- Venue
- The Barbican
- Location
- London
Initially published by Round Table Review (now defunct) in 2006
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 one staff member (a Lorena) at the Barbican for confirming that this was in fact permitted and facilitating the process of putting the things on. Once gimped-up, the impact of all-round 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 is unnaturally cold outside in March when I visit the Tropicália exhibition, which contrasts strongly with feelings evoked and thoughts about being somewhere hot, of equatorial climates and the associated cliches. I was reminded of once being abducted and driven around, at gunpoint, for hours in Venezuela but released later because the captors noticed my Irish passport. Abstrusely, that left a warm impression too. Still I cannot really imagine Brazil, nor what it is like to be Brazilian, so in a basic way the exhibition is educational. Artefacts do operate as storage mechanisms, a supplement to history books say.
There is a lot to get through at this show. Navigating Oiticica’s installation on its own would be enough. There are live macaws downstairs! Upstairs I discover Nelson Leirner’s “O Porco” (The Pig). Pigs work well as art subject-matter. Paul McCarthy’s simulated one, displayed at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the period before, is another example. 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?”. Those kind of art games would appear pretentious now but the piece has other things going for it. O Porco amounts to a large stuffed pig, chained to a chunk of bacon, in a wooden crate. Leirner pre-empts Damien Hurst’s use of livestock to the tune of a few decades. Unlike the macaws, the pig is dead but its radical displacement, and inappropriateness, brings it to life. A dialogue can be conducted with O Porco. And, as with McCarthy’s Mechanical Pig, one effect is that it is impossible to look at a pig in the same again.
Ernesto Neto’s drooping mesh of stockings, embroidery and beads compare with something Eva Hesse might have produced. “That’s The Law” is concerned with the problem of vision, the law of gravity, how things are trapped. Not necessarily in a negative sense. 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 an, at times nihilistic, arguably post-modern attitude in relation to oppression.
The term Interactive is overused and lazily used but new media and technology artists would benefit from a visit to Tropicália. Here the interactivity is achieved via low-tech approaches. I haven’t addressed the Tropicália music scene (which is how it is primarily understood), nor mentioned the films, the performances, nor looked at other obvious frameworks (relating to sexual transgression and liberation for example). Tropicália was overwhelming and remains difficult to define but, looked at now, was definitely (unknowingly) ahead of its time.
