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WORK TITLE: Helio Oiticica: Folding the Frame
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Princeton
STATE: NJ
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://artandarchaeology.princeton.edu/people/faculty/irene-small * https://cms.artandarchaeology.princeton.edu/media/files/small-cv-2015.pdf * http://www.pipaprize.com/pag/irene-small/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Brown University, B.A., 1997; Yale University, M.A., 2002, Ph.D., 2008.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Multitude at Artists Space, New York, NY, co-curated, 2002; Verbivocovisual: Brazilian Concrete Poetry at Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, organizer, 2006; Blind Field exhibit, co-organizer, Krannert Art Museum, 2013; University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, assistant professor of art history, 2009-12; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, assistant professor of art and archaeology, 2012-.
AWARDS:Recipient of fellowships and grants, including the Getty Research Foundation, the Dedalus Foundation, the Creative Capital and Andy Warhol Foundations, the Lemann Institute of Brazilian Studies, and the Research Board of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Third Text, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Getty Research Journal, Grove Dictionary of Art, Artforum, and Image and Narrative.
Contributor of essays to anthologies, including Contemporary Art: Themes and Histories, 1989 – Present, edited by Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, Wiley Blackwell, 2013; Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, edited by Lauren Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert Rushing, Duke University Press, 2013; Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, edited by Alejandro Anreus, Robin Greeley, and Megan Sullivan, Wiley Blackwell, 2016.
SIDELIGHTS
Art curator and professor Irene V. Small published Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame in 2016 which she examines the works of Brazil’s modernist artist. Small is assistant professor of contemporary art and criticism at Princeton University. Her research interests include historical and neo-avant-gardes, modernism in a global context, abstraction, and temporalities of art. In 2006, she organized the Verbivocovisual: Brazilian Concrete Poetry at Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, and in January 2013, she curated the Blind Field exhibition for Brazilian artists. Her writings include essays to the award-winning exhibition catalogue Picasso and the Allure of Language published by the Yale University Art Gallery in 2009. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in history of art from Yale University.
In 2013, Small collaborated with cowriter Tumelo Mosaka to publish Blind Field from the Krannert Art Museum. The book focuses on artwork from twenty new and mid-career artists in Brazil that perceive blindness as a metaphor for the country’s obstruction of perception of its political and cultural identity. Topics include transition in contemporary society, the move from public space to virtual space, and the move from local to global endeavors.
Small’s 2016 book Hélio Oiticica focuses on the Brazilian modernist artist who was a forerunner in participatory art. Writing in Choice, E. Douglas called the book a “theoretically sophisticated introduction to one of 20th century art’s most compelling figures.” Oiticica (1937-1980) melded geometric abstraction and bodily engagement, reflecting Brazil’s postwar push toward cultural and political modernization. He expressed the country’s utopian vision of progress and European constructive art. Small divides the book into four chapters that center around one or two categories of Oiticica’s art, such as the flat Metaesquemas and Bilaterais of the late 1950s to the three-dimensional, mixed-media Comets and Parangoles of the mid to late 1960s. Each chapter includes detailed commentary on Oiticica’s sculptures depicted in rare archival images, and how people, including children, interact with the work, bringing them to life and offering an image-experience participation.
Small follows Oiticica from the late 1950s during the Rio de Janeiro Neoconcrete movement and his paintings of images, to his shift to non-object subjects, mixed-media, and “fold” consciousness. Small traces the figure of the fold in which flat surfaces are drawn in three-dimensions. Experimenting with painting and color he produced the wearable work, Parangolés, layered fabric capes wearers can manipulate. In his 1967 Tropicalia installation recalls the architecture of Brazil’s favelas, along with stereotypical images like tropical plants, and live parrots. According to Small, the work obliterates the allegory of a national identity that the capitol, Brasilia, represented. As Small challenges the established opinions of his works, she explains that Oiticica’s participatory works functioned as both political emancipation and epistemological events as part of everyday life. Oiticica’s work has influenced contemporary artists, such as Cildo Meireles, Ricardo Basbaum, Gabriel Orozco, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Olafur Eliasson.
Although her in-depth study is dense, and the intricacies of her argumentation are sometimes demanding, “Small punctures and nuances some of the recurrent myths in accounts of the political commitments of Hélio Oiticica’s art practice in her monographic study of the artist,” noted Gillian Sneed online at Brooklyn Rail. Sneed added: “She counters the ‘brittle and well-worn’ readings of Oiticica’s participatory works as emancipatory to argue instead that they engaged in ‘less familiar strains of agency and disruption.’” From her vast research of Oiticica and his archival work, “Small underscores the experiential and contingent nature of Oiticica’s work to produce what she describes as ‘a deterritorialization of the archive from the inside out,’” according to Sneed.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, October, 2016, E. Douglas, review of Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame, p. 200.
ONLINE
Brooklyn Rail, http://brooklynrail.org/ (February 1, 2017), Gillian Sneed, review of Hélio Oiticica.*
IRENE V.SMALL58 Western Way105 McCormick Hall, Princeton, NJ 08540Dept. of Art & Archaeology, Princeton Universityirenesmall@aya.yale.eduPrinceton, NJ 08544+1.718.887.6109 (mobile)ismall@princeton.edu+1.609.258.3771 (office) +1.609.258.0103 (fax)EMPLOYMENTAssistant Professor of Art & Archaeology, Contemporary Art& Criticism, Princeton University (August2012 –)• Affiliated faculty, Program in Media & Modernity• Affiliated faculty, Program in Latin American StudiesAssistant Professor of Art History, Modern and Contemporary Art, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign(Jan 2009 –August 2012)• 0% appointment, The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory • Affiliated faculty, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies • Affiliated faculty, The Lemann Institute of Brazilian StudiesEDUCATIONYale University, New Haven, CT M.A. History of Art 2002, M.Phil. History of Art 2005Ph.D. History of Art 2008 Dissertation: “Hélio Oiticica and the Morphology of Things” (Frances Blanshard Fellowship Fund Prize)Committee: David Joselit (co-advisor); Kellie Jones (co-advisor); Alexander Nemerov; Christopher WoodBrown University, Providence, RI B.A. EnglishLiterature, Women’s Studies 1997Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa TEACHINGUndergraduate courses taught: Contemporary Art, 1950 –Present;Art at its Limits: The 1960s in Brazil, Argentina and the US; The Artist at Work; Exhibiting Experimentalism; Art in a Global Context; Twentieth Century European Art; European Art Between the Wars; Meaning in the Visual Arts: An Introduction to the History of ArtGraduate courses taught:When is Art?; Theorizing the Archive in Latin American Art; The Aesthetics of Hunger; Participatory Art; The Lives and Deaths of Works of Art; Practicing Utopias; MFA Graduate Critique LaboratorySept 2002 –May 2006Teaching Fellow, Yale University, Department of the History of ArtIntroduction to the History of Art (Professor Vincent Scully); Film Theory and Aesthetics(Professor Noa Steimatsky); The Self in Twentieth Century Art(Professor David Joselit); History of Western Art, Renaissance to the Present(Professors Anne Dunlop & Christine Mehring); Abstract Expressionism(Professor Alexander Nemerov)
2AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS2015Bolsa de Pós-Doutorado, Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, Universidade de São Paulo2015Program in Latin American Studies Faculty Summer Research Grant, Princeton University2015Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities Grant, for course “The Artist at Work”2014University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences Grant, Princeton University2014David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project Grant, Princeton University, for development of course “The Artist at Work”2011 –2012Creative Capital& Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant 2011 Research Board Grant, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign2011 –2012LemannInstitute for Brazilian Studies Faculty Research Grant, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign2011Humanities Released Time, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign2009, 2010List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by their Students, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Fall 2009, Spring 2010, Fall 20102009Frances Blanshard Fellowship Fund Prize for Outstanding Dissertation in the History of Art, Yale University2007 –2008 Getty Research Institute Predoctoral Fellowship2007 –2008Dedalus Foundation Ph.D. Dissertation Fellowship2007Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies Research Grant, Yale University2006Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Summer Research Fellowship, Yale University2005 –2006University Dissertation Fellowship, Yale University2005Paul Mellon Centre Travel Grant, London, U.K.2003, 2004, 2005Lehman Award, History of Art, Yale University2003McNeil Award, History of Art, Yale University2003Summer Foreign Language Institute Graduate Fellowship, Yale University2002 –2003Gutman Fellowship, History of Art, Yale University2002 –2003 Philip Lippincott Goodwin Fellowship, History of Art, Yale UniversityPUBLICATIONSBooks2015• Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame(Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2016), in press.Peer-Reviewed Articlesand Book Chapters2016• “The Myths of Hélio Oiticica” in Alejandro Anreus, Robin Greeley, and Megan Sullivan, eds., A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art(London: Wiley BlackwellPublishing, 2016) (forthcoming).2015• “Pigmentpurand the Corpo da Côr: Post-painterly Practice and Transmodernity” October152 (Spring 2015): 82-102.2013• “Medium Aspecificity / Autopoietic Form” in Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, eds.,Contemporary Art: Themes and Histories, 1989 –Present(London: Wiley Blackwell Publishing, 2013), 117-125.
