This article was downloaded by: [UQ Library]On: 11 November 2014, At: 03:49Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Third TextPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20

Phenomenological OpennessSérgio Bruno MartinsPublished online: 16 Feb 2012.

To cite this article: Sérgio Bruno Martins (2012) Phenomenological Openness, Third Text, 26:1, 79-90, DOI:10.1080/09528822.2012.647652

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2012.647652

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”)contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and ourlicensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publicationare the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor &Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independentlyverified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantialor systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and usecan be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Phenomenological OpennessHistoricist Closure: Revisiting the Theory

of the Non-Object

Sergio Bruno Martins

Questioning the concept of the non-object should be less a matter ofasking what it is than how it comes into being. For much of the signifi-cance of Ferreira Gullar’s radical formulation lies in what it respondsto, in the kind of historical space it carves in order to carry out its concep-tual operation. I take the cue here from Gullar himself: after a fewopening sentences, mostly dedicated to saying what the non-object isnot, the ‘Theory of the non-object’ – the now famous Neoconcretistessay he wrote in 1959 – suddenly turns to a reappraisal of modern artthrough the lens of the new-found concept (and under the subtitle‘death of painting’).1 For the ‘issue’, the poet would remark, ‘requires ret-rospection’.2

It did, and still does – in more than one sense, perhaps. So let us startwith Gullar’s own famous retrospective account of the non-object, whichhe has repeatedly recounted over the decades and which is, in any case, ahelpful introduction to the concept.3 All versions of the story begin with adinner at Lygia Clark’s in 1959 when she chose a new work to present toher guests. Gullar’s many later descriptions of this work are far from con-sistent but commonly portray a diagonal construction of interlockedpainted wooden plaques, connected at the edges – something inbetween her ‘Cocoons’ and ‘Counter-Reliefs’, but free-standing like herfamous ‘Animals’. A dispute apparently followed about a proper wayof defining the piece, with the senior critic Mario Pedrosa proposing tocall it a relief and Gullar protesting that a relief ‘presupposes a surface’against which it would stand. The poet recalls spending some timealone with the work before finally offering an alternative definition:non-object. It would now be Pedrosa’s turn to object, stating that ‘anon-object would be something that is not an object of knowledge, andtherefore it is nothing’. Gullar’s retort was to clarify that he meant theword ‘object’ strictly in the sense of an ordinary thing, like ‘a pen, atable, a chair, a book’ – the prefix was meant to detach the artworkfrom that kind of ordinariness. That makes the non-object the product

Third Text, Vol. 26, Issue 1, January, 2012, 79–90

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online # Third Text (2012)http://www.tandfonline.com

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2012.647652

1. Hereafter referred to simply as‘the Theory’.

2. Ferreira Gullar, ‘Theory of theNon-Object’, Michael Asbury,trans, in Kobena Mercer, ed,Cosmopolitan Modernisms,INIVA and MIT Press, Londonand Cambridge,Massachusetts, 2005, pp 170–173, p 170

3. There are numerous versions ofthis anecdote available in textsand interviews by the poetspanning three differentdecades. See FernandoCocchiarale and Anna BellaGeiger, ‘Ferreira Gullar’(interview), in FernandoCocchiarale and Anna BellaGeiger, eds, Abstracionismo,Geometrico e Informal: AVanguarda Brasileira nos AnosCinquenta, FUNARTE, Rio deJaneiro, 1987, pp 98–99; ‘ATregua – Entrevista comFerreira Gullar’, in Cadernosda Literatura Brasileira –Ferreira Gullar, InstitutoMoreira Salles, Sao Paulo,1998, p 36; and FerreiraGullar, ExperienciaNeoconcreta: Momento-Limite da Arte, Cosac Naify,Sao Paulo, 2007.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

03:

49 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

of a double negation – on the one hand, the word object itself deniesmedium-specificity, while, on the other, the prefix non denies a potentialconsequence of the first denial, namely the artwork’s perceptual reduci-bility to the ensemble of ordinary objects.4 This double negation inturn corresponds to the two constitutive pillars of the ‘Theory’ – a phe-nomenological and a historical (or rather historicist) one. These twoaspects will be the subject of the present article.

