| Summary: | Mid-twentieth-century Brazil was the site for an important shift in art practice, from singular artworks to interactive objects, immersive environments, participatory artworks and performances that took social relations as their subject. Today, Brazilian artistic production of 1960s Brazil is regarded as a crucial model for global contemporary art practices engaged with social relations and urban space. In breaking with traditional artistic mediums such as painting and sculpture, prior scholarship claims, these Brazilian artists challenged art's supposed autonomy from its social context. This dissertation argues, however, that mid-twentieth century Brazilian art did not respond to a "crisis" of easel painting as the art world shifted from Paris to New York after WWII, nor was it simply a natural outgrowth of a characteristically Latin American sensitivity to the intersection of art and counter-hegemonic politics during the 1960s.
This concern with the spaces of art (both inside and outside the museum gallery) was not simply a set of formal exercises. Instead, it laid bare the particular intersection of political economy, urban space, and aesthetic practices in Brazil. That is, these changing aesthetic practices occurred amid competing approaches to political modernization, whereby rising liberal democratic notions of universal citizenship confronted Brazil's long history of oligarchic and elite-driven political process. In this socially transitional Brazil, how would the publics for art be constituted? More specifically, how would collective aesthetic experience be understood when the very nature of Brazilian collectivity was itself in question?
Artists and architects discussed include Flavio de Carvalho, Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Joao Batista Vilanova Artigas, Lina Bo Bardi, Waldemar Cordeiro, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Helio Oiticica.
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