32013• “Against Depth: Looking at Surface through the Kodak Carousel” in Lauren Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert Rushing, eds.,MadMen, MadWorld: Sex, Politics, Style andthe 1960s(Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 181-191.2012• “Exit and Impasse: Ferreira Gullar and the ‘New History’of the Last Avant-Garde” Third TextVol 26 No 1(January 2012): 91-101.2009• “Believing in Art: The Votive Structures of Conceptual Art” Res: Anthropology and AestheticsVol 55/56 (Spring/Fall 2009): 294-307.2009• “Morphology in the Studio: Hélio Oiticica at the Museu Nacional”Getty Research JournalNo 1 (February 2009): 107-126.2007• “Piranesi’s Shape of Time” Image [&] NarrativeNo 18 (September 2007), online http://www.imageandnarrative.be/thinking_pictures/small.htm.Book and Catalogue Contributions2016 • “Permanent Evolution: Hélio Oiticica and the Return to Rio 1978-1980” in Hélio Oiticica, exh. cat. (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, Art Intitute of Chicago, 2016) (forthcoming).2015• “Gabriel Sierra: Passing the Time of Pictures, Inhabiting the Network’s Pause” in Gabriel Sierra, exh. cat. (Chicago: Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, 2015) (forthcoming).2014• Response, in Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose, eds.,Retracing the Expanded Field: A Conference in Art and Architecture(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 195-201.2014• “On Zilia Sánchez’s Surface” in Zilia Sánchez, exh. cat. (New York: Galerie Lelong, 2014), 5-9.2013 • “Blind Field: Inside/Out” in Tumelo Mosaka and Irene V. Small, Blind Field, exh.cat. Champaign: Krannert Art Museum, 2013, 16-21.2009 • Contributing author, Susan G. Fisher, ed., Picasso and the Allure of Language(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 54-61, 104-118, 136-139, 149-169, 195-201, 209-217.-New RepublicBest Art Books of the Year, 2009-Association of Art Museum Curators Awards for Excellence, Runner-up for Outstanding Exhibition Catalogue, 2009-Independent Publishers Book Awards, Fine Arts Silver Medal, 20092008• “Interview with Felipe Dulzaides” in Lauri Firstenberg, ed., California Biennial 2008 (Orange County Museum of Art, 2008), 76-79.2007• Verbivocovisual: Brazilian Concrete Poetry.Exhibition pamphlet, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University (November 2006); also published in CiberLetras: Revista de crítica literaria y de cultura / Journal of literary criticism and cultureNo.17 (July 2007) online.2002• “Multitude: Memory of Form” in Lauri Firstenberg and Irene Small, eds., Multitude(New York: Artists Space, 2002).Articles2015• “Paulo Bruscky” Grove Dictionary of Art(online encyclopedia).2014•“Live Streaming: Irene V. Small on Documentary Strategies in Brazilian Art and Activism” Artforum(May 2014): 286-290.2014• “Towards a Deliterate Cinema; Hélio Oiticica’s and Neville D’Almeida’s Block-Experiences in Cosmococa—Program in Progress (1973)” in Elizabeth Walker, ed., On Performativity, Vol 1 of Livings Collections Catalogue(Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2014), online http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/deliterate-cinema2012• “Ped•a•go•gia: Como fazer coisas com palavras” (“Ped•a•go•gia: How To Do Things With Words”)Reconfigurações do Público: Arte, Pedagogia e Participação, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro(March2012) online http://www.seminario.mamrio.org.br/2011• “Openings: Matheus Rocha Pitta” Artforum(Summer2011): 386-389.2010• “Material Remains: On the Afterlife of Hélio Oiticica’s Work” Artforum(February 2010): 95-96.
42009• “Site and Sociality: Joseph Beuys and the Relics of Modernist Sculpture” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin(November 2009): 86-88.2008• “One Thing After Another: How We Spend Time in Hélio Oiticica’s Quasi-Cinemas” Spectator: USC Journal of Film and Television Criticism,special issue “The Instant”, ed. René T. Brucker Vol 28 No 2 (Fall 2008): 73-89.2001• "System Error: Notes" DialogueVol4 No 1 (Spring/Summer 2001): 1.2001•“Blind Spot: Writing the Body in the Video Art of Tran T. Kim-Trang” Art Asia PacificNo 30 (April 2001): 62-67.2000•“Spectacle of Invisibility: The Photography of Tseng Kwong Chi & Nikki S. Lee” Art Asia PacificNo 28 (October 2000): 48-53.1999•“The Looking Glass: Three Photographers” Dialogue, Asian American ArtsAlliance (Fall 1999): 23-29. Exhibition Reviews and Previews2014• “Other Primary Structures: Working Through, Acting Out,” What Does the Other Do?Colección Cisneros Debates, July 2014 http://www.coleccioncisneros.org/editorial/debate/what-does-other-do2014• “Sensitive Geometries: Brazil 1950s-1980s”, exhibition review, Artforum(January 2014): 208.2013• “Mira Schendel”, exhibition preview, ArtforumVol 52 No 1 (September 2013): 139.2011• “Luis Camnitzer”, exhibition preview, ArtforumVol 49 No 5 (January 2011): 91.2010• “Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space”, exhibition preview, ArtforumVol 49 No 1 (January 2010): 169.2010• “Our Literal Speed” Journal of Visual CultureVol 9 No 2 (August 2010):237-41.2010• “Rivane Neuenschwander”, exhibition preview, ArtforumVol 48 No 9 (May 2010):132.2006•“Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture”, Focus exhibition review, ArtforumVol 44 No 6 (February 2006):204. 2006• “50thAnniversary of the Exhibition of Concrete Art”, exhibition preview, Artforum2006 Vol 45 No 1 (September 2006):169.2006•“Gego”, exhibition preview, Artforum2006 Vol 44 No 9 (May 2006):150.2006• “Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture”, exhibition preview, ArtforumVol 44 No 5 (Jan.uary 2006): 102.2006• “Artur Barrio: Actions after Actions”, exhibition preview, ArtforumVol 44 No 5 (January 2006):91. 2002• “Urban Pornography”, exhibition review, Third TextVol 16 No 2 (Summer 2002): 205–208.2000•“Amnesia”, exhibition review, New York ArtsVol 5 No 1 (Jan. 2000):22-23.1999•“Mona Hatoum”, exhibition review, New York ArtsVol 4 No 12 (December 1999): 47.1999•“Place and Diversity: Memory and Location”, exhibition review, New York ArtsVol 4 No 12 (Dec. 1999): 25.1999•“Mariko Mori”, exhibition review, Dialogue, Asian American Arts Alliance (Fall 1999):10-11.LECTURES AND SYMPOSIA2015• “Blind Field” presentation in seminar “Freestyle and Displacement in Contemporary Art Practices”, Barnard College, April 20152014• “Charting theOrganic Line” Critique and the Contemporary: Latin American Art History Since the 1960s, Columbia University, November 2014 2014• “The Not-Photography of Non-Sculpture: Tino Sehgal and the Limits of Work” The Photography of Sculpture, Getty Research Institute, October 20142014• “Paixão do Mesmo: Cacique de Ramos e o Multidão” Escola Visual de Arte, Parque Lage, August 2014 2014• “Text in the Wake of the Technical Image: Mira Schendel’s Datiloscritos” University of California, Irvine, Visual Studies Series, May 2014
52014• “Sculpture After the Medium” Graduate colloquium, SUNY Purchase, March 2014 2014• “Pigments Pursand the Corpo da Côr:Post-painterly Practice and Transmodernity” Institute of Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, January 2014 2013• “Oiticica-subterrânea” PINTA Forum, New York, November 2013 2013• “Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame” Rewald Seminar, The Graduate Center, CUNY, September 2013 2013• Panelist, “Art and School: Tino Sehgal’s This Situation” Princeton University, Interdisciplinary Program inthe Humanities, November 2013 2013• “Pigments Pursandthe Corpo da Côr:Post-painterly Practice and Transmodernity” Connecting Art Histories / Grounds for Comparison: Neo-vanguards and Latin American / Latino Art, Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Colombia, June 20132013• “Passion of the Same: Cacique de Ramos and the Multitude” Program in Latin American Studies and Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University, March 2013 2013• “Situated Transmission: Hércule Florence and the Invention of Photography in Brazil” Itinerant Languages of Photography, Mexico City, March 2013 2013• Contemporary Art, 1989 to the Present, A Roundtable Discussion,New Museum of Art, March 2013 2013• “The Cell and the Plan: Diagramming Oiticica’s Eden” Keynote lecture, Mapping: Geography, Power, andthe Imagination in the Art of the Americas, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, March 2013 2012 • “Text in the Wake of the Technical Image: Mira Schendel’sDatiloscritos” SeminárioInternacional Mira Schendel, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Pauloin collaboration with Tate Modern, December 2012 2011• “Passion of the Same: Cacique de Ramosand the Multitude” The Politics of Camoufage in Artistic Practices from the 1970s, Columbia University, October 2011 2011• “What a Body Can Do” University of Chicago, Departmentof Art History, February 2011 2010• “On the Afterlives of Art” Art àArchives: Latin American and Beyond from 1920 to Present, University of Texas, Austin, October 20102010 • “O Depois de Arte” Hélio Oiticica: Legados e Futuros, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, September 2010 2010• “When is Art? Or, How to Make a Work that is not a Work of Art” New Perspectives on Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art, University ofIllinois, Chicago, April 2010 2010• “The Folded and the Flat: On Art and Information in Brazil c. 1960” Abstract Connections, Tate Modern, London, March 