The actual identity of that primordial non-object may be hard to pin-point, but one thing is certain: it is made of as many layers of memory asit is of wood. In other words, to look for hard facts and descriptive accu-racy in the anecdote may be a dead end, but we may still perhaps glimpsethe poet’s stakes in that episode in the way he plays with certain termsand oppositions. What I want to suggest is that Gullar’s claimed objec-tion that a relief always presupposes a surface on which it is constructedimplicitly refers to Pedrosa’s field of expertise, Gestalt theory, with itsemphasis on the differentiation between form and ground.5 The non-object may be thus a pivot of Gullar’s complex and also layered relation-ship to Pedrosa’s precedence as a critic (Clark’s work being a particular

Lygia Clark, Counter-Relief, 1958/1960, industrial paint on wood, 56 x 56 x 1.5 cm, courtesy Associacao Cultural ‘OMundo de Lygia Clark’, ref no 20174, photographer unknown

80

4. For Gullar, on the one hand,ordinary objects ‘are exhaustedin the references of meaning’, iethey are fully determined bytheir instrumental belonging inlanguage (our relationshipwith a pear would bedetermined by it being namedso). On the other, if an object isstripped of this linguisticdetermination, it reverts to ‘theopacity of the thing’, becoming‘impenetrable,unapproachable, clearly andinsupportably exterior to thesubject’. The non-object, then,would be a way out of thisimpasse. See Ferreira Gullar,‘A Dialogue on the Non-Object’, in Michael Asbury,Caroline Menezes and LauraBarbi, eds, NeoconcreteExperience, exhibitioncatalogue, Michael Asbury,Luciana Dumphreys, NadiaKerecuk and Michael

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

03:

49 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

site of conflict).6 In short, this anecdote is also a tale of succession. Theyounger critic, armed with the theoretical apparatus bestowed on himby his senior (Gullar often acknowledges his critical, theoretical andart-historical debt to Pedrosa), takes the master’s place and becomesthe legitimate spokesperson of a redefined avant-garde.7

This was ten years after Pedrosa finished his groundbreaking thesis onGestalt, On the Affective Nature of Form, which he circulated amongstartists and critics close to him. Gullar, for one, claims to have read iteven before moving to Rio de Janeiro and first meeting Pedrosa inperson.8 All of this begs a deep revision of the role Gestalt playedwithin Brazilian abstract and Concretist circles. In his seminal study ofNeoconcretism, critic Ronaldo Brito goes as far as seeing MauriceMerleau-Ponty’s critique of Gestalt theory as analogous to Neconcret-ism’s critique of earlier Concretism.9 Brito is right to an extent, asGullar’s writings confirm, but it is worth questioning the reduction ofGestalt theory in Brazil solely to the role of an overdeterminingdogma.10 For to see Gestalt as little more than a theoretical apparatusthat was ‘imported’ alongside other international Concretist tenets, asBrito does, is to overlook Pedrosa’s earlier intervention.11 If the lattertook place in very different conditions from those surrounding the emer-gence of the ‘Theory’, it nevertheless set the terms – or so I will argue –for a debate that would dominate the following decade, up to Gullar’sown intervention.

As abstraction gradually ceased to be the domain of a few isolatedpractitioners and gained institutional backing in the late 1940s (forexample with the 1949 show ‘From Figurativism to Abstractionism’in the recently inaugurated Museum of Modern Art in Sao Paulo), afiery polemic ensued, with Pedrosa and others, such as the future SaoPaulo Concretist leader Waldemar Cordeiro, fiercely defending itagainst attacks from artists and critics associated with the earlier gener-ation of figurative modernism.12 In this context Pedrosa’s engagementwith Gestalt theory should thus be seen as strategic rather than dog-matic, for it suggestively countered a common criticism of abstraction,namely its supposed solipsism. In a particularly virulent attack in 1948,painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti had branded abstraction a ‘sterilespecialization’.13 Of course, Pedrosa’s thesis was not about abstraction– not explicitly, that is. It initially rejects the idea that ‘perception ispreceded by a virtual act of recognition’, which would amount to therecognition of useful objects.14 Still, against the backdrop of thefiguration/abstraction debate, this is unavoidably analogous toaffirming that figuration always comes after form, thus reversing DiCavalcanti’s terms (figuration would be a ‘specialised’ use of form).In short, what Pedrosa initially interrogates is nothing less than thedetermination of form:

