Importing Abstraction: Neo-Concretism and the Historical Avant-Garde

Does the concept of an avant-garde aesthetic, valid in Europe or the United States, have equal validity in an underdeveloped country like Brazil?

Ferreira Gullar, Avant-Garde and Underdevelopment (1969)

Abstract art existed before there were any Brazilian abstract artists, so when they did appear it is unsurprising that critics should have accused them of being derivative. After attending the fourth São Paulo Biennial in 1957, where he encountered the latest Concretist works by artists such as Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, and Hélio Oiticica, the then-director of the MoMA Alfred H. Barr Jr. described what he saw as mere “diagrams” and “Bauhaus exercises,” prompting the Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa to quip that perhaps Mr. Barr would have left more satisfied had the paintings been filled up with flocks of parrots.[1] Still, opposition issued from within the Brazil art scene, too. In a series of impassioned attacks published during the 1950s, the renowned figurative painter Emiliano di Cavalcanti charged the Concretists with uncritically importing forms from abroad. Known for his efforts to produce an art totally devoid of European influence, di Cavalcanti saw in this new wave of abstract artworks “monstrous visions of amoebic or atomic residues, microscopically revealed by sick minds.”[2] But when di Cavalcanti exhibited his own work at the second São Paulo Biennial in 1953, a foreign member of the jury—the English art historian Herbert Read, no less—intervened to insist that the national painting prize be given, not to di Cavalcanti, as was originally planned, but to Alfredo Volpi, whose work drew directly from European modernism. Reflecting back on the incident in 2001, the poet Décio Pignatari noted that after this moment Volpi became an object of admiration among the Brazilian Concretists, despite the views of those critics who, “in the American fashion,” categorized him as simply a “painter of buntings.”[3]

These examples illustrate a predicament that is neither limited to the plastic arts nor specific to Brazil, but which is objectively imposed upon peripheral countries by the asymmetrical structure of the world market. Impressing some as original, striking others as imitation, the history of Brazilian Concretism presupposes vanguard movements in Europe, even while it breaks with the sequence of European modernism as such. The problem is analogous to that which Roberto Schwarz had discerned in the importation of the novel to Brazil, as a result of which the imagination of Brazilian novelists “became fixed on a form whose presuppositions were not to be found in the country, or were to be found in an altered way.” [4] In the case of the avant-garde, however, the logic is a different one, no less disjunctive, for the European vanguards set out to attack art as an institution, one of whose principal representatives was the bourgeois form of the novel. What are the political and artistic problems to which the European avant-garde poses a historical solution, and how do these presuppositions fare when taken up in the periphery, where foreign forms are always affirmed improperly, skewed and distorted as part of the systemic misplacement of ideas?

In the late nineteenth century cult of l’art pour l’art, the institutional separation between art and life became the political content of the work itself, emblematized by Flaubert’s aspiration to write “a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style.”[5] This aestheticist conception of the artwork as an autonomous sphere marooned from exterior constraints was a historical response to the brutal repression of popular revolutions in Europe around 1848, after which date the bourgeoisie was forced to confront the particularity of its own class interests. Through an inversion duly noted by Marx in his political writings, the “fireworks” of liberal-Romantic rhetoric were unveiled as the “incendiary rockets” of state power.[6] The clavis aurea of bourgeois ideology was now revealed to be class ressentiment masquerading as egalitarian humanism, resulting in what Lukács diagnosed as “a decisive alteration in class groupings and in class attitudes to all important questions of social life.”[7] Artists responded to this historical impasse by privileging technique over opinion and objectivity over expression, symbolically resolving the crisis of bourgeois confidence by fetishizing the work of art. This aestheticist turn is amply registered by the various literary innovations of the time, from Flaubert’s impersonality to Zola’s scientific objectivity, from Henry James’s experiments with point of view to Dostoevsky’s fragmented first-person singular.[8] The period also witnesses a historically new disruption of the conventions of meaning in easel painting, with figures like Cézanne and Manet challenging the perspective of the beholder in a way that indexes the broader crisis in social subjectivity.[9]