20102010• “Hélio Oiticica: The Cell and the Plan” School of the Art Institute of Chicago, April 2010 2010•Moderator, “Art as Event” Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, March 2010 2010• “Against Depth” Mad World, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, February 2010 2010• Discussant, CAA session Art as Event, Chicago, February 2010 2009•“The Folded and the Flat: On Art and Information in Brazil c. 1960” Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian Colloquium, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, October 2009 2009• “The Cell and the Plan” Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Lecture Series, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, September 20092009• “Reading Oiticica” chaired by Christopher Dunn, Latin American Studies Association conference, Rio de Janeiro, June 2009 2009• “The Cell and the Plan” Modern Art Colloquium, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, March 20092009• “What A Body Can Do” CAA session Clothing, Flesh, Bone: Visual Culture Above and Below the Skin, Los Angeles, February 20092008• “Hélio Oiticica’s Systems Art” Getty Research Institute, April 20082008• Co-organizer, Latin America: The Last Avant-Garde, co-sponsored by the Department of the History of Art, Yale University & the Department of Art History, The Graduate Center, CUNY, April 20082008• “Time Is On My Side: On the Cocaine Cinemas of Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida” Altered States, University of Southern California Graduate Student Conference, March 2008
62007• “The Folded and the Flat” First Triennial Conference of the Association for Latin American Art, Institute of Fine Arts, October 20072006• “TheFolded and the Flat” Poem/Art: 50 Years of Brazilian Concrete Poetry Yale University, November 2006 2005• “One Thing After Another: How We Spend Time in Hélio Oiticica’s Quasi-Cinemas” Open Systems: Rethinking Art Circa 1970Symposium, Tate Modern, UK, September 20052004• “Hélio Oiticica’s Tropicália; Hunger of Form” 10thAnnual CUNY Graduate Symposium, October 20042004• “Pointing to Duchamp” Yale University Art Gallery, February 20042003• Moderator, “Deconstructing the City” Constructing the City,Yale University, November 20032003• “Paul Pfeiffer’s The Long Count: The Performance of History, the Labor of Art” Issues in Representation: Inscription and IntermedialitySymposium, Brown University, March 2003CURATORIAL WORK2015Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton University• Exhibiting Experimentalism, collaborative student-curated exhibition in conjunction with the display of Lygia Clark,Bicho (Máquina MD),1962 (January 29 -March 8 2015)2012-2013Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Co-Curator (with Tumelo Mosaka)• Blind Field, exhibition of mid-career and emerging artistsworking in Brazil; opened at Krannert Art Museum January 2013 and travels to Eli and Edyth Broad Museum, Michigan State University June 2013Jan-Aug 2007Yale University Art Gallery, Graduate Curatorial Intern• Contributing author for exhibition catalogue Picasso and the Allure of Language(January 2009)Fall 2006Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library, Guest Curator• Verbivocovisual: Brazilian Concrete Poetry, exhibition of rare books, printed objects and works on paper, in conjunction with the conference Poem/Art: 50 Years of Brazilian Concrete Poetry, organized by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Fall 2002Artists Space, Co-Curator (with Lauri Firstenberg)• Multitude, exhibition of international contemporary art at not-for-profit gallery, New York1999 –2000Curatorial & Research Assistant to Okwui Enwezor,Director, Documenta 11• Primary research, curatorial assistance and coordination for the exhibitions: The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994(Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; PS1/MOMA, New York 2002); CenturyCity: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis(Tate Modern, London 2001); David Goldblatt(AXA Gallery, New York, NY 2001); Mirror’s Edge(Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy; Tramway Contemporary ArtCenter, Glasgow, Scotland 1999); and Documenta 11 (Kassel, Germany 2002)ACADEMIC SERVICE2015-2019Princeton University, Gauss Seminars in Criticism• Member, Executive Committee2013-2017Princeton University,Program in Media & Modernity• Member, Executive Committee2015Princeton University, Kenneth Maxwell Senior Thesis Prize Committee2013Co-founder, Translating Institutionality
7• Open working group co-founded with Joaquín Barriendos (Columbia University) and Zanna Gilbert (Museum of Modern Art, New York) on Latin American conceptual practices 2012—Princeton University, Department of Art & Archaeology•Chair, Lecture committee(2013); Member, Visual Resources committee(2012-15); Resources committee (2012-13); Library committee (2013-2014)2012Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundations• Evaluator, Arts Writers Grant Program2011 –2012 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory • Organizing committeefor unit’s annual seminar, on theme “BeyondUtopia?Art, Theory and the Coming of ‘Spring’”2011 –2012Brazilian Studies Association• Program committee for BRASA annual conference September 2012 2009 –University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Modern Art Colloquium • Co-organizer oflecture series for advanced graduate students, faculty, and visiting speakers to present on topics of modern and contemporary art and art history2009 –2011University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Latin American Visualities Lecture Series• Co-organizer of lectureseries for invited speakers co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the College of Fine and Applied Arts2009 –University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, School of Art &Design • Member of Visitors Committeewhich invitesspeakers to campusApril 2004Yale University, Graduate Coordinator, Department of the History of Art• Co-organized master class with Winfreid Menninghaus, “Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetics”2003 –2004Yale University, Co-Chair, Street Hall Committee• Organized lecture series for invited guests and monthly Work-in-Progress talks for faculty and graduate students within the Department of the History of Art ADVISEESPh.D. Advisees• Sonia de Laforcade, Princeton University(current)• Benjamin Murphy, Princeton University (current)• Teresa Cristina Jardim de Santa Cruz Oliveira, Systems and Feedback: Cildo Meireles’s Insertions Into Ideological Circuits, 1970—Ongoing, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2013Ph.D. Committees•Christopher Reitz, Martin Kippenberger and Michael Kelley: The Artist Persona and the Precarious Middle Class, Princeton University, 2015 (2ndreader)• Jennifer King, Michael Asher and the Art of Infrastructure, Princeton University,2014 (2ndreader)• Elena Filivpovic, The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp, Princeton University, 2013 (2ndreader)• Michelle Lim, Navigating Floating Worlds, Princeton University, 2013•Jessica Maxwell, Heterogeneous Objects: The Sculptures of Martin Puryear,Princeton University, 2013•Anna Katz, Lee Bontecou’s Sculpture an Drawings, 1958-1971, Princeton University, 2012(2ndreader)Masters Advisees
8• David Thomas, “Behind the Mirror: Rereading Theatricality in Luciano Fabro’s Allestimento Teatrale,” University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, May 2010Masters Committees• Daniela Matera Gomes Lins, “Um artista desvenda o ‘Labirinto’: a fraseologia documental de Hélio Oiticica aplicada à sua produção”, Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Museologia e Patrimônia, February 2012• Ha-Yan Kim, “Nam June Paik’s Participation TV: Opened Circuits,” University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2010• Sunny Jang “Artists’ Archives as Alternative Historiographies,” University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2010UndergraduateSenior Thesis Advisees•Mary Lou Kolbenshlag, “From Wheat Paste to the World Wide Web: A Genealogy of Activist Art and the Development of Artist-as-Brand,”Princeton University, 2014• Pew Wutilertcharoenwong, “Man think thai lady make house clean work love somuch cook everry time smile,” Princeton University, 2014• Daryl McCurdy “Worldmaking and the Tactical Artists’ Collective,” University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2010• Caitlin Harrington “Photography Divided:Female Subjectivity and the Filmic Referent in Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, ” University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2010•Eric Schmitt “Chris Burden and the Ethics of Spectatorship,” University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 2010Visiting Student Research Collaborator Advisees•Danielle Nastari, Universidade de São Paulo-Princeton University, 2014•Carolina Toledo, Universidade de São Paulo-Princeton University, 2013PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPSCollege Art Association (2002-)Association for Latin American Art (2007-)Society of Contemporary Art Historians (2008 -)Latin American Studies Association (2009-)Brazilian Studies Association (2011 -) LANGUAGESPortuguese, French, Spanish (reading), German (reading)
IRENE SMALL
Member of the Nominating Committee PIPA 2013.
