Art via post

Museum collects works of Latin American and Eastern European artists through postal network established when countries faced dictatorships.

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – The Universidade de São Paulo’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC USP) boasts the most important collection of international conceptual art in Brazil.

Comprised of works by European artists, especially from the East, which are extremely important in the global contemporary art scene, the archives were formed by MAC USP through the institution’s role as one of the recipients in a postal network for Latin American and European artists established in the 1960s and 1970s, when many of these respective countries were under dictatorships.

Maria Cristina Machado Freire, associate professor and vice-director of MAC USP, made this discovery through research conducted on the museum’s archives in recent years, with FAPESP funding.

From 1997 to 1999, through a project entitled “The Aesthetics of the Process. Conceptual Art in the USP Museum of Contemporary Art’s archive: research and surveying,” Freire began to investigate MAC USP’s collection of conceptual art works from the 1960s and 1970s, which had been forgotten within the institution.

Throughout the study, she realized that there was a significant body of work from artists in countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia and East Germany. She considered the discovery important and believed it deserved deeper investigation.

Based on her discovery, the researcher began to list all artists in the archive that were originally from former socialist countries in Eastern Europe and analyze the relationships and common issues of their work with those of artists from Latin America. The 2005 study, “Places and critical manners of contemporary art at museums,” was conducted with FAPESP funding under the auspices of its Thematic Project line.

Freire noted that artists from the two regions used the post as a means of breaking through the censorship and repression imposed by the dictatorships they faced in the 1960s and 1970s and to establish a postal network for art and exchange of artistic information.

Some institutions like MAC operated in this alternative communication circuit as recipients and meeting places for the artistic works sent from all over the world to the public/university museum via post.

“At the time, MAC organized international and local exhibitions utilizing calls for works via mail. The museum sent letters to artists the world over, inviting them to participate in its exhibitions. And they sent their works via mail simply out of solidarity and to participate in a system of artistic information exchange  that was outside the art market, the media and other hegemonic artistic centers, and which no longer exists today,” Freire told  Agência FAPESP.

According to Freire, during the dictatorship, MAC became the centralizer of conceptual art works from around the globe, forming the most important archive of its type in the country, especially because of the institution’s pioneering and vanguard role.

“In the 1960 and 1970s, when art was experiencing a moment of redefinition, in which not only paintings, sculpture, drawings and engravings – the fine arts – but also the body in performance, installations and photography began to be recognized as art, MAC was one of the first Brazilian contemporary museums to house all these new perspectives,” she says.       

At the helm of the museum in 1970 was Walter Zanini, the first director of institution, who strived to hold quality exhibitions that did not require much capital. To this end, he invited artists through a postal art network, which allowed many European artists, particularly from the East, to participate in the exhibitions.

“The works of these artists, which are in MAC’s archives, are extremely important not only because of their significance in the current global contemporary art scene, but because of the poetic discourse they expressed in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, it would be impossible for the museum to acquire some of these works that were donated by artists at the time,” says Freire.

Alternative networks

Among the works found in the conceptual art collection are photographs of performance art and artistic actions using the artist’s own body, which was the preferred means of expression used by both artists from Eastern Europe and Latin American in the so-called “lead years” when artistic reproduction was limited or prohibited.

“At the time, even mimeographs were controlled. Photography became a means of more easily reproducing and distributing the often clandestine works that artists were making,” says Freire. Some of these works are part of the exhibition Alternative Networks (Redes Alternativas), curated by the researcher and now showing at MAC USP.

Derived from the Thematic Project, the exhibition presents 40 works by Latin American and Eastern European artists that directly or indirectly used photography as a metaphoric expression of freedom. Among the works selected are Veículo (Vehicle), from 1973 by Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko and Flagelação (Flagellation), by Czech artist Petr Stembra.

Before the São Paulo showing, this portion of the archive was presented in Stuttgart, Germany, as part of the international show Subversive Practices. Art under Conditions of political repression 60’s – 80’s South America/Europe.

The exhibition Alternative Networks will be open through December 18 at MAC USP, which is located at R. da Praça do Relógio, 160, Cidade Universitária, São Paulo. The exhibition is open to the public on Tuesday and Thursday from 10 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The exhibit is free.

For more information:  www.mac.usp.br