Form and Feeling - by Antonio Sergio Bessa (Paperback)

About the Book

A significant contribution on the development and aftermath of post-World War II Concretism in Brazil

Book Synopsis

Winner, 2022 Association of University Presses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Scholarly Illustrated Category

A significant contribution on the development and aftermath of post-World War II Concretism in Brazil

Form and Feeling features a collection of essays by noted scholars exploring the sensorial, experience-based, and participatory practices pioneered in the 1950s by artists and poets such as Flávio de Carvalho, Ivan Serpa, Hélio Oiticica, Haroldo de Campos, Mary Vieira, Lygia Pape, Anna Maria Maiolino, Lygia Clark, Waly Salomão, and Emil Forman, among many others. Fourteen thought-provoking essays examine how many of their strategies constituted a pertinent critique of the country's wide-ranging embrace of Eurocentric modernity while anticipating a number of practices prevalent among contemporary artists today--namely, the rise of art as social practice, the embrace of pedagogical concerns by artists, and relational aesthetics.

The fourteen essays collected in this volume consider the ramifications of modernist abstraction in the second half of the twentieth century and contribute to a growing academic field in postwar Brazilian and Latin American art history. Contributions to this anthology examine the development of modernist ideas that flourished in Brazil during a controversial period interspersed by dictatorial regimes. The global aspect of Brazilian art is especially evident in these studies, presenting the relational complexity of their subjects as transcultural, transnational actors while simultaneously contributing to a growing, increasingly nuanced understanding of visual and material culture, performance, and criticism in Brazil.

Form and Feeling continues the important process of re-analyzing the intersections of Concretism and Neo concretism, arguing for greater affinities between the primary and lesser-known cast of characters while equally redistributing the strict geographical divisions of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. This anthology broadly situates this extraordinary period of artistic experimentation in direct relationship to contemporary factors, such as psychoanalysis, educational systems, poetry, politics, and feminism. It crafts innovative relationships about the constructive hierarchies of form and space, poetry and painting, and mathematics and philosophy, thus engendering new positions for a deeply ensconced period in Brazilian history.

Review Quotes

The Brazilian constructivist project in the arts is a long journey. This timely anthology does justice to that history by offering a multifaceted narrative of the concrete movement, from its historical precedents in the local avant-garde to its echoes in the following generations from the 1970s onwards.---Rodrigo Moura, Chief Curator, El Museo del Barrio, New York

This provocative new collection of essays addresses Brazil's constructivist project and its legacy in the counterculture movement of the seventies. An illuminating volume that vividly captures the postwar literary and visual histories of Brazil.---Nancy Perloff, Curator, Modern & Contemporary Collections, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California

About the Author

Antonio Sergio Bessa holds a Ph.D. from the Steinhardt School of Education, New York University. For sixteen years he worked as the Director of Curatorial and Education Programs at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, in addition to teaching at the School of Visual Arts and Columbia University's Teachers College. A scholar of concrete poetry, Bessa is the author of Öyvind Fahlström--The Art of Writing, co-editor of Novas--Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos, and editor of Mary Ellen Solt--Towards a Theory of Concrete Poetry and Paulo Bruscky: Poesia Viva.