Lives and works in Princeton, USA.
Irene Small is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Criticism at Princeton University, where her research interests include historical and neo-avant-gardes; modernism in a global context; abstraction; temporalities of art; problems of methodology and interpretation; relationality and the social implications of form. Her current book project, Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame, examines discourses of developmentalism and organic processes of emergence as they intersect in the articulation of a participatory art paradigm in mid-1960s Brazil. Her research has been supported by a number of fellowships and grants including the Getty Research Foundation, the Dedalus Foundation, the Creative Capital and Andy Warhol Foundations, the Lemann Institute of Brazilian Studies, and the Research Board of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
As a curator, Small co-organzied Blind Field, an exhibition of emerging and mid-career artists working in Brazil, which opened at Krannert Art Museum January 2013 and travels to the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University in June 2013. She organized Verbivocovisual: Brazilian Concrete Poetry at Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University in 2006, co-curated Multitude at Artists Space, New York City, in 2002, and contributed essays to the award-winning exhibition catalogue Picasso and the Allure of Language (Yale University Art Gallery, 2009). Her publications include “Medium Aspecificity / Autopoietic Form” (Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson, eds. Contemporary Art: Themes and Histories, 1989 – Present. London: Wiley Blackwell Publishing, 2013, pp.117-125); “Exit and Impasse: Ferreira Gullar and the ‘New History’ of the Last Avant-Garde” (Third Text Vol 26 No 1 (January 2012) pp. 91-101); “Openings: Matheus Rocha Pitta” (Artforum (Summer 2011) pp. 386-389); “Material Remains: On the Afterlife of Hélio Oiticica’s Work” (Artforum (February 2010) pp. 95-96); “Believing in Art: The Votive Structures of Conceptual Art” (Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics Vol 55/56 (Spring/Fall 2009) pp. 294-307); “Site and Sociality: Joseph Beuys and the Relics of Modernist Sculpture” (Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (November 2009) pp. 86-88); and “Morphology in the Studio: Hélio Oiticica at the Museu Nacional” (Getty Research Journal No 1 (February 2009) pp. 107-126.)
To meet the other members of Nominating Committee 2013, click here.
Irene V. Small Assistant Professor
Small
Irene V. Small
Assistant Professor
Contemporary Art and Criticism
On Leave F2017/S2018
315 McCormick Hall
(609) 258-3771
ismall@princeton.edu
Profile
Ph.D., Yale University, 2008
Irene V. Small teaches modern and contemporary art and criticism with a transnational focus. Her areas of specialization include experimental practices of the 1960s and ’70s, abstraction, and art and theory in Latin America, particularly Brazil. Her book, Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (University of Chicago Press, 2016) examines the practice of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, who worked in Rio de Janeiro, London, and New York from the mid-1950s through the late 1970s. In particular, it examines discourses of developmentalism and organic processes of emergence as they intersect in the articulation of a participatory art paradigm in mid-1960s Brazil. Recent essays have considered Oiticica’s last years in Rio de Janeiro (accompanying the 2016-2017 retrospective of his work); the Brazilian avant-garde movement Neoconcretism and the historiographic interventions of critics such as Ronaldo Brito and Ferreira Gullar; pigment and post-painterly practice; the concepts of medium specificity (or aspecificity) and autopoietic form; and social sculpture in the wake of the “expanded field.” Small has also written about contemporary artists in catalogue essays and publications such as Artforum, including on the artists Allora & Calzadilla, Gabriel Sierra, Zilia Sánchez, and Matheus Rocha Pitta. Her research has been supported by a number of fellowships and grants, including the Graham Foundation, the Getty Research Foundation, the Dedalus Foundation, the Creative Capital and Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the Lemann Institute of Brazilian Studies, and the Research Board of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
As a curator, Small co-organized organized Blind Field, an exhibition of emerging and mid-career artists working in Brazil, presented at the Krannert Art Museum and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in 2013, and Multitude, a group exhibition thematizing proliferation and mutability at Artists Space, New York City, in 2002. In 2006, she curated Verbivocovisual: Brazilian Concrete Poetry at Sterling Memorial Library, and in 2015 led a student-curated exhibition, From Frame to Life: Experiential Activation, at the Princeton University Art Museum.
At Princeton, she is member of the executive committees of the Program in Media and Modernity and the Gauss Seminars in Criticism, and an affiliated faculty member of the Program in Latin American Studies and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She currently holds the Harold Willis Dodds Presidential Preceptorship.
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Teaching Interests
Professor Small teaches courses on modernism and contemporary art in a global context. She regularly teaches a survey of contemporary art since 1950, as well as selected topics in 20th and 21st century art, and Latin American art. Her graduate seminars have treated temporalities of art, problems of methodology and interpretation, relationality and the social implications of form. Her courses often aim to engage actual works of art, whether in campus collections, area museums, artists’ studios in New York, or even international exhibitions of contemporary art.
Current Research
Professor Small is currently at work on a new book that takes as its point of departure the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s notion of the “organic line.” In addition, she is at work on several articles that treat media-based practices in Brazil: one examines the political potential of structures of ecstatic mimicry in Carlos Vergara’s photographs of the carnival bloco Cacique de Ramos; another considers the typed drawings of the Swiss-Brazilian artist Mira Schendel in relation to the nomadic philosopher Vilém Flusser’s notion of the “technical image”; a third treats the proto-photographic experiments of the 19th century inventor Hércules Florence through rubrics of remediation and digitalization.
Selected Publications
“Permanent Evolution: Hélio Oiticica and the Return to Rio 1978-1980” in Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium L, exh. cat. (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum, 2016).
Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (University of Chicago Press, 2016). L
“Pigment pur and the Corpo da Côr: Post-painterly Practice and Transmodernity” October 152 (Spring 2015).
“Live Streaming: Documentary Strategies in Brazilian Art and Activism,” Artforum (May 2014).
“Towards a Deliterate Cinema: Hélio Oiticica’s & Neville D’Almeida’s Block-Experiences in Cosmococa-Program in Progress, 1973,” in Performativity (Living Collections Catalogue) (Walker Art Center, 2014). L
“Medium Aspecificity/Autopoietic Form,” in Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, ed. Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
Blind Field, exhibition catalogue, coauthored with Tumelo Mosaka (Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013). L
“Exit and Impasse: Ferreira Gullar and the ‘New History’ of the Last Avant-Garde,” Third Text 26.1 (January 2012).
“Openings: Matheus Rocha Pitta,” Artforum (Summer 2011).
“Believing in Art: The Votive Structures of Conceptual Art,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 55/56 (Spring/Fall 2009).
“Morphology in the Studio: Hélio Oiticica at the Museu Nacional,” Getty Research Journal 1 (February 2009).