If certain forms remind us of objects more directly connected to our prac-tical activities, this fact is a consequence, an effect, and not a cause of theorganization [of the form].15

Or, making the reversal even clearer: ‘If we grant affective signification tothese figurations, this is the result of a preceding fact: their preliminaryexistence as sensible objects.’16 Cordeiro’s position in 1949 struck asimilar chord: ‘Only by objectivising, by depersonalising a form can

81

Marsden, trans, Gallery 32,London, 2009.

5. Those terms also and obviouslyallude to Clark’s Counter-Reliefs.

6. This relationship was verycomplicated indeed. Gullar’senthusiasm for the way LygiaClark’s work exemplified thenon-object was actually metwith scepticism by the artistherself. In her writings, shereveals she had furtherconversations with Pedrosa(whose opinion she evidentlyheld in higher regard than thatof Gullar’s) after the dinnerepisode, during which bothquestioned the suitability of theterm. According to Clark,Pedrosa even proposed analternative name, trans-object,which is exactly the termOiticica later employed inrelation to his Bolides. See LygiaClark, exhibition catalogue,Fundacio Antoni Tapies,Barcelona, 1998, pp 139–143.

7. See Ferreira Gullar, ‘A Tregua– Entrevista com FerreiraGullar’, op cit, pp 31–55.

8. Ibid, p 38. Artist AlmirMavignier also recalls sessionsin Pedrosa’s home when thecritic read parts of his thesis toMavignier, Abraham Palatnikand Ivan Serpa – artists whoshared Pedrosa’s interest in thework of the mentally ill – so asto test their reactions to it. Seethe film by Nina Galanternick:Formas do Afeto: Um Filmesobre Mario Pedrosa, HDVNTSC, colour, 35 minutes, Riode Janeiro, 2010.

9. Ronaldo Brito,Neoconcretismo: Vertice eRuptura do ProjetoConstrutivo Brasileiro,FUNARTE/Instituto Nacionalde Artes Plasticas, Rio deJaneiro, 1985

10. In an argument developedroughly at the same time asmine, critic Caue Alves noteshow Concretism andNeoconcretism failedrespectively to mobilise andacknowledge Gestalt theory inPedrosa’s terms and argued thatGullar ultimately failed toconsider Merleau-Ponty’sinterest in salvaging Gestalt’simportant contributions from itsown problematic premise ofperceptual isomorphism. Alves’philosophically well-informedargument is in many respectssimilar to mine, including interms of documentarysubstantiation, but wenevertheless differ in important

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

03:

49 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

one make it a matter of reflection, determining the intelligibility of awork.’ He would argue, in a Van Doesburgian manner, for a ‘reallanguage of painting’ based on ‘colour and lines that are colour andlines and do not aspire to be pears or men’.17 As a rhetorical coup degrace, Cordeiro emphasised the reversal of the charges against abstrac-tionism: ‘we, the abstractionists, denounce the unsociability and thesolipsism of figurative art’.18

In a crucial passage, Pedrosa advocates a comparison between the uni-versality of recognising a face and that of an artwork, rejecting the theorythat the child slowly distinguishes the human face piece by piece from thechaos of primordial sensation. On the contrary, he sides with Gestalt indefending the spontaneous recognition of the face as a ‘good form’,which he then compares to the recognition of art: ‘[The art object] isendowed precisely with this physiognomic power that we grasp so well,that the animal grasps, and that the child grasps in a face.’19 Howstriking can this be, if one just thinks of how abstraction was attackedfor being little more than a chaotic sea of meaninglessness? For Di Caval-canti:

[abstract artists] construct expanded little worlds out of free-floating frag-ments of real things: these are monstrous visions of amoebic or atomic resi-dues, microscopically revealed by sick minds. For me, whenever an artistnurtures his imagination on those obscure fissures of the world, thenreason is not at work.20

