Associação Cultural Videobrasil

In the light of 30 years
by Cláudio Bueno

about Focus 8 of 18th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil's Public Programs

Introduction

This is an account of what was heard during 3 debate panels¹ held during the 18th Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil, as part of the public programs’ “focus 8," titled "In the Light of 30 Years."

The first panel, titled "Videobrasil + Expoprojeção + Zanini," featured Aracy Amaral, Cacilda Teixeira da Costa and Roberto Moreira, with Eduardo de Jesus as mediator. The speakers discussed landmark events in the history of video art in Brazil. The second meeting, "Exhibitions in Context," set out to discuss art exhibitions held over the past three decades and their connections with Festival Videobrasil. The panel featured the curators and researchers Ana Maria Maia and Daniela Labra, with Ana Pato as mediator. The third and final panel, titled "30 years: memories and updates," reviewed the major cycles of change undergone by the festival and its connections with the so-called geopolitical South. The panel featured Solange Farkas, Moacir dos Anjos, Eduardo de Jesus and Gabriel Priolli Netto. The mediator was Teté Martinho.

Next, the ideas debated in the panels will be rearranged into a new conversation, a new summary of the addresses, in no particular chronological order or combination.

Video art in Brazil, it does exist!²

Cacilda Teixeira da Costa kicked off the series of meetings with the address "Video-art at MAC, USP." She expounded on the actions held at the MAC, under the management of Walter Zanini, geared towards the insertion of video and the so-called "new media" into the Brazilian art scene. In the 1970s, despite the tentative character of these productions in Brazil, Zanini, with his unique energy, caused the scene to emerge and set it in motion.

In 1973, the curator showed the first video work ever in a Brazilian museum, a piece by the artist Fred Forest; he also represented Brazilian video artists internationally; in 1976, alongside Cacilda Teixeira and Marília Sabóia, he established the museum’s video department; organized technical courses, purchased a Portapak camera and made it available to artists in São Paulo; encouraged researchers like da Costa to dedicate themselves exclusively to art and technology; and hosted exhibits like Video-post and Vídeo MAC, among so many other actions.

All of this vital, fundamental energy directed towards the establishment of a circuit was interrupted in 1978, as Zanini unexpectedly departed from MAC USP and da Costa left to Rio de Janeiro. The work was halted and never resumed again, creating a huge historical gap for the museum and to the very history of video art, electronic art and digital art.  The museum had to be told once again: "Video art in Brazil, it does exist!" As noted by Eduardo de Jesus in one of his addresses, art historians still resist considering the influence of video and cinema in contemporary visual culture.

Also in 1973, São Paulo hosted the first-ever survey of Brazilian audiovisual production. It was the show "EXPOPROJEÇÃO"³ (1973),

curated by Aracy Amaral, and updated and reedited forty years later, in 2013, in partnership with Roberto Moreira. Amaral tells that at the time, an art show highlighting image in motion was a deviation from the norm in art production. Therefore, the curator did not want the new production to be featured in a gallery or museum. Thus, she proceeded to find an "alternative" venue near Melo Alves Street, in São Paulo. And in order to at least produce a catalog, she obtained sponsorship from bank Novo Mundo.

The idea for the show sprang from the understanding that many people were already working with Super 8, as opposed to conventional cinema; furthermore, Amaral had good international connections, and received collaborations from Antonio Dias (then living in Italy) and Hélio Oiticica (in New York). Due to its innovative character, the show was widely publicized in the press and the artists went about it very enthusiastically.

Roberto Moreira noted that the 40 years that separate the show from our days was one of the reasons that led the curators to rethink the history of Brazilian audiovisual. This was only made possible by Amaral’s thoroughness and historical vision: she kept many of the show’s documents in her archives, including a film by Raymundo Colares, correspondence with artists etc. Otherwise, there are no records of EXPOPROJEÇÃO (1973); the show was considered lost in history.

This concern with historicizing the exhibitions and archives of ephemeral, immaterial art practices like video, performance and broadcasts, is underscored by the researcher Ana Pato. Considering the complex policies of acquisition, preservation and obsolescence of their means of production, these artworks have remained on the outside of museums. Thus, Pato invites us to look into “minor” organizations that emerge around video and fulfill this role of preservation, as is the case with Videobrasil itself, the Electronic Arts Intermix, the Netherlands Media Art Institute and others. As mediator of the panel "Exhibitions in Context," the researcher also inquires about the time needed in order to criticize and historicize an exhibition. Such inquiry proves relevant in face of the fact that critics, curators and historians do not impart much attention to productions in non-traditional art media that bear strong connections with the present tense.

In response, Ana Maria Maia posits that in order for the length of the historian’s role to be shortened, in the fast times we live in, new mechanisms must be created to understand and discuss the present. She adds that even though some exhibitions do not require much time to “settle,” while others take time to “happen,” and thus need a longer wait before they become historically inscribed.

Taking charge of articulations with the present tense entails risks, in proportion to the creative power generated by discussing something at the time of its occurrence, still unstable, open, less contaminated and seminal.

In his text for the book celebrating Videobrasil’s 30^th anniversary, Eduardo de Jesus will explore this notion of present tense in the face of the close connection between video and performance. As the curator puts it, it is a dense present – one that does not pass fleetingly and is concentrated, for it is directly subjected to the moment of its presentation. This exploring of the present tense, inherent to the nature of video and performance, was also pointed out by da Costa on discussing 70s productions: "It was the only way. They would turn on the camera and stage the performance."