Small, Irene V.: Helio Oiticica: folding the frame
E. Douglas
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 54.2 (Oct. 2016): p200.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Small, Irene V. Helio Oiticica: folding the frame. Chicago, 2016. 294p index afp ISBN 9780226260167 cloth, $45.00; ISBN 9780226260334 ebook, contact publisher for price
54-0510
N6659
2015-12861
CIP
In this theoretically sophisticated introduction to one of 20thcentury art's most compelling figures, Small (Princeton) investigates the early career of Helio Oiticica (1937-80), Brazil's best-known modern artist. She starts in the late 1950s--in the context of the Rio de Janeiro Neoconcrete movement, which broke from the impersonal, "industrial" geometric abstraction of Sao Paulo's Concrete artists--and continues to about 1967. Through the figure of the fold, a flat surface rendered into a three-dimensional form, the author documents Oiticica's shift from an art of painted images or propositions to be seen to an art of the phenomenological "non-objects" theorized by the Brazilian poet and art critic Ferreira Gullar, who was instrumental in the development of the Neoconcrete movement. Each of the four chapters focuses on one or two series of works, from the painted, flat Metaesquemas and Bilaterais of the late 1950s to the three-dimensional, ready-made, mixed-media Comets and Parangoles of the mid to late 1960s, which, when directly handled as Oiticica intended them to be, create physical sensation and "fold" consciousness. Small persuasively situates Oiticica's work in a specific Brazilian sociocultural context and in the broader history of the Western modernist avant-garde. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.--E. Douglas, University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill
Douglas, E.
Live streaming: Irene V. Small on documentary strategies in Brazilian art and activism
Irene V. Small
Artforum International. 52.9 (May 2014): p286.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
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AN UNREMARKABLE SIGN conveys a remarkable occurrence: smile, you are being filmed. Alerting visitors to the presence of security cameras, the notice echoes an infinite number of similar placards that have proliferated in banks, stadiums, prisons, casinos, airports, and malls--the countless sites where visuality is harnessed for the purposes of management and control. Every such sign corresponds to a vast archive of footage recorded and stored on tapes, disks, hard drives, and digital clouds. These archives' images unfold in real time, but their longue duree is short-lived, since they are overwritten by other images as data storage is depleted, recovered, and redeployed. In 1966, Pier Paolo Pasolini proposed that film registers, as if by writing, the language that reality "speaks." "By living," he wrote, "we represent ourselves, and we observe the representation of others." In a perverse logic, surveillance tapes are the dystopian enactment of this lived cinema: a cinema of boredom and pure disciplinarity, in which events count only if something goes wrong.
The banality of the aforementioned sign--printed on office paper and slightly tattered, it's imperative to smile a peculiar combination of sadistic wink and hackneyed cheer--is one symptom of such a cinema. Yet it also figures within a filmic register of a different sort. Taped to a glass door that barricaded a throng of protesters at the city hall of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the sign itself was recorded many times over, as a still from Os brutos (The Raw Takes), 2013, attests. Compiled by the collective Cachorro Vinagre, Os brutos consists of a series of unedited single shots that document a demonstration in which several hundred civilians gathered outside the government building, demanding that their concerns be addressed by the legislature bunkered inside. The protest was part of a stunning wave of manifestations that swept Brazil in June of last year, due in no small part to social media, and to viral video in particular. Incited by an increase in bus fares, the manifestations quickly targeted rampant political corruption, lack of public services, police brutality, LGBT discrimination, favela-pacification policies, and, not least, excessive spending on World Cup and Olympic preparations in Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere. During the demonstration documented in Os brutos, participants managed to peaceably occupy Belo Horizonte's municipal headquarters for three full days. Among the compiled sequences are images shot through the glass doors, in which individuals inside and outside the building share a virtual space generated by the reflective surface of the partition, as well as images of the protesters finally gaining entry through these same doors, rushing past the security camera on their way in.
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The Belo Horizonte demonstration would certainly count as a disruption within the governmental and technological regime that surveillance serves. Indeed, as the protesters chanted outside the city hall, they were making their own images. Training cameras and smartphones on the bureaucrats and guards who attempted to block their entry, they produced a counterdocument of the state's regulation of public space. Somewhere within this footage must be an image of a camera recording its own surveillance, a feedback loop of perfect simultaneity in which transgression takes the form of a lens returning its own continuous stare.
Such an obdurate optics strangely recalls the cinematic device of the long take, a sustained, continuous shot in which no edits or cuts are made. In 1948, the film critic Andre Bazin described the long take as a "fragment of concrete reality," because the duration of an action coincides with the time of its filmic perception. Indefinite and even erratic, the long take permits--indeed obliges--the viewer to formulate meaning on his or her own. Bazin contrasted this aesthetic with the coerciveness of montage, which follows an interpretive schema determined by a director in advance. Drained of the fundamental "ambiguity" of reality, montage can easily become a vehicle for ideological manipulation. For Bazin and others after him, the long take thus has a singular documentary charge.
An analogous ethic of authenticity has recently surfaced among contemporary artists and activists in Brazil, who have witnessed unprecedented social unrest and mobilization over the course of the past year. During the June 2013 manifestations, for example, the Brazilian media collective Midia ninja (an acronym for Independent Narratives, Journalism, and Action) made a direct appeal to a kind of digital verite. Pitching their content as "live and without cuts," the group's members used smartphones and other mobile devices to document protests from within the crowds, often streaming video through apps such as TwitCasting and through the group's own site, PosTV. The raw and at times illegible character of this live footage departs markedly from the slick productions of corporate media. Internalizing the structural segmentation of advertising, commercial television privileges standardized narrative units even when it broadcasts little content at all. By contrast, the material transmitted by Midia ninja is temporally unpredictable, lasting as long as the action it documents (or until the batteries run out).
Yet whereas the ethics of Bazin's long take hinge on the viewer's interpretive choice while perceiving the individual shot, the significance of Midia ninja's videos are bound up in their broader affective and archival capacities. The group's visceral transmissions and visual branding (the masked ninja of their online profile evokes black-bloc anarchists and action heroes alike) seem participatory, urgent, even dangerous. The collective's rapid generation of alternative media content, meanwhile, is ideally suited for dissemination through social networks. When the student Bruno Ferreira Teles was imprisoned for supposedly throwing a Molotov cocktail during a clash in Rio, he appealed to Midia NINJA to recover and distribute videos from the event. The clips show Teles empty-handed and subsequently ambushed by police wielding stun guns, and even indicate that a police infiltrator may have been the one to throw the bomb. In this sense, Midia ninja's concept of truth is no more sophisticated than that of conventional media, even when it disrupts dominant channels of representation. The long take, it turns out, can be just as instrumentalized as it is aesthetic (the surveillance camera tells us as much). The deeper question posed by Midia ninja and countless other practitioners of midia livre (independent, or free, media) in Brazil is instead about how we circulate--and circulate through--real-time images, about how we chart paths through representations of the immediate past.
The protests in Brazil, in fact, were all about circulation, albeit of a different kind. The initial demonstrations were organized by transportation activists who argued that free public transit is a right, not simply because it is required to access other rights (such as education and health care) but because inhabitants have the fundamental right to use their city: to traverse it for a purpose but also to wander, to get lost, to make of the city what they want. This seems self-evident, but Brazilian cities have long and complex histories of segregation and structural disempowerment. Two recent phenomena are cases in point. Earlier this year, working-class (and often dark-skinned) teenagers from the city's outskirts began to organize online to hang out at upscale shopping malls in events called rolezinhos, or "little strolls." When police used rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse such a crowd in January, they demonstrated that not all bodies may move equally through urban space. So while the early rolezinhos were apolitical, even affirmative in impulse, the right to circulate--and, by a reverse logic, the right to stay in place--remains a radical claim. At the end of March, meanwhile, impoverished residents in Rio displaced by skyrocketing rents used social media to plan an occupation of a derelict building, formerly a site of the Brazilian telecommunications company Telerj, now owned by the cellular corporation Oi. Within days, the building and its environs were transformed into the new Fa vela da Telerj, with some six thousand inhabitants calling the pop-up settlement home. Yet less than two weeks after the favela's inauguration, riot police expelled these residents in a brutal three-hour operation, rendering them once more nomadic and politically disenfranchised, with several hundred camping out in protest across from Rio's city hall.