In 1947, art historian Quirino Campofiorito also targeted art producedby ‘live instincts uncontrolled by reason’.21 Only this was not directedagainst modern abstraction but against an exhibition of paintings fromthe Engenho de Dentro psychiatric hospital workshop in Rio deJaneiro. This is no coincidence, since Pedrosa was enthusiasticallyinvolved in the workshop, which became a refuge from conservative artinstitutions.22 It was with the help of discussions generated by the dailyexperience of the workshop that much of Pedrosa’s thesis was conceived.The critic, of course, reacted strongly to commentaries such asthat of Campofiorito, to the point where, as sociologist Glaucia VillasBoas argues, the polemic involving the art of the mentally ill wenthand-in-hand, for a while, with the figuration/abstraction debate.23

In short, if Gestalt allowed Pedrosa to theorise the artistic validity ofthe workshop, it also allowed him to mobilise the production of the men-tally ill – especially their production of geometric abstraction – in orderto legitimise the universality of abstract forms.24 The workings of reason,like the representation of recognisable objects, were secondary in relationto the perception of form. It is clear then that Pedrosa’s was an aestheticsof reception, from which sprang his belief that good works of art couldequally originate from modern artists and psychiatric interns alike. Thiswould temporally translate into a striking definition of artistic openness:‘The realized object is the point of arrival in the artist’s action, but alsothe viewer’s starting point.’25

A few years later, in the 1952 ‘Ruptura’ manifesto, however, Cordeirono longer defended ‘we, the abstractionists’, making a point instead ofdistinguishing ‘those who create new forms from old principles’ from‘those who create new forms from new principles’.26 This signalled aprogrammatic turn: he denounced ‘non-figurative hedonism’ alongside,

82

aspects. On the one hand, Alvesproposes suggestive linksbetween the emergingConstructive avant-gardes andthe political debates of the 1940sand 1950s.On the other, he doesnot discuss the non-object,which for me, and despiteGullar’s dismissive remarks,dialectically appropriates theparadigm of openness Pedrosahad initially perceived in Gestalt.See Caue Alves, ‘Concretismo,Neoconcretismo e Filosofia:Projeto e Falencia da UtopiaConstrutiva’, in Caue Alves et al,Conversas Itinerantes, Funarte,Chapeco, Cacador,Florianopolis, Criciuma,Joinville, 2010, pp 9–46. Mythanks to Clarissa Diniz forbringing this article to myattention. For my own longerdiscussion of Gestalt, see SergioBruno Martins, Constructing anAvant-Garde: Passages inBrazilian Art, 1949–1979, PhDthesis, University CollegeLondon, 2011.

11. This flaw is made all the moresignificant since Brito’saccount has been deeply (and,in many respects, deservedly)influential, but it can beexplained: Pedrosa’s thesiswas published only in 1979,two years after the seniorcritic, who was by then nolonger interested in Gestalt,returned from exile – and allof that took place after Britohad finished writing his 1975study. It is noteworthy that,in another article from 1975,Brito enthusiastically praisesPedrosa but, once again, failsto mention the latter’sinvolvement with Gestalt. SeeRonaldo Brito, ExperienciaCrıtica, Sueli de Lima, ed,Cosac Naify, Sao Paulo,2005, pp 48–52. The factthat Pedrosa’s interest inGestalt theory graduallydissipated was revealed byhimself to Otılia Aranteswhen they first met in 1979.See the preface to the secondedition of Otılia Arantes,Mario Pedrosa: ItinerarioCrıtico, Cosac Naify, SaoPaulo, 2004, p 9.

12. Otılia Arantes datesPedrosa’s engagement withabstraction from 1944–1945with his return to Brazil andthe publication of a series ofarticles on Alexander Calder.See Otılia Arantes, MarioPedrosa: Itinerario Crıtico,Scritta, Sao Paulo, 1991,p 33.

