INTERFACE

REVIEW

Tropicalia

The Barbican, London
13 February - 22 May 2006

Reviewed by: Michea(fada)l (pronounced Mehall) O'Connell (a.k.a. Mocksim) »

Saussure, Derrida and others may have questioned it but the received view remains that words have reasonably specific meanings.  And the word Tropicália, the title of the current exhibition at The Barbican, according to Helio Oiticica, meant “the cry of Brazil to the world”.  In their bumpf Tropicália is described as revisiting “the energy and excitement of late Sixties and early Seventies Brazil”, Tropicália was “the title for one of the most celebrated albums in Brazilian music history” and so on.  Basically Tropicália is difficult to pin down: It appears to mean almost everything which happened, on the artistic front, in Brazil, during a certain period.  Plus judging by the quantity of more contemporary material on display at this exhibition the term also covers a lot of what’s gone on since.

Still, despite the breath and vagueness of the title, governments felt the need to expel exponents of Tropicália: participants in the movement were treated as subversives.  Maybe they feared Tropicália precisely because it was so chaotic and difficult to define: this signified a new idea about freedom.  The traditional Left, the main enemy for the autocracy (which took power in 1964 and stayed there for two decades) might be more easily comprehended.

The creation of an almost, but not quite, claustrophobic effect is part of the repertoire of Tropicália’s best-known exponent, Hélio Oiticica.  Ligia Clark’s suits made primarily of plastic or rubber-based materials offer a similar but amplified version of that experience.  What is generally called Interactive Art can be problematic, one dimensional, even intimidating but here certain pieces seduce the participant in a manner which is unassuming.   Clark’s stifling, fetishistic, smelly outfits are good examples of this: they call to be worn.  But thanks also to Lorena at the Barbican for confirming that this was in fact permitted and facilitating the process of putting the things on.  Once fully gimped-up, the impact of all-around closeness and the blocking of peripheral vision is heightened by the qualities of the synthetic fabrics and particular materials employed.  Those less-frequently exploited of the senses for odor and touch play a bigger role.  In the mind one focuses, not on what is far-away but on one’s own compliance with what is far-away.  Oppression, for example, might be an illusion.  This, at first glance, appears very different to say Marxist notions about reality and truth but could be construed as another way of framing the same set of circumstances.  While any dictatorship wields a brutal apparatus, all of them rely on a mass of people being blind to that power or too familiar with it or unaware of their own capacity to make freedom.

It was unnaturally cold outside in March when I visited the Tropicália which meant that I was affected, to a greater degree than might be expected, by irrational thoughts about equatorial countries, humid atmospheres and generally the idea of heat.  I have a soft spot for South America too, was once abducted at gunpoint in Venezuela but released later because the captors liked my Irish passport.  Still I cannot really imagine Brazil or what it is like to be Brazilian so, I hate to admit it but, the exhibition for me was certainly educational.  Artifacts, despite their absurdity, do operate as a kind of concentrated information, more useful than history books say.

If you saw everything that there was to see at Tropicália, did all that there was to do here, you’d go mad.   Navigating Oiticica’s installation on its own might be enough.  There are live macaws downstairs and upstairs I discovered Nelson Leirner’s “O Porco” (The Pig).  Pigs make great art-objects.  Paul McCarthy’s simulated one was displayed Whitechapel recently and that was fantastic too.  No time or space to explain why now so forget objectivity: it just was.  Amusingly when O Porco was first accepted for display in 1967 Leirner himself demanded to know why.  He wrote to the jury asking "which criteria did the critics use to admit this work to the Brasilia Salon?”.  Of course art is just another pretentious game but this piece goes beyond that.  O Porco consists of a large stuffed pig, chained to a chunk of bacon, in a wooden crate.  It seems astonishing for its time, pre-empting Damien Hurst’s use of livestock by decades. Unlike the macaws, the pig is dead but the piece comes to life partly because of its radical displacement, its apparent inappropriateness.  What is art?  I don’t really know but felt able to a conduct a dialogue with O Porco.  One effect of witnessing McCarthy’s Mechanical Pig recently and then this one is that to look at a pig in the same again becomes impossible.

Ernesto Neto’s drooping mesh of stockings, embroidery and beads evoke memories of that Eva Hesse show at Tate Modern in 2003.  “That’s The Law” is concerned with the problem of vision, the law of gravity, how things are trapped.  It’s not negative though, at all.  And the best experiences at Tropicália render into existence uncomfortable truths regarding limitations, morality or what playwright and politician Augusto Boal called “the cop in the head”.  The Tropicália movement represented a nihilistic or post-modern attitude in relation to oppression and in that sense, now, it seems old hat, like punk, but nevertheless absolutely vivid.

With the general overuse and misunderstanding of the term Interactivity it ought to be compulsory for new media and technology artists to visit Tropicália.  Tropicália’s interactivity is highly effective and is achieved through low-tech or even no-tech approaches.  I haven’t addressed the music scene at all, nor the films, the performances, the sheer sex in it because that makes the review as overwhelming as the exhibition.  Of course if Tropicália is too much then that’s a problem of your making.

Writer detail:

Google Mocksim to find out more

m@mocksim.co.uk| www.mocksim.org

Venue detail:
The Barbican
Barbican Centre Silk Street London EC2Y 8DS

www.barbican.org.uk/tropicalia/home 

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