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When, in 1970, the Rio-based artist Cildo Meireles initiated his Insercoes em circuitos ideologicos (Insertions into Ideological Circuits) series by imprinting political messages on bottles and banknotes and reintroducing the items into public use, his imperative was to isolate the circuit of those objects in order to call attention to the imbrication of repressive political and economic power. Today, the question is one of occupying and redirecting such ideological circuits, be they the pleasure domes and telecommunications of late capitalism or the architectural ruins left in their wake. In July of last year, Meireles reinitiated his banknote project with a new message: cade amarildo? (Where is Amarildo?), in reference to Amarildo de Souza, a bricklayer from Rio who had been abducted by police and was subsequently alleged to have been tortured to death. Meireles's message was stamped on paper money, as in the original project from the 1970s. But the new iteration circulated primarily as an online image, a viral meme proliferating in the absence of the literal body, which had disappeared.
How might we think about the circulation and occupation of images together with those of bodies in space? A video from artist Graziela Kunsch's ongoing work Projeto mutirao, begun in 2003, gives one indication. The piece documents an intervention in which transportation activists wrest open the back doors of a public bus in Sao Paulo, allowing a stream of riders to enter without paying in front. The clip itself is brief--only thirty seconds--and was culled from extensive footage that Kunsch shot as part of her work with housing, free-transport, and independent-media movements. That such raw footage appears in Projeto mutirao in the form of long takes is key, and Kunsch is explicit in her debt to Bazin. But as Pasolini recognized, the long take inevitably entails the cut, which transforms the present tense of reality--in all of its excess and ambiguity--into a past that can accrue signification. From her raw footage, for example, Kunsch isolates moments that embody the concept of mutirao-. a term that refers to acts of participatory mutual aid, often temporary in nature. Sometimes these extracts are climactic, like the opening of the bus doors or the burning of a turnstile. But just as often they are oblique, ephemeral, and indexed to moments of observation: the tacking of a tarp onto a jury-rigged shelter; a cleaning collectively organized in a squatter camp; a pair of young boys transforming a construction site into a makeshift playing field. All represent openings and hiatuses in which social orders are rethought.
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These extracts form a mobile, open-ended archive that Kunsch uses as a catalyst for dialogues in schools, art exhibitions, workshops, community meetings, and public forums. She also includes footage shared by other activists, as well as clips from prior conversations. The archive thus opens out onto multiplicitous repositories of images and actions, each with its own viewpoint, modes of visual apprehension, and political aims. Yet the archive functions as a self-reflexive device as well, revealing the work's highly mediated nature, the degree to which Kunsch becomes a protagonist herself. Because Projeto mutirao is realized only by means of discussion and debate, however, Kunsch's navigation through this video material is contingent on the social process of its reception within a given time and place. And because each encounter is recorded in turn, the project has a feedback mechanism that incorporates both critique and historicity. In this, Projeto mutirao diverges from the instantaneity of both surveillance and documentary counterinformation in favor of multiple temporalities that unfold unevenly in real time. Of course, as much might be said of a Facebook feed. But by insisting on the co-presence of archival moving images with talking, thinking, feeling bodies, Kunsch's project models--in terms of concrete experience--the ways in which we catalyze action by traveling between screens and space.
The filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl recently asked whether the Internet was dead. Not because it has been superseded, but because it is "all over," which is to say that it has infiltrated the epistemologies and operations of the offscreen world. The negative implications are too copious to catalogue. But Steyerl hazards a further question: "If images can be shared and circulated, why can't everything else be too ? " What would it be like, in other words, if online behaviors migrated offline--toward the production of a lived commons? What if the virtual circulation of images really impacted the circulation of bodies in space? The Brazilian protests proved, once again, that this can happen. Kunsch's project, meanwhile, helps us comprehend the interval between these two types of circulation as a shared project of mutirao.
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RENATA LUCAS
THERE ISN'T A DAY like another in Rio de Janeiro. First there were the construction sites, the forced evictions, and the devastation of entire blocks in the city's port area and surroundings. Now there is the building-and-implementation phase of the so-cailed Porto Maravilha, a major undertaking associated with such international corporations as Tishman Speyer, the Trump Organization, and Westfield Group: an ambitious plan to drastically change the architectural and human landscape of the city. The project is transforming an entire region of predominantly lower-class housing-neglected by the government for years-into luxury towers, hotels, and shopping mails. Rio is proud to announce that with money from the private sector, it has achieved what it couldn't have before. But the city seems to be acting as a iab for capital, where an accelerated process of privatization has meant a lack of public participation and a weakened civil society. Reacting to this hygienist policy of aggressive gentrification, the city has been swept by protests.
There are also new museums in the redevelopment program. The Museu do Amanha (Museum of Tomorrow), currently under construction, advances like an immense white body on the sea. Dedicated to technology, it has been designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Caiatrava. The Museu de Arte do Rio, with its poetic acronym MAR (sea), was designed to exhibit the main private art collections of Rio. Painted white, as if to match Calatrava's museum, mar was the first to be completed; it is housed in a former bus station and police hospital constructed in the 1940s and a neighboring early-twentieth-century building. The decision to use these structures was made in only a few days, and many bus passengers were surprised by the unexpected disappearance of their station, which moved a few blocks away overnight. The new building is like a hologram: Looking at its white skin, recently applied, one still seems to see the old bus station made out of brown tiles.
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At the same time, a disembodied museum is built on air, for a body passing diagonally across the city, transgressing the orthogonal trajectories of urban movement, for a man who meanders through the cracks: the Museum of the Diagonal Man. It could be embodied according to the same method as mar, falling into some existing architectural entity--from time to time, materializing itself in a corner or in a slot of any given space. mar shows that white paint in itself already accomplishes the transformation of one thing into another. I am likewise looking for niches for fleeting and fractured acts: an entryway, a sidewall, a spiral staircase, a modernist window. Everything serves to compose a museum in fragments, which merges with the landscape itself.
RENATA LUCAS IS AN ARTIST BASED IN RIO DE JANEIRO. THIS TEXT FORMS PART OF HER PROJECT THE MUSEUM OF THE DIAGONAL MAN (2013-).
IRENE V. SMALL IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)
Small, Irene V.
Southern exposure: Irene V. Small on Videobrasil
Irene V. Small
Artforum International. 54.5 (Jan. 2016): p75.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
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ARE IMAGES TODAY dematerialized, ephemeral configurations of pixels and electronic signals that merely pause as they migrate from screen to screen? Or are they more multifarious in their ubiquity, inhabiting visual surfaces as well as imaginaries and modes of apprehension, historical sedimentations and cartographies of power? Of course, this is a false opposition: It is precisely the image's mutability that allows it to so deeply infiltrate our materialities, politics, and patterns of perception. Yet since the beginning of video art's relatively short history, there has been a certain dream about the medium's critical, affective potential that pertains to its tendency toward dematerialization. There was always a desire, in other words, that video might unleash images from the stagnation of objects, launch them into circulation, and facilitate the crossing of borders and upsetting of traditions; that video's plasticity was uniquely suited to generating newly nomadic images in turn.
I was reminded of this ambition when viewing Sandra Kogut's exhilarating video Parabolic People, 1991, in the exhibition of works from the Videobrasil Collection archive that ran parallel to the nineteenth iteration of the Sao Paulo-based Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil. The festival was founded in 1983 in the heady climate of Brazil's imminent redemocratization after two decades of military rule. These were years when filmmakers, journalists, artists, and activists fought to break up television monopolies and censorship; when, across the world, smashing walls and pulsing to the beat of a mass-mediated global village was still a utopian project rather than a symptom of the corporatization of culture. Parabolic People resulted from a residency in France that Kogut won through Videobrasil in 1989. It is built from clips collected in video kiosks that Kogut installed in the streets of Paris; Rio de Janeiro; Moscow; Dakar; New York; and Tokyo, where passersby could duck in off the street and record themselves. Set to an intoxicating pop sound track and overlaid with a patchwork of flickering signals, blazes of color, gliding images, and snippets of moving text, the work captures the euphoria of its moment. Multilingual and discordant, its fragmented elements magnetize and reverberate without being forced to cohere. It is also the kind of work one can appreciate screened on a TV monitor, projected on a gallery wall, streamed as a YouTube video, or delivered in almost any other media format. After all, Parabolic People celebrates video's polymorphous quality--its capacity to deploy images that are everywhere and nowhere at once.