13. Emiliano Di Cavalcanti,‘Realismo e Abstracionismo’,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

03:

49 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

and significantly, amongst others, the art of ‘mad people’. So it is not sur-prising that he would later echo and reverse Pedrosa’s formula, in order todefend the ‘universality of the object’, by arguing that ‘content [in art] isnot a starting point, but an arrival point’.27 The ‘product’ of artistic activitywould thus become a programmatically crafted object whose meaningwould be universally communicable, in keeping with Cordeiro’s beliefthat ‘art can participate in the contemporary spiritual work whenendowed with its proper principles’.28 Hence the growing tendency ofRuptura-aligned painters to distribute their formal repertoire sparinglythroughout a number of works, restricting the pictorial procedure ofeach individual work to one or a very few clear organising principles. Ascritic Lorenzo Mammı has pointed out, Concretist aesthetics favoured ‘acontinuous exercise of the eye, and not a singular and intense experience’.29

This is not to say that Sao Paulo Concretism was devoid of inventive-ness. The sculptures of Luıs Sacilotto, for example, are unequivocallydriven by such ‘continuous exercises’ – giving rise to their titles, alwaysaccompanied by four-digit chronological indexes. Works like Concretion5942 (1959) and Concretion 5839 (1958) depart from an original squaremetal plane. It is this original form – the square – that is kept and multi-plied throughout an intricate series of cut-and-fold operations. These aredesigned to create regular intervals between the metal strips that are equiv-alent in width to the strips themselves. Most importantly, the oppositionbetween opaque matter and empty space becomes secondary in that bothstrip and interval cooperate in forming closed gestalts. To put it briefly,those pieces prompt the viewer’s perception to complete the lines and con-tours of the virtual squares, triangles or circles they propose. In art histor-ian Ana Maria Belluzzo’s words, Sacilotto’s aim was to ‘update apermanent figure and reveal the complexity of simple things’.30

Is such a procedure still in keeping with the rigorous Concretist aes-thetic and ideological framework? Yes, for Sacilotto’s inventiveness actu-ally affirmed the elasticity of the Concretist visual repertoire, and

Luis Sacilotto, Concretion 5942, 1959, painted aluminium, 30 x 30 x 17 cm, ArquivoSacilotto, photo: Sergio Guerini

83

in Joao Bandeira, ed, ArteConcreta Paulista:Documentos, Cosac Naify,Centro Universitario MariaAntonia da USP, Sao Paulo,2002, p 17

14. Mario Pedrosa, Arte, Forma ePersonalidade: 3 Estudos,Kairos, Sao Paulo, 1979, p 14

15. Ibid, p 16

16. Ibid

17. Waldemar Cordeiro, ‘Ainda oAbstracionismo’, in JoaoBandeira, Arte ConcretaPaulista: Documentos, op cit,p 17

18. Ibid

19. Ibid, p 64

20. Di Cavalcanti, op cit, p 17

21. Campofiorito, 1947, quoted inGlaucia Villas Boas, ‘AEstetica da Conversao: OAtelie do Engenho de Dentro ea Arte Concreta Carioca(1946–1951)’, Tempo Social:Revista de Sociologia da USP,vol 20, no 2, 2008, pp 197–219, p 206

22. Almir Mavignier, Ivan Serpaand Abraham Palatnik, artistswho would eventually play keyroles in the emergingConstructive movement, werealso involved in the workshop,which had been founded byMavignier. For a thoroughaccount on the role of theworkshop as one of thecatalysts of Concrete art inBrazil, see Villas Boas, op cit.

23. As Villas Boas puts it, ‘thepolemic Quirino Campofioritoversus Mario Pedrosa becamea reference for respectivelyconservative and progressivepositions in the field of arts’.Ibid, p 208.

24. Villas Boas also stresses theimportance of the workshop inthe building of relationshipsbetween would-beConstructive artists.

25. Ibid, p 57

26. Waldemar Cordeiro et al,‘Ruptura’, in Cocchiarale andGeiger, eds, op cit, p 219

27. Cordeiro, ‘O Objeto’, inCocchiarale and Geiger, eds,op cit, pp 223–224, p 223

28. Cordeiro, ‘Ruptura’, op cit, pp220–222, p 222. This polemicalessay was written as a responseto attacks by senior critic SergioMilliet. Cordeiro responded byattacking in turn the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

03:

