Opening this week I believe, or next weekend, at the MCA. We plan to go check it out.
The lasting impression of Tropicalia movement
Before Tropicalia grew into one of the most significant artistic and cultural movements in the history of Brazil, it was a moment.
The moment came in 1967, when a group of artists launched a quest for the meaning of Brazilian identity in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. One of those artists, Helio Oiticica, called his installation “Tropicalia” -- a word that, the following year, became the title of one of the most famous Brazilian pop albums featuring Caetano Veloso and others.
By the end of 1968, Tropicalia expanded into a loosely organized cultural phenomenon whose major theme was Brazil's confident eclecticism, which was producing a distinctive hybrid style in music, visual art, literature, theater, film, architecture, fashion, food and advertising. Although its heyday lasted only until 1972, when many of its greatest proponents had been imprisoned or forced into exile by the Brazilian military dictatorship, Tropicalia is influencing a new generation of artists there.
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update 1018/05: Ezra Klein has more on what one of the main Tropicalia founders is up to now, namely open source!
This fascinating chapter of Brazilian history is the focus of what promises to be one of the highlights of the Chicago art season: “Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture,” a wide-ranging exhibit that runs Oct. 22-Jan. 8 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, after which it will tour to London; Lisbon, Portugal, and New York.“It was not an organized movement like, say, early Cubism,” says Carlos Basualdo, a Baltimore-based art writer who has curated the exhibit in collaboration with MCA's Julia Rodrigues Widholm. “The conversation happened among a number of people across disciplines, but they didn't set themselves up to work collectively with a manifesto.”
What was this “conversation” about? No less than the nature of what it meant to be Brazilian in a time of cultural upheaval that had followed the country's military coup in 1964. The new right-wing government was nationalist, “purist” and closely connected to Brazil's Portuguese roots; the Tropicalists, as they came to be called, were internationalist and receptive to a wide variety of influences, including those of the country's indigenous and Afrocentric populations.
“The Tropicalists were talking about the possibility of rethinking the Brazilian identity as an open process, and how that would be reflected in their work,” Basualdo says. “They combined an appetite for foreign influences with the confidence in their capacity to metabolize them and produce something that was not derivative but, rather, very much their own. It was an extremist collage aesthetic.”
And that makes “Tropicalia” relevant to the current state of contemporary art practice in the United States, Widholm says. “This kind of cultural cannibalism, in which you're combining multiple sources of influence and trying to come up with a completely new form, is something that we see a lot today.”
The MCA exhibit features major works from the 1967 exhibition -- include those of Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Antonio Dias and Lygia Pape -- as well as a survey of films, excerpts of concerts by Tropicalist musicians, fashion, theater set designs and models and drawings by the Italian-born architect Lina Bo Bardi, who spent much of her career in Brazil.
In addition, the legacy of Tropicalia will be reflected in a series of works by younger musicians and artists, including Arto Lindsay, Ernesto Neto, Rivane Neuenschwander and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.
“Tropicalia is over,” Basualdo says, “but Tropicalia is victorious.”
Tags: Arts
