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Between Contexts: Cabelo and Jarbas Lopes in transit through the world |
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Cabelo and Jarbas Lopes are artists, Brazilians, from the same generation, with a body of work at once individual and jointly collaborative that configures a specifically Brazilian artistic phenomenon: a kind of cultural ‘cannibalism’, stripped of the prejudices of modernism, a blend of performance, music, installations and popular elements combined with a vitality that ultimately qualifies the intensity of their work.
Miguel von Hafe Pérez presents here for the first time in Spain a specific project by Cabelo for the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica. It is for this reason that we are publishing a text giving a brief introduction to the context within which the two have emerged. |
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If in parallel with this we bear in mind that these itineraries were constructed at the height of the so-called military dictatorship of 1964, we make the scenario even denser, precisely to the extent to which it was constructed on a series of vital paradoxes that continue to surprise the panorama of the art Brazilian art scene. The spectre of uncertainty as to a specifically Brazilian identity was constructed as a fundamental matrix of the first modernism —that is to say, of the first modernist deviation— that structures a whole tradition of postcolonial cultural reconciliation, together with that precursor of postmodernism we mentioned above:
‘In 1924 the poet Oswald de Andrade proclaimed himself “against the copy, and in favour of invention and surprise”. It may be that Brazilian art is like the Brazilian character, like Macunaíma, the eponymous hero of Mário de Andrade’s rhapsodic novel; in other words, perhaps it is like that kind of hero without a character, which I would say is a critically problematizing way of discussing their specificity on the basis of the degree zero of the formation of their cultural identity. In a play of words in which the Shakespearian dilemma is confounded with the name of one of Brazil’s major indigenous peoples, Oswald de Andrade declared synthetically in his Manifesto of 1928: ‘Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. Tupi, or not Tupi, that is the question.’ |
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| Jarbas Lopes.Troca Troca, 2003 |
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There are many Brazils. Brazil is a nation of illiterate television-watchers. Brazil invented the debate and the term ‘postmodern art’ (the postmodern condition was discussed in 1966 by the critic Mário Pedrosa, complete with motifs, arguments and philosophical substrata similar to those that occupied European and North-American thinkers in the 1970s and 1980s). Pedrosa, in Rio de Janeiro, was speaking in the ghetto, which means that he was not speaking for the world. It is strange, but Brazil started and then moved on from the debate on postmodernism before Europe, but above all before considerable sections of its population arrived at modernity with literacy. [...]
‘It was the Europeans and North-Americans who “Latin-Americanized” Brazilian art. We suffered fear, suspicion and anxiety. We worried in case our bananas would be taken as precedents of some banana republic. There were those who would have preferred us to be “universal”, a kind of half-breed offspring of Western reason. Why so much fear?” |
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| Jarbas Lopes. Detall d’un dibuix, 2004 |
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“ Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically.
Philosophically. Tupi, or not Tupi, that is the question.” |
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Untainted by that fear, because alien to much of the sterile discussion that feeds the little world of art that they constantly parody and short-circuit, the artists that concern us here, Jarbas Lopes (Nova Iguaçu, Rio de Janeiro, 1964) and Cabelo (Cachoeiro de Itapemirim, 1967) commenced their respective creative itineraries at a point in time when the brand name ‘Brazil’ had already gained a very particular specific weight in the international art context. The fact is that if the Euro-American arts system, with its economic and symbolic interests, is starting systematically to include figures from that country in its ‘official calendar’, it is striking to note the situation of many artists who scrape a living in a domestic art circuit that is in many cases impoverished while at the |
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same time enjoying an ever greater importance outside their native land. Jarbas Lopes and Cabelo mark out their position in the current scene on the basis of an immersion in popular culture that is consanguineous with a conscious interaction with the erudite universe of contemporary art. However, they do not do so with an excessively mythic vision of the de-hierarchizing of the high culture vs. low culturemodels of agitation, but because it is in the flux of a poetic experience of the everyday that they find the principal reason for practices that multiply, chameleon-like, into design, performance, writing, music, installation and, in a register that can never be emphasized too strongly, the creation of a space of transverse joviality that combines the ephemerality of the casual encounter, street poetry, the urban utopia as a form of vital resistance in the complex game of physical and emotional survival that a city like Rio de Janeiro entails. This libertarian imaginary is evident in Jarbas Lopes’ work in the action Troca-Troca (2002), in which he swapped pieces of different coloured cars (the famous ‘fuscas’) and thus counterpointed a personal vision of something anonymous and industrial in order to travel from Rio de Janeiro to the Museum in Curitiba with a group of friends on a journey in which the boundaries between the artistic and the non-artistic were viscerally blurred (on one of the many occasions when the retinue was stopped by the police, as the artist explains in the diary of the trip he published to coincide with his show at the Gasworks Gallery in London, he asked the officer if he knew what contemporary art was and received the reply ‘no, I don’t, but everyone knows what pure beauty is.’ The disconcerting question and answer takes us back to a dimension in which desire is superposed on existential angst. In other words, the research is not an end in itself but a motive for extending the pleasure of what is discovered. And what is discovered, in Cabelo’s words, takes in the myth of Orpheus, ‘the one who has the power to make a pathbetween the shadows and the light. For me this path is poetry itself. It makes me a mediator, someone who seeks the time when words were still betrothed to one another, someone who mixes the past and the future, the unconscious and everything that escapes chronological time. There are moments when I feel like a diver, when I penetrate into the viscera of society, breaking with the conventionally accepted gestures and structures like the word and the gesture.’The almost shamanic register of some of this artist’s performances proves particularly pertinent in a context that makes the street, with its contradictions,
its dramas, its missed opportunities, euphorias and banalities, the arena of chance encounters in which the unexpected can and does happen, where reason gives way before emotion.
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Both Jarbas Lopes and Cabelo, frequent accomplices in actions in which authorial status is relegated to the background, confront us with a world infinitely more complex than that which we rationally attempt to abstract from reason: because their dreams, their doubts, their experiences and their iconoclasm in general are vital testimony that the old maxim coined by Robert Filliou is still a acutely relevant: art is what makes life more interesting than art.
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| Cabelo. Erictonio peripatético, 2005, fotografia de la performance |
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Paulo Herkenhoff, Brazil/Brasis, in Ricardo Basbaum (org.), Arte Contemporânea Brazileira: texturas, dicções, ficções, estratégias, Rios Ambiciosos, Rio de Janeiro, 2001, pp. 360 & 362.
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