49 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

consequently its overall validity and versatility.31 The limit of Sacilotto’smultiplication remains strict: it lies precisely in the threshold of the result-ing planes remaining intelligibly reversible – virtually, of course – to theiroriginating figure. As Belluzzo observes, Sacilotto ‘started from a singlesurface, which is definitely square, to create various planes’, thus neverlosing ‘sight of the original form’.32 The success of his work dependson how effectively he draws a multiplicity of shapes out of a first singleone, whilst keeping this initial reference intact and unequivocally refer-ring the viewer back to it – shapes that are furthermore securelyaligned in planes. This is the magic of his operation, to borrow Belluzzo’sapposite term: indeed, we are meant to follow his cuts and folds back-wards, in the same way we would follow a stage magician revealing hissleight-of-hand, in order to understand and marvel at the simplicity ofthe operation. If proliferation were somehow stretched beyond this exer-cise, the sculptures would risk their status as (intelligible) ‘products’ andquickly collapse into (arbitrary or intuitive) ‘expression’ – at least accord-ing to Cordeiro’s rigorous terminology.

Such inventiveness leads Belluzo to protest that the ‘plural forms thatcharacterize Concrete production reveal an organic, functional structureevery time they are folded and unfolded’, at odds with the Neoconcretecharacterisation of them as ‘mechanical serial forms’.33 It is superficial,however, to see the Neoconcrete criticism of the ‘mechanical’ only interms of seriality. For Gullar’s vocabulary in this case was borrowedstraight from his main theoretical reference at the time, Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behaviour, from which I would like to quotean elucidating passage:

A mechanical action, whether the word is taken in a restricted or loosersense, is one in which the cause and the effect are decomposable intoreal elements which have a one-to-one correspondence. In elementaryactions, the dependence is uni-directional; the cause is the necessary andsufficient condition of the effect considered in its existence and itsnature; and, even when one speaks of reciprocal action between twoterms, it can be reduced to a series of uni-directional determinations.34

Irrespective of how much Sacilotto’s sculptures are ‘folded and unfolded’,they never lose sight of a given set of generative principles (in fact, theystrive not to).35 The temporality of experiencing phenomena implicit inMerleau-Ponty’s passage is thus akin to that of the Concretist artwork:an analytical inventory of ‘one-to-one correspondences’ of causes andeffects; it is a temporality that, in short, folds the moment of experienceonto that of production, the latter understood as a ‘series of uni-directional determinations’. It is in this sense that Cordeiro could arguethat the object in art offered no ‘starting point’: there is no ‘beyond’ it,since experiencing it means decoding it rather than giving it continuationthrough subjective experience. Thus we reach Gullar’s 1957 critical rever-sion of Cordeiro’s notion of the object:

. . . the poem starts when the reading is over. . . thus, in the concrete poem,the reader is brought into encountering a durable object – that puts thepoem in opposition to the advert and to advertising processes in general– where language aims only at precipitating an action by the reader, notto create an object for him.36

84

abstractionism of one ofMilliet’s preferred painters,Cıcero Dias. Ronaldo Britowould neatly synthesise thisstance by arguing that theparadigm of the Concretist artistwas the ‘superior designer’.

29. Lorenzo Mammı, ‘Concrete’56: The Root of Form’, inConcreta ’56: A Raiz daForma, exhibition catalogue,Mariana Attie and NoemiJaffe, trans, Museu de ArteModerna de Sao Paulo, SaoPaulo, 2006, pp 23–50, p 36

30. Ana Maria Belluzzo, ‘Ruptureand Concrete Art’, in ArteConstrutiva no Brasil: ColecaoAdolpho Leirner, Aracy AAmaral, ed, Izabel MuratBurbridge, trans, DBAMelhoramentos, Sao Paulo,1998, pp 95–141, p 123

31. It is crucial to understand themeaning of inventiveness as theexpansion of a repertoire thatis meant not to challenge itsoverall predetermination but,on the contrary, continuouslyto confirm the validity andreach of its generativeprinciple; it is something like acreative proliferation ofexamples. In Brito’s account,this kind of inventiveness isplaced in opposition toNeoconcrete imagination. SeeBrito, Neoconcretismo, op cit,p 112.

