Skipping stages. From constructivism in architecture and in poetry to the digital media: searching for parameters to understand the emerging media and the formation of a specialized audience in Brazil

Abstract

Skipping stages searches for parameters that clarify the current production in art and technology and the formation of a specific audience in Brazil. Parameters that can be found in the parallelism between the social-economic situation and the aesthetic resolutions; and in the reflection on the artistic formats of the bases of material production, mainly those related to the country’s industrialization. The present article is supported by the modernist project of architecture and of constructivist poetry and by their respective theoretical models. The current effervescence is due to the recent initiatives in São Paulo: VideoBrasil, Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica, FILE, Itaúlab, Emoção Art.ficial, Prêmio Cultural Sergio Motta de Tecnologia; and in Rio de Janeiro: the electronic magazine Canal Contemporâneo, Centro Cultural Telemar; and to the countless theses and dissertations in the area of art and technology of the Post-Graduation programmes, such as the Communication and Semiotics programme of the Catholic University of São Paulo (PUCSP). But it is also due to the mechanisms that were implemented in the 1950s, as the Bienal de São Paulo, which disseminated the avant-garde and formed the audience of the arts. In addition to these mechanisms of the past, there is the artistic oxygenation provided by theorists and artists who have recently come to Brazil from Europe, like Mário Pedrosa, and by visitors like Max Bill, who imprinted their view on the country, making the local debate flourish. Besides, there are the foreigners who lived in our country and who were important in the universities as opinion makers, like Vilém Flusser, who worked at the School of Communication and Arts (ECA) of the University of São Paulo (USP), and at Armando Álvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP). The local artists contributed to the international constructivist scenario despite the impediments to the creation process, such as the peripheral country’s difficulty in having access to cultural goods, the limited resources, and the precarious conditions of material production. The kinetic and minimalist anticipations of the Latin American artists are remarkable, specially those of Abraham Palatnik, the multisensory artistic propositions of Ligia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, and the investments that founded a computer art among us, undertaken by Waldemar Cordeiro. It is a fact that concrete poetry was on a par with the most avant-garde productions in the international scenario, overcoming the local technical difficulties. But the mental imagery characteristics respond to a more remote pre-industrial past of colonial Brazil. “The Brazilian mental imagery is essentially Jesuitical and baroque” (MAMMI 1995). Nevertheless, according to Frederico de Morais, “Brazil, that had a baroque root, was impregnated with Le Corbusier’s rationalism” (MORAIS 1979, p. 84). Thus, the information and formation of the artists and of the audience followed many trends that were, sometimes, confused.