Yto Barrada's Wallpaper--Tangier, 2001, which opened the invited artists' section of this year's Videobrasil, formed a refracted riposte to this now-historical reverie. It is not a video, but instead a hybrid image-object that consists of an expanse of wallpaper that exactly matches the size of the freestanding wall on which it is installed. Printed on this lining is the image of yet another swath of wallpaper, this one divided into panels, cropped, and frayed. The scene it depicts is the stuff of packaged tourism: a crystalline lake, a field dotted with trees, snow-topped mountains in the distance. The work's visual interest does not, of course, derive from this canned vista (Barrada photographed it in a cafe in Tangier), but in the way its representational surface becomes obdurately material, pulling away from its support to betray its wrinkling, fading, and misregistration. Yet this physicality is ultimately a trompe l'oeil. The work's depicted materiality is suspended between images, while its actual materiality functions more like a barrier than a banal background. If images slide and effortlessly mutate in Parabolic People, here they are immobilized and stalled. And whereas Kogut's early work implies the transit and transformation of subjects within a deliriously globalizing world, Barrada's Wallpaper evokes the geopolitical asymmetries that structure movement and restraint. The port of Tangier, after all, is a key point of passage between Africa and Europe. In this, it is a locus of inverted, though not reciprocal, fantasies about the desirability of "elsewhere": On one hand, the city is imagined as a vacationer's idyllic paradise; on the other, it acts as a highly restrictive point of departure for economic and political migrants. It is not quite clear to which fiction the wallpaper refers. Like those in Parabolic People, this image is everywhere and nowhere at once. Yet unlike those skidding, superimposed fragments, it is not an image in motion, but rather a synecdoche of blockage.
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THREE FRAMEWORKS steer Videobrasil's intervention within the global circuit of recurring exhibitions of contemporary art. First, a rotating cast of curators (in this case Bernando Jose de Souza, Bitu Cassunde, Joao Laia, Julia Reboucas, and Solange Farkas, the last also the festival's founder) select works for its main exhibition from an international open call. This means that the exhibition trends toward emerging artists and, at least theoretically, bypasses the promotional system of the art market in favor of a more democratic base. This edition's juried grand-prize winner was the Beijing-based twenty-eight-year-old Hui Tao, whose riveting video Talk About Body, 2013, pictures the artist sitting on a bed, swathed in a hijab, and surrounded by a throng of onlookers. Dispassionately cataloguing his biological and genetic features, he recasts his body as a corporeal palimpsest given over to the "continuous invasion and blending [of] history." Tao's work joined that of fifty-two other artists and collectives in the sprawling main exhibition, which, following Videobrasil tradition, was accompanied by shows of invited or commissioned works by more established artists. This year, Barrada was featured alongside the Portuguese filmmaker Gabriel Abrantes; Malian artist and educator Abdoulaye Konate and Brazilian sculptor Sonia Gomes, both of whom utilize textiles to vastly different ends; and Paris-based Brazilian artist Rodrigo Matheus, whose site-specific work addressed the exhibition space's former life as a factory.
Since 2011, Videobrasil's second organizational principle has been its openness to all media, though video remains its mainstay. Although one could argue that this makes it cognate with other contemporary art festivals, it also creates an institutional space to engage the heterogeneous offshoots of video since its origins in television and magnetic tape, offering a panorama of contemporary practice constellated around the moving image rather than painting, installation, or the other media that typically inhabit the white cube. This porous rubric is often enormously productive, allowing the inclusion here, for example, of Koken Ergun's engrossing dual-screen projection of Turkish children spouting nationalist ideologies; Carlos Melo's video performance of Pierre Restany's 1978 "naturalist" manifesto; Paulo Nazareth's quartet of videos recalling the infamous Tree of Forgetting at the slave-trading port of Ouidah, Benin; and Roy Dib's deadpan allegory of Arab-Israeli intimacy and sex. But the results can be uneven. Sculpture suffers in particular, not least because the myriad modes of video presentation--hanging scrims, monitors on pedestals, black-box zones, staged microenvironments, cinemascale screens--take on sculptural presences themselves.
At first glance, this proliferation of formats might be taken as evidence of the enormous flexibility of video content. Yet this multiplicity no longer signals the innate mutability of the medium. To the contrary, it indicates a condensation of moving images into highly specified material configurations that approach objects in their constitution. Paradoxically, as videos approach the status of things, objects become more like images. Sometimes this quality is theorized by the work itself, as in Barrada's Wallpaper. But it can also be a collateral effect. Installed next to a massive projection of Abrantes's film Liberdade (Freedom, 2011), even Gomes's magnificent twisted, bunched, and knotted fabric constructions--so amply haptic--verge on becoming pictures.
A final distinctive characteristic of Videobrasil is its sustained focus on the global South, understood not as a literal place but as a set of conditions, experiences, and affiliations that concern regions marginalized by the ongoing legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberalism. Once upon a time such regions were termed third world in reference to their "third" alternative to the Cold War's capitalist/socialist dichotomy and to their pervasive economic underdevelopment. The twenty-first-century appellation recognizes that such conditions and political reconfigurations are neither fixed within geographic limits nor brokered by independent nation-states. Streams of migrants and a debt crisis have propelled Greece into the southern axis, for instance, a fact acknowledged by Documenta 14 artistic director Adam Szymczyk's decision to collaborate with the Greek magazine South as a State of Mind and stage the 2017 exhibition in both Kassel and Athens. But whereas Documenta's promise to create what its director calls an "artistic bridge" between these two cities reiterates (even as it critiques) the same top-down hierarchy of power and finance that shaped the bailout and austerity measures, Videobrasil privileges horizontal relations that stretch across multiple points south. The specter of the global North is never far off, but by reorienting artistic production toward lateral and transversal dialogues, Videobrasil affirms that a key task of the global South is to institute new vectors of reference.
It is surely to highlight this relational priority that the curators chose to eschew partitions, installing the majority of works in the main exhibition within sight of one another. This approach built a certain distraction into the viewing experience, as one tended to watch, or scan, two or more pieces simultaneously. If earlier video works such as Parabolic People allegorized their own moment of globalization via a multiplicity internal to their format, this multiplicity is now externalized as a function of sight lines and the viewer's movement in space. "Globalization as backdrop" would be an easy, and not entirely unwarranted, critique. Yet this installation also drew explicit attention to the exhibition's social and architectural container, namely the area de convivencia (space for living together) of the landmark SESC Pompeia, designed by the Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi in 1982. SESC (Servico Social do Comercio) is an entity that oversees a national network of community centers funded by taxes levied on the Brazilian commercial sector, and workers from this sector are its main constituents. On any given day, however, visitors to SESC spaces vastly exceed this single demographic. And because the institution's range of offerings--from preventative health exams and ceramics workshops to rock concerts and conferences on queer theory and speculative anthropology--is equally diverse, art is presented not as capital to be captured but as a polyvalent experience woven into the fabric of the everyday. In this respect, the selfie-snapping culture of northern megamuseums pales in comparison. To chart a global South from this extremely localized site is to insist that the south is not, in fact, a state of mind: It is a set of lived coordinates that demand a different frame of knowing.
IRENE V. SMALL IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY IN NEW JERSEY.
Art Systems and Hélio Oiticica
by Gillian Sneed
Elena Shtromberg
Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s
(University of Texas Press, 2016)
Irene V. Small
Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame
(University of Chicago Press, 2016)
Last year, Brazil dominated international headlines for a series of troubling episodes: the beginning of the year witnessed the emergence of the Zika virus, precipitating panic at the prospect of a global pandemic; the spring brought increasing political turmoil that eventually led to the August 2016 impeachment of the country’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff, amid a corruption scandal—in what many have described as a right-wing coup—leading to the non-democratic installation of the corrupt Michel Temer. The Summer Olympics were decried for a woeful lack of preparation and a diversion of investment away from Rio’s poorer neighborhoods, and in October, just before our own catastrophic political swing to the extremist right in November, Rio de Janeiro elected as mayor Marcelo Crivella, a right-wing evangelical who has supported banning abortion and gay marriage, privatizing education, and investing in heightened policing. Meanwhile, Brazil is also undergoing one of the worst economic recessions in recent history.
Amid last year’s turmoil, two important English-language studies by U.S. art historians on Brazilian art were published, both analyzing Brazil’s socio-economic history during the postwar period and the politics of the art made during that time: Elena Shtromberg’s Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s, and Irene V. Small’s Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame. Examining Brazilian conceptual and video art practices during the period of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964 – 85), Shtromberg’s slim but comprehensive study begins in 1968, the year that heralded in the harshest period of the dictatorship, characterized by state-sponsored censorship, and the imprisonment, torture, and “disappearances” of dissidents. Shtromberg, an associate professor of art history at the University of Utah, specializing in modern and contemporary Latin American visual culture, analyzes the art production of an array of Brazilian artists—including those well-known outside of Brazil, like Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, and Artur Barrio, as well as those who are lesser known, like Anna Bella Geiger, Antonio Manuel, and Sonia Andrade—as part of a complex network of social practices and political conditions that she describes as “a matrix of social exchange.”
