Brazil’s Body and Soul
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York is cloaked in black. The inner walls of Frank Lloyd Wright's rotunda, built in 1956-59 on 5th Avenue, were exceptionally darkly painted to emphasize the spirituality and magic of Brazilian art. The organizers of the exhibition, planned for two years, had no idea what effect it would evoke in today's mournful New York.
The exhibition provides an overview of the Western world's little-accessed entwining of the physical and spiritual consciousness of Brazilian multiculturalism. It integrates performance, music, and film disciplines, essential for expressing ritual-liturgical traditions. Two key phases of Brazilian development dominate: the Baroque period and the contemporary era of creation.
The urgent missionary work of the 17th and early 19th centuries significantly influenced the entire Latin American world. The dramatic complex of the 18th-century Baroque altar dominates a monumental display of 350 works. The altar, transported to New York from the São Bento monastery in Olinda, in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, became the pride of the exhibition and the city, as objects from this period are rare. Dutch artist Frans Post, with his European-style tropical landscapes, represents the presence of European artists during colonization. The most prominent sculptor and architect of the time was O Aleijadinho (1738-1814) in the gold mining region of Minas Gerais. Baroque sculptures from Latin America depict dramatized figures in the European style. Deep realism is often depicted with actual clothing, real hair, and glass eyes, particularly impressive in liturgical processions. The gestures of the figures are often more expressive than in less passionate Europe, reflecting a blend of theatrical and spiritual nature in Latin American art. The exhibition is complemented by ritual liturgical objects and intimate devotional altars made by significant artists such as Frei Agostinho da Piedade in the 17th century and Manuel Inacio da Costa and Francisco Xavier de Brito in the late 18th-century Rococo period.
The fact that Brazil is a multicultural territory requires a comprehensive display of all the ethnic expressions included in it. Examples of indigenous artists' work include feather cloaks, masks, and other body ornaments belonging to people from the Amazon or Caribbean coast, still used today. The most interesting artifacts are those that intertwine the influence of the Catholic Church with local religious traditions and their fusion into new consciousness. So-called "milagros" (miracles) are small wooden representations of body parts given by believers to saints in exchange for healing on the corresponding part of the body.
Other curiosities from recent history include "carrancas." Dramatic wooden carvings of lion heads were attached to ships and served to repel enemies. They appear somewhat harsher than their well-known European counterparts. Carrancas come from the northern region of Brazil, from the São Francisco River area, and were used there in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
African influence, brought by the importation of slaves to the South American continent around 1850, changed traditional aesthetics and religiosity during adaptation to the new socio-cultural context. They brought with them a high level of expertise in jewelry making, which further developed mainly among slaves around the largest Brazilian gold mine, Minas Gerais. The exhibited gold jewelry was owned by slaves and is evidence of African beliefs and resistance to European hegemony in Brazil.
The strong penetration of culturally conditioned ideas surprises with depictions of local saints with dark skin (for example, Saint Elesbão), installed in special churches for slaves. Sculptures by Geraldo Teles de Oliveira were carved from tree trunks into arabesque compositions of human figures. Plump, colorful wooden statues by Maurino Araúja and other artists like Agnolo Manoel dos Santos are further evidence of Afro-Brazilian art. The art of contemporary artist Mestre Didi is key to understanding the phenomenon of Afro-Brazilian art as a whole. His ritual scepter, made of plant materials, leather, straw, and other materials, communicates the manifestation of Yoruba spirits and their connection to ancient cosmological myths. Like Didi, most contemporary artists seek to express the still-living ancient culture.
The importance of indigenous nations, African roots, and the Baroque period was rediscovered by artists of the Pau-Brasil and Antropofagia movements in the 1920s and 1930s. Tarsila do Amaral, Anita Malfatti, Victor Brecheret, and Candido Portinari are just a few of the artists interested in suppressed identity. The 1950s saw the construction of the new utopian capital Brasília and the creation of the São Paulo Biennale. The era inspired artists such as Sérgio Camargo, Lygia Clark, and Franz Weissman towards concretism and neo-concretism, which lasted until the 1970s.
A group of selected contemporary artists represents some of the new artistic strategies in today's Brazilian art. Arthur Bispo do Rosario (*1911) represented Brazil at the Venice Biennale in 1995. In his "presentation mantle," he plans to present himself to God on the Day of Judgment. In the ritual carnival decoration on the cloak, he stitched hundreds of names of his acquaintances, who will represent him before God. Cloaks and masks have been tools of theatrical disguise with spiritual purposes since ancient times. They are used in this way by Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape in their contemporary works of participatory art. The viewer becomes a co-actor here, putting on a mask or throwing on a cloak and participating in physical activities such as dance, which, according to the artists, enhances the connection between people. In this sense, carnival must also be understood.
Vik Muniz collects remnants from carnival processions and creates portraits of children from them, which he then photographs (Aftermath 1998). A series of video works and installations (by
Antonio Manuel, Regina Silveira) represent the trends in contemporary Brazilian art and the effort to integrate into the Western context. However, these examples lack the expressive power of
tangible media, which are essential for expressing Brazilian consciousness.
The exhibition, which is the largest project ever undertaken by the Guggenheim Museum, is part of the international presentation of Brazil "Brazil Connects the World," in which several museums in Brazil, England, France, and the USA participated from 2001 to 2002. The exhibition will be open until January 27th. There are plans to construct a new Guggenheim branch in Brazil following the one in Bilbao, Spain. The Guggenheim also expands its activities for public education. Therefore, on November 1st, the educational center The Sackler Center for Arts Education was inaugurated, where educational programs in the visual arts, performance, and literature will be conducted.
Gabriela Jurosz-Landa