How Did Neo-Concretism End?

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2178-0447.ars.2022.200329

Keywords:

Hélio Oiticica, Neo-Concretism, Brazilian Art, Historical Materialism

Abstract

In this article, Nicholas Brown analyses the work of Hélio Oiticica from the 50s – when it was firmly related to the research conducted by the Neo-Concrete avant-garde – to the 70s and demonstrates how these works thematize in insistent ways an experiential aspect that is implicit from the beginning in the work’s literal objecthood, permanently mobilizing the dialetics between the idea and the literal support in space. The author also examines the specific configuration of the correlation between political history and the art-historical sequence regarding the Neo-Concretism. Finally, departing from the productive contradiction between thingly substrate and signifying surface in Oiticica´s work, Brown indicates how the dynamic between social-political and intellectual history is presented in the last years of his trajectory as a re-investment of the art object in odds with commodity society.

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Author Biography

  • Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois

    Nicholas Brown teaches Modernism, African literature, and critical theory in the English Department and in the Department of African American Studies, with an affiliate position in Art History. His research interests include Marxism, Hegel studies, the history of aesthetics, Lusophone literature, and music studies. His first monograph, Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature (Princeton, 2005), examined the relationship between postcolonial literature and European modernism, and the relationship of each to continuing crises in the global economic system. His new book, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art Under Capitalism (Duke, 2019), asserts the resumption of the modernist sequence — not always in the expected places — in the era after postmodernism. Chapters of Autonomy have appeared in nonsite, Postmodern Culture, and the Revista do Instituto dos Estudos Brasileiros. Former President of the Marxist Literary Group, Professor Brown chairs the editorial board of the journal Mediations and is a founding editor of the electronic/print press MCM. 

References

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Published

2022-08-31

Issue

Vol. 20 No. 45 (2022): Brazilian Modernity Special Issue

Section

Articles

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Copyright (c) 2022 Nicholas Brown

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How to Cite

Brown, N. . (2022). How Did Neo-Concretism End?. ARS, 20(45), 298-360. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2178-0447.ars.2022.200329