In order to emphasize the political and ethical commitments of their artworks, the volume situates them historically by tracing the social systems of representation and communication within which they were inscribed, including: the contradictory economic “miracle” and the concomitant hyperinflation of the early 1970s (which she relates in a chapter titled “Currency”); the history of print and televisual media in Brazil and the nuances of government censorship enacted on them as well as the covert strategies journalists and artists used to evade them (in chapters titled “Newspapers” and “Television”); and the failed expansionist project of the Trans-Amazonian Highway, undertaken at the height of the dictatorship in 1972 to connect isolated regions of the country to the political and economic urban centers, which was responsible for indigenous displacement, extermination, and widespread deforestation (in “Maps”).
Throughout, Shtromberg analyzes the strategies artists used to critique the dictatorship’s repressive conditions. One example in the chapter on currency is Cildo Meireles’s Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Project Banknote: Who Killed Herzog? (1976), in which the artist stamped onto cruzeiro bills (the Brazilian currency of the time) the words “Who Killed Herzog?” (Vladimir Herzog was a left-wing journalist whose death while imprisoned was initially claimed by the authorities to have been suicide, but was later revealed to have been the result of torture), and then reinserted them into circulation—in order to anonymously challenge the state’s murder of dissidents. In the chapter on television, she examines Artur Barrio’s 1. From Inside Out. 2. Simple… (1970), a sculptural installation comprising a television set on a pedestal draped in a white sheet that partially obscures the news program it broadcasts, which she describes as a (literally) veiled reference to censorship. She importantly sheds light on the under-studied contributions of women artists to this history, including Sonia Andrade, Letícia Parente, and Anna Bella Geiger, whose Elementary Maps (1976 – 77)—a series of videos in which the artist draws maps of Brazil to critique both the racial and gendered implications of its colonial past as well as the censorship and violence of the present dictatorship—Shtromberg analyzes in the chapter on maps. The political efficacy of such works, Shtromberg ultimately argues, should not be judged in terms of quantifiable measures, but rather in terms of the ways in which they “[open] up a symbolic space of dissent.”
While Shtromberg analyzes artistic dissent during the dictatorship, Irene V. Small punctures and nuances some of the recurrent myths in accounts of the political commitments of Hélio Oiticica’s art practice in her monographic study of the artist. To accomplish this, Small, an assistant professor of contemporary art and criticism at Princeton University, focuses on Brazil’s developmentalism of the 1950s and ’60s, leading up to and including the dictatorship, to chart the participatory paradigm in Oiticica’s work from its inter-subjective origins in the Neo-Concrete movement of the 1950s and ’60s to the increasingly socially engaged character of his Parangolés of the 1960s. She counters the “brittle and well-worn” readings of Oiticica’s participatory works as emancipatory to argue instead that they engaged in “less familiar strains of agency and disruption.”
She focuses on what she describes as art’s epistemological character—“its ability to inaugurate conditions of knowledge [and] reconfigure one’s perception of the world”—to argue that Oiticica’s participatory works did not function merely as a form of political emancipation, but more importantly, as generative epistemological events designed to intervene into everyday life. For Small, the radical and oppositional promises of the participatory in Oiticica’s work should not be understood as arriving at the end of the 1960s with the Parangolés (multilayered fabric capes to be worn and manipulated by user-participants), but rather as structurally embedded within Oiticica’s sculpture from its very beginnings in the early 1960s, when it was first unfolded and opened beyond its own boundaries.
Throughout the book, Small underscores the experiential and contingent nature of Oiticica’s work to produce what she describes as “a deterritorialization of the archive from the inside out.” She reveals and reflects on her own process of researching Oititica’s rich archive, which was tragically largely destroyed in a fire in 2009. Each chapter begins with sensitive and close readings of rare archival images, usually photographs of people—in many cases children—interacting with or using Oiticica’s sculptures, which effectively function to both bring the objects to life and to provide a concrete image-experience against which to set up her discursive frameworks.
Small argues that the limiting modernist “frames” of art history—notions of authorship, art’s presumed autonomy, and the historical methods with which art is categorized—should be unfolded, or reconfigured. Hence, she methodologically employs “procedures embedded within the work” to enact a formal and conceptual operation rooted in the paradigms of “the folded” and “the framed.” These help her to understand how Oiticica’s works functioned structurally and socially. Like Shtromberg who is interested in how Brazilian postwar art was entrenched in systems, matrices, and circuits, Small considers art a “matrix of practice and reception” and contends that Oiticica’s artistic agency was embedded within “a circuit” of actors, events, histories, and conditions, including the legacy of European constructive art, and the developmentalism of Brazil at mid-century.
As with Shtromberg’s chapter on newspapers, which examines how the medium functioned as a site of artistic intervention and journalistic resistance, Small’s first chapter “The Folded and the Flat,” also draws on the newspaper’s structure and mode of disseminating information (through the physical flattening or folding of the page) as a point of departure for understanding the shift from the Concrete (1956 – 58) to the Neo-Concrete art movement (1959 – 61). To do this, she analyzes a range of artworks to argue that Neo-Concretism transformed Concretism’s “flat” approach of conveying information, into one of “folding,” which opened up art objects to their surroundings. Her second chapter, “The Cell and the Plan”—which examines the relationship between art and modernist building projects like the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (1955) and the new capital of Brasília (1960)—parallels Shtromberg’s interests in cartography and topographical organization as a mode of consolidating nationalist ideologies in her chapter on maps. Small argues that Oiticica attempted to recuperate and revise modernism’s formal structures, despite their utopian failures, by scaling his work in relation to the human body. Specifically, she argues, he transformed the institutional logic of the “plan” into a diagrammatic mode of organic growth that recast the developmental by way of the subterranean and the bodily.
Here she analyzes his most well-known work, Tropicalía (1967), an installation reminiscent of the organic architecture of Brazil’s favelas, comprising stereotypical Brazilian signifiers like sand, tropical plants, and live parrots, as well as “penetrables”— structures into which participants could walk—one of which was a labyrinth of panels that led to a TV set broadcasting a local channel. For Small, the work functioned as “an inversion of [Brasília’s] developmentalist aims,” and effectively obliterated the allegory of national identity Brasília represented. For Shtromberg, who also discusses the work in her chapter on television, Tropicalía pointed to TV’s capacity to promote the state’s ideological agenda to the masses, as well as the contradictions of technological modernism in a country where even in the most impoverished communities, every home had a TV.
While the first half of Small’s book considers how “the fold” functions to draw external environments into artworks (and vice versa) by means of the subject, the second half examines processes of “unfolding” in which the subject’s body is co-articulated with the work. Her fourth chapter, “What a Body Can Do,” for example, examines the dialogue between the participant-subject and the art object facilitated by the Parangolé, which she argues was conditioned by the taxonomic and morphological biological classification systems Oiticica had learned as an employee of a natural history museum. She argues that rather than signifying bodily emancipation and free expression, as commonly rehearsed in the literature, the Parangolés functioned instead to question the nature of the body itself, to underscore its incoherence and mutability, and to propose the radical relationality and instability of identity, which she describes as “the unfolding of the body itself.”
While Small’s in-depth study is dense, and the intricacies of her argumentation are sometimes demanding, her best contributions to the literature on Oiticica emerge in her close readings of archival documents and her bold challenges to canonical accounts of his works. Shtromberg’s volume is much more straightforward in its prose, though equally engaging in its careful examination of both canonical and lesser-known conceptual art of the 1970s. Both books are excellent resources that shed new light on the art and socio-economic conditions of postwar art in Brazil from mid-century to the late 1970s, providing nuanced details in their fresh readings that contribute substantively to literature on the topic, especially in the English language. Ultimately, with some noteworthy overlaps in themes and subject matter, these two studies offer divergent styles and approaches to the material which both reveal profound thinking around the social implications of Brazilian postwar art and its political exigencies, which could not be more urgent or pressing given the parallels in the political climates of both Brazil and the U.S. today, and ongoing questions around the political role and efficacy of art during periods of political repression.