The décalage that takes place in Europe in the early twentieth century has to do with the radical overhaul of aestheticism’s claim to self-legislating detachment. According to Peter Bürger’s classic account, the historical avant-gardes of the 1910s and ’20s sought to reintegrate art into the praxis of life, thereby exploding the ideology of the autonomy of the aesthetic.[10] Rather than forge a new style of their own, one that might compete with or supersede previous traditions in art history, movements such as Dadaism and Constructivism liquidate the very possibility of period style by elevating the availability of artistic means to a principle of the composition. A paradigmatic example is Theo van Doesburg’s 1930 Manifesto for Concrete Art, which envisions a mechanical and exact painterly aesthetic in which the plastic elements of the work itself—line, shape, light, color, space—acquire self-referential independence.[11] Throughout the 1940s and ’50s, the Swiss artist and designer Max Bill doubled down on the mathematical aspects of art concret—the science of relationality, the calculation of proportion—which had still been for Mondrian part of his pantheistic mysticism.[12] A former student at the Bauhaus, Bill garnered a significant following in Brazil, where the São Paulo-based Grupo Ruptura artists took up his rationalistic theory of artistic form.[13] “Colour is over,” claimed Waldemar Cordeiro, suggesting instead that there are no human emotions that cannot be expressed in black and white.[14] But during the late 1950s a group of carioca artists began to distance themselves from Bill’s mathematical rationalism with a new, intuitionist approach to non-figurative abstraction.

Schooled in the same traditions as their paulista confrères, though adding a prefix to consecrate their distance, the Neo-Concretists held that the geometric tendencies of Concretism had been taken to “|a dangerously rationalist extreme,” one that imprisons the work of art within a “mechanistic concept of construction.”[15] By contrast, artists like Clark, Oiticica, and Lygia Pape were less interested in mathematical theories of artistic composition than they were in the expressive means through which works come to transcend them. Buttressed by the phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Susanne K. Langer, Neo-Concretism superseded the impasse of formalism in 1950s Brazilian aesthetics by returning to the expressive qualities of works by painters like Malevich and Mondrian, of whose projects it positioned itself as the historical completion. By 1959, the Neo-Concretists were openly declaring that “artists operating in a developing nation more completely fulfilled the ideas and praxis of the historical avant-garde than did the earlier artists themselves.”[16] However, the twin insistence on inheritance and usurpation only reinscribes the derivative logic that is supposed to have been overcome, for to telescope artistic developments between core and periphery into a linear narrative of progression is to elide the culture of dependency that introduces a separation between them. The task of the critic should rather be to discover the means through which the negative dialectical relationship with models in Europe is rearticulated internally as a moment of the form. Far from doing away with the matrix of derivation, such an interpretation would take belatedness to be an objective problem immanent to the construction of the work itself, not an external imposition that might be overcome by deprovincializing one’s perspective.

Prima facie, Lygia Clark’s painting series Planos em superfície modulada (1954–58) seems to derive from more or less contemporary experiments by artists associated with the Bauhaus tradition, such as the German artist Josef Albers’s Structural Constellation (1954), and indeed critics were wont to read her work in this way at the time: through the lens of derivation. However, notwithstanding the obvious similarity, which is more of a reference than a shortcoming, there is a key difference between the two works that speaks to the artistic originality of Neo-Concretism. Whereas the Albers piece maintains the picture plane in order to manipulate the possibilities of representational space, Clark attacks the distinction between figure and ground by carving the lines separating the shapes directly into the plywood. The result is an inversion whereby line is no longer a constructive element appearing against a more or less stable background, but a destructive presence that introduces negative space into the work by rupturing the unity of form. This transformation of the mark from figure into ground lures the beholder into the material substrate only to deliver back to them the thingliness of painting itself, as if the artwork were becoming conscious of itself as an object of artistic judgment. Yet, because Structural Constellation already embodies the Concretist reduction of art to its constituent elements, Clark’s advance consists of a more deliberate retreat, materializing the objectivity of the artwork by concretizing the logic of abstraction. Gullar’s name for this implosive procedure was the “non-object,” which describes how works of art supersede their material support via formal means immanent to the works themselves.[17] Examples proliferate in the output of other Neo-Concretists, such as Hélio Oiticica’s Metaesquemas (1956–58), where the oblong tessellation of shapes is painted directly onto the board, so that the interstices between the spaces, as well as the hollows within the shapes themselves, pull the material substrate into the sphere of meaning. The resulting tension between figure and ground, or between objecthood and signification, allows the thingly aspect of the work to insist through the painterly surface.[18] Negating figural intention by positivizing the work’s material support, non-objects ratify what might otherwise be read as a nonsensical statement from the early Benjamin: ‘There is no background in painting, nor is there any graphic line.’[19]

Formalizing the problem of belatedness via the technique of negative space, Neo-Concretism would seem to find itself in a similar predicament to that which Bürger identified in the neo-avant-gardes of the 1950s and ’60s.[20] While Neo-Dadaist works by artists such as Jasper Johns and Yves Klein, or the monochrome paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, may reiterate the historical avant-garde’s call to abolish the distinction between art and life, they do so without the latter’s revolutionary orientation, for the means through which such a sublation might be achieved have become institutionalized in the interval. In this way, the passage from “historical” to “neo-” converts avant-gardiste protest into the form of its opposite: if, in the 1910s, Duchamp’s Urinoir still implied the destruction of art as an institution, to exhibit a stone pipe in a gallery in the 1960s is to demand that institution’s recognition. The upshot of this trajectory is a disabling antinomy: experiments with form lead to the abolition of art, but to abolish art would mean curtailing these formal experiments. As Daniel Spaulding has argued, this forestalled path towards self-abolition parallels the trajectory of the early twentieth-century workers’ movement.[21] From this perspective, modernist forms like pictorial abstraction can be seen to mediate the internal limits of “programmatist” politics, in which the proletariat’s struggles to affirm itself as a class run up against the realization that a true revolution would necessitate the proletariat’s own abolition. By the mid-century mark, this revolutionary sequence had culminated in a spectacular set of defeats: “of workers’ identity, of communist parties, of unionism; of self-management, self-organisation and autonomy.”[22] The claim that neo-avant-gardiste attempts at reinventing modernist forms lack a radical horizon is thus not mere arbitrary theorizing, as some critics have suggested, but rather a recognition of the fact that the utopian objectives of the historical avant-garde are withdrawn as a possibility by the epochal reorganization of the capital-labor relation, or else perverted beyond recognition through political developments like Soviet state socialism.[23] In Spaulding’s words, “the destiny of the avant-garde was tied to revolution’s failure” (Spaulding, “Value-Form”).

Although theoretically cogent and politically engagé, this periodization does not easily translate into the peripheries of the world-system, where cycles of struggle are typically either belated or premature, divergent or prophetic. Realiter, the downward sequence from historical to neo-avant-garde, is mirrored in reverse when taken up in Brazil: instead of a deflation of radical energies, Neo-Concretism rides the promise of a future class rapprochement between the national elite, the working class, and the landless peasantry.[24] During this phase of developmental populism, the Kubitschek (1956–61) and Goulart (1961–64) administrations seemed to be gravitating towards a socialist alternative. But high levels of debt and rising inflation presented the swelling populist movement with a decision: either integrate with foreign capital or fundamentally restructure class relations at home. In pursuing the latter option, the left sought alliance with the national bourgeoisie and progressive industrialists, who were of course unwilling to consent to large-scale social transformation. Unable to marshal a viable revolutionary subject, the left mistakenly believed that socialism might be achieved without radical changes to existing property relations, which was, incidentally, precisely the dilemma of programmatism in Europe. The military coup of 1964 thus met with little resistance from the left, who were able to maintain cultural hegemony until the hardening of the regime in 1969, at which point many artists and intellectuals were forced to emigrate to Europe. As Nicholas Brown writes, Neo-Concretism, which climaxes in 1961 with Gullar’s sensational call to hold a terrorist exhibition in which the movement would blow up all its existing works, “came to an end in a moment of pre-revolutionary ferment and post-coup disillusionment” (Brown, “How Did Neo-Concretism End?”, 300). Contemporaneous with the neo-avant-garde, which repeats the historical avant-garde without the same radical intention, but sharing the latter’s revolutionary orientation, though in a fundamentally different social context, Neo-Concretism is both beyond and between the canonical distinction made by Bürger.

Notes