32. Belluzzo, op cit, p 128

33. Ibid, p 118

34. Merleau-Ponty, op cit, p 160

35. It is worth comparing Merleau-Ponty’s description with that ofthe Concretist object by formerUlm School theoretician MaxBense: ‘We consider anabsolutely constructive objectthat which can be methodicallyproduced in a finite and exactseries of conscious steps ofdecision and manipulation. Andwe consider a non-absolutelyconstructive object that whichcannot be methodicallyproduced in a finite and exactseries of securely executablesteps; an object whose existencedoes not originate from an actthat can be subjected todecomposition andrecomposition.’ Max Bense,Inteligencia Brasileira: UmaReflexao Cartesiana, TercioRedondo, trans, Cosac Naify,Sao Paulo, 2009, pp 63–64.English translation by theauthor, from the Portugueseversion.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

03:

49 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

This was partly a reaction against Concretist positions, no doubt; butwhat we fail to grasp, if we restrict the scope of this reaction to a suppo-sedly closed Concrete-Neoconcrete polarity, is the way Gullar cruciallyreclaims, in very similar terms, the openness of Pedrosa’s 1949 Gestaltianformula.37 Also, by further advancing that the poem ‘must count as aquotidian experience’, but one that aims at a ‘transcendental totality’,Gullar was already introducing the phenomenological tension that isthe crux of the ‘Theory’: the uneasy matrix of an artwork whose experi-ence bypasses the privileged space of the fine arts, but which equallyrefuses the ordinariness of utilitarian objects (a major point of differen-tiation between the non-object and the later minimalist object).

EXCLUDED OBJECT

I want to turn now to the problem of Neoconcretist teleological histori-cism – that is, to what Gullar actually meant by retrospection in thefirst paragraph of the ‘Theory’. Concretism, especially in poetry, didoften engage in dense discussions of its artistic predecessors, but thesewere discursively arranged as a sort of constellation. With Neoconcretism– and more forcefully with the ‘Theory’ – a critical take on medium-specificity assumed the guise of a carefully constructed historicist narra-tive. Gullar was then visual arts editor of the Sunday Supplement of theJornal do Brasil newspaper, the undisputed intellectual vehicle of Neo-concretism, and by 1959 his articles there were becoming more systema-tic.38 He then started, for example, a year-and-a-half-long series ofreviews of modernist movements and artists under the telling overallheading, ‘Stages of Contemporary Art’.

One purpose of those articles was to flesh out the historical accountsketched initially in the ‘Neoconcrete Manifesto’ and developed in the‘Theory’. Gullar claims in the latter that the media of painting andsculpture ‘[converge] towards a common point’ in which ‘the denomina-tions painting and sculpture perhaps no longer apply’.39 For the poet,base and frame were equivalent limitations that both sculpture andpainting were in the process of overcoming – or, more precisely, thattheir abstract forms were in the process of ‘overflowing’.40 Withmedium-specificity left behind, only the non-objecthood of the work– the phenomenological tension it sets up – would remain as an artisticparameter, and Gullar would sometimes make explicit the telos of thisoperation: ‘There is in Brancusi, as well, the path to the non-object.’41

We should ask ourselves, however, to what extent the status of paintingand sculpture is really equivalent in this account. In other words: doesthe non-object deny both categories equally in order to constituteitself? Maybe not, and it is precisely by taking this fundamental imbal-ance into account that we can start to think the non-object beyond itsoriginal historicism.42

The different historical inflection of the ‘Theory’ in relation to the pre-ceding ‘Neoconcrete Manifesto’ is nicely summarised by Michael Asbury:‘[no] longer directly concerned with establishing parameters of distinctionfor neoconcretism, Gullar’s text centres on the unfolding of the two-dimen-sional plane within space as a general art historical development’.43 Withthe non-object already situated within his theoretical horizon, Gullar is

85

36. Ferreira Gullar, Oliveira Bastosand Reynaldo Jardim, ‘PoesiaConcreta: ExperienciaIntuitiva’, in Cocchiarale andGeiger, eds, op cit, pp 229–230, p 229

37. Gullar’s article was a directresponse to Sao Paulo Concretepoet Haroldo de Campos’snotion of mathematicalcomposition. However, sinceGullar engaged almost single-handedly in polemicalexchanges both with Sao Paulopoets and with Cordeiro, it is fairto assume that his aestheticpositions relate to Concretism ingeneral.

