rewinding the footage, I realized that I wanted the whole thing moving in fast forward. At that moment, it became clear to me how my artistic process can mature, develop, and change over time without consciously being influenced by the outside world.

Additionally, I am thankful for my garden and to the philosopher Gilles Deleuze for revealing to me the metaphor of weeds. Weeds grow underground, without our noticing, until they materialize one day as green subversive beings. The system that sustains things underground is nurtured by faith as well.

RM: I know you were born in the US, but raised in Argentina. I can’t help but think of the incredible and rich history of abstract, Concrete, and Neo-Concrete art in South America. I am specifically thinking of artists, such as the Brazilians Hélio Oiticia, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape, as well as the Venezuelan Gego, among others. Do you see yourself as a participant in this tradition?

BC: I hope so. Of course I think I am strongly influenced by them, and I hope that my work is reflecting upon contemporary issues, as well as rethinking paradigms set forth by them. I do see similarities in methodology, such as the use of elements like leisure, pleasure, and tactile/bodily experiences. I also believe that art is not there to illustrate, represent, or denounce the outside world, but rather to bring about different ways of exploring and experiencing it, both mentally and physically. I also use language as a creative medium and the idea of spirituality.

RM: The way you phrased your statement on the site is reminiscent of a concrete poem. Additionally, the spoken language you included in your “Structures of Faith” video is very abstract. Can you discuss how you use language?

BC: Language is the first tool we are given to mediate with this world. It is passed on to us, mostly through our mothers (thus the term “mother tongue”). To me language is one of the most fertile media available. I not only use it as it is given to us, but I like to invent words and structures, again following the tradition of Concrete and Neo-Concrete artists.

In the case of my statement, it is one of a series that I began in 1998 when I realized that language was as creative an element as any other medium I was working with. For this reason I do not follow the format of a traditional statement — providing answers or explaining ways of responding to a piece. Instead, I use this opportunity to add a new dimension to the work while revealing certain clues about a particular work. My statements are shaped more in the form of a poem, in which I may invent words or use other ways to trigger the viewer’s imagination.

In my video I start by using words to state an idea. Then the words become a list suggesting urban architectural constructions while questioning the relationship between words and their meanings. For the video, I also decided to have the text (in English) read by someone with a strong immigrant accent, thereby adding another dimension that points to post-/neo-colonialism issues.

RM: Finally, you intend the viewer to handle and manipulate your small plastic structures. How important is the viewer’s participation in your installations? What would you like the viewer to experience when handling your structures?

BC: In all of my work, the viewer’s participation is very important. In some pieces participation is less overt and simply used to trigger mental processes like imagination. In other works, such as my plastic structures, participation involves actual touching. In either case, the degree of involvement on the part of the viewer is not important, as long as the piece initiates a transformation in the viewer’s mindset from when he/she first arrived to the site of the work.

In summary I want these structures to work in the same way rosaries do — as pocket-sized, jewelry-like objects one keeps in the hands while the mind is utterly still — no actions, thoughts, or feelings. I believe this vacuum can be a fertile ground, in which to transform experiences, perceptions, and attitudes towards the world.