The highlight among the numerous examples listed by de Jesus in his speech was Otávio Donasci’s performance on occasion of the first edition of Festival Videobrasil, in 1983, titled "O cavaleiro do Apocalipse" (The horseman of the Apocalypse), which saw the artist go down Europa Ave. towards the MIS wearing a television set on his face. It was one of his videocreatures. This example made us realize the festival’s own connection with artworks of this nature (which would be revisited later, in the 15^th edition).

And the risk of the present tense, of wagers, suppositions and misgivings, is where the very history of Videobrasil has taken place. In 1983, the festival had its first edition at a time of political opening and growing audiovisual production, a time when the art scene was almost completely shut off to video.

Solange Farkas and Gabriel Priolli recall that throughout its first ten editions, the Videobrasil Festival intended to crack open gaps in the television system (a TV subordinated to military government). There existed the imminent desire to take television by storm and revolutionize it! The desire to critically combat the existing (mainstream) production via so-called "independent productions." It was all about a political and aesthetical revision of tradition. Priolli tells us of the importance of this moment, which took charge of the festival as the epicenter of debates that helped shape regulatory issues still in effect when it comes to the screening of cultural, educational and independent productions on Brazilian television. The 80s music scene, especially rock and roll, alongside the emergence of MTV, also played a key role in incorporating experimental audiovisual productions that contributed to modernize TV language.

Once the foundations to this experimental and political vocation had been laid, as Teté Martinho pointed out, the festival went on new paths, conversing ever more explicitly with the art field. It went international and started bringing to Brazil an expressive set of works by a new generation involved in video experimentation. It went biennial and focused on the so-called Southern geopolitical axis. In doing so, it helped permanently insert video in the art scene, embracing all media starting with the 17^th edition in 2011 – while still centering its focus on video.

The festival’s internationalization process began in the 10^th edition, although the idea had been hinted at in prior editions. This choice was based on needs such as: the festival’s desire to open up to new inputs and to the artists’ quest for insertion into the global art scene, which afforded legitimacy and visibility. There seemed to be a need for acknowledgement from the North, with no clear awareness of the value of local productions, and even of partnerships with countries in Africa and Latin America (an unresolved issue until this day).

Little publicized productions were sought after, ones that were in a kind of dark zone like ourselves. A long process aimed at creating new contexts for a centralizing art scene, empowering us gradually. In her speech, Farkas stresses the need to lay a foundation of work for exchange with Southern countries, and thus create a more equal relationship w the North (while not necessarily establishing a logic of opposition).

Because as Moacir dos Anjos has told us in a long text about the South’s issues, what makes art diverse is no longer the stationary conflict. Rather, the “art of the South” or “minor art” (as the curator tells us) is art that de-territorializes the hegemonic language and vocabulary. Thus being, this is not about an “alternative art," but rather about responding and resisting to the North’s pretensions. A disarrangement of the influential instances of “global art,” reinforced by academia, the major exhibitions etc. Therefore, this is about confronting subordinate conditions and thus revealing multiple accents that can indicate who is speaking, from whence in the world, from which position. In this way, symbolic legacies can come undone, as well as the pretensions of art that ambitions to be global, but is hegemonic.

Such hegemonic symbolic legacies are also denounced in the speech of curator Ana Maria Maia, who cites as a case in point the exhibition "Desvios de la deriva: experiências, travessias e morfologias," held in 2009 at the Reina Sofia Museum, curated by Lisette Lagnado and Maria Berrios. The show featured Brazil’s Flávio de Carvalho, Lina Bo Bardi and Sérgio Bernardes; Chile’s Roberto Matta, Juan Borchers and the group from Escola de Valparaíso; plus drawings by Le Corbusier.

Building on the anthropophagic metaphor without ruling out the hegemonic matrix, the exhibition sought to re-characterize the modern Latin American avant-garde. In other words, artworks like Flávio de Carvalho’s revealed, in the exhibition venue, the experimental drives that emerged in Latin America, originating global concepts such as "drift," oft associated with the "Situationist International." Another example is the drawings made by "Le Corbusier" during a visit to South America in 1929. Through these drawings, the exhibition pointed us towards the French/Swiss architects’ influences being affected by the landscapes of the South. Thus, Le Corbusier went from influencer to influenced; and Flávio de Carvalho was featured in an European museum as a pioneer and a major artist. For her part, the curator Ana Maria Maia takes to regarding exhibitions as powerful places for telling and challenging stories, allowing one to position oneself in face of the geopolitical field that art organizes globally. No longer as other, but taking a place of speech.

This process of internationalization and legitimization of contemporary Brazilian art in the European and North American realms is also the subject of Daniela Labra’s studies. In her research, Labra observes how Brazilian contemporary art is received and critically interpreted in curatorial texts. She therefore asks herself where the new and old clichés are and how an international Brazilian art gets built. In her speech, Labra lists some of the landmark historic events of the late 80s and early 90s (fall of the Berlin Wall, end of Southern Cone dictatorships, among others) as drivers of an imperialist revision. These have allegedly led to the inclusion and recognition of peripheries; the fascination with the aesthetic of the other; the exoticization of other (precarious) modernities; and the inclusion of ethnic minorities in the art world (authorized by their legitimizer, who at once detects the failure of the hegemonic cultural model).

Finally, Teté Martinho inquires Solange Farkas about the continuation/relevance of a program that values the geopolitical South, to which Videobrasil’s director and curator confirms the need to go on establishing stronger, more equal connections between the countries and their art institutions.

____________________
¹ All panels can be viewed in full on Channel VB, available here.
² Expression uttered by Walter Zanini, in the introduction to the video art exhibition held at MIS (Museum of Image and Sound in São Paulo) by the artist Roberto Aguilar, with advisory from Marília Sabóia.
³ Expoprojeção 1973-2013: click here to download the exhibition catalog.