38. For a thorough study of thestory of the SundaySupplement, see ElizabethVarela, Suplemento Dominicaldo Jornal do Brasil eNeoconcretismo: Relacoes eManifestacoes, unpublishedMPhil dissertation, UFRJ, Riode Janeiro, 2009.

39. Gullar, ‘Theory of the non-object’, op cit, p 173

40. At some points his argumentbecomes quite simply thatabstract forms become sosimilar to either frame orsculpture as inevitably to‘include’ them, thus reachingbeyond the ‘metaphorical’ spaceof thefinearts andasserting theirphenomenological presence inthe world. See Ferreira Gullar,‘Brancusi e o Problema da Basena Escultura’, in SuplementoDominical do Jornal do Brasil, 9April 1960.

41. Ibid. Although the Brancusiarticle was not nominally partof the Stages of ContemporaryArt series, it was publishedwithin the latter’s time-span.For an example of the samerationale that is part of theStages series, see FerreiraGullar, Etapas da ArteContemporanea: Do Cubismoa Arte Neoconcreta, Revan,Rio de Janeiro, 1998, p 148.

42. Already in 1960, Lygia Clarkwould question whether thesuppression of the base insculpture was really equivalentto that of the frame in painting,preferring to concentrateinstead on the problem of thedestruction of the plane (whichwill soon enter the presentdiscussion). See Lygia Clark,untitled, in Lygia Clark,exhibition catalogue, FundacioAntoni Tapies, Barcelona,1998, pp 139–141.

43. Asbury, ‘Neoconcretism andMinimalism’, op cit, p 176

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

03:

49 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

able to address even groups and artists he had previously dismissed, posit-ing Neoconcretism as a dialectical synthesis. The Duchampian readymade,for example, is now recognised as an acute but failed expression of the his-torical urge to overcome the centrality of the represented object in art:

This process of transfiguration of the object is limited by the fact that it isgrounded not so much in the formal qualities of the object, but in its con-nection with the object’s quotidian use. Soon that obscurity that is charac-teristic of thing returns to envelop the work, bringing it back to thecommon level. On this front the artists are defeated by the object.44

To put it another way, what Gullar seems to have concluded is that thereadymade’s offensive against the represented object was so extremethat it razed art altogether to the ground, reducing the territory theavant-garde was hoping to revolutionise to nothing but a sterile rubbleof ordinary objects. Such a conquest would be for him as pointless as itwas to understand Piet Mondrian ‘as the destroyer of the surface, theplane, the line, without paying attention to the new space constructedby this destruction’.45 The avowed transcendence inaugurated by thenon-object (ie the redemptive subject–object relation it promised, conso-nant with its utopian ethos) was thus, in this precise sense, a constructiverequirement that depended as such on its unequivocal articulation viaconstructive forms. It was also a contextual requirement for sure, butone inherent in the very historicity of the non-object: the obligatorypassage via the figure of the plane signified its hard-fought position atthe end of a dialectical history of modernism, a position that was nowable to incorporate and surpass even those seemingly antithetical histori-cal episodes (and thus to assure its superiority and distinction).46

This pivotal role assumed by the plane will ground both the explicitprominence of painting in Gullar’s history of modernism and its implicitgrip over the interpretation of Neoconcretism (it is noteworthy in thisrespect that the title of the Stages of Contemporary Art series wouldeventually change into Stages of Contemporary Painting).47 The caseof Amilcar de Castro is exemplary here, as the misleading simplicityof his sculptures makes them privileged screens for interpretive projec-tions. What may have been initially a critical description of his workbecame, over the years, a hackneyed formula, an obstacle to furthercritical reflection. I refer to the idea that his trademark sculptures orig-inate with a cut-and-fold operation that opens up the two-dimensionalplane to three-dimensionality48 (to which I shall refer, for brevity’s sake,as the ‘2D–3D account’).49 There are important points to consider here.First, while the cut-and-fold account is undoubtedly accurate (as a dras-tically brief inventory of sculptural actions), it is also, as critic RodrigoNaves was one of the few to point out, too schematic, in that it clearlyfails to account for the experiential complexity of these works.50

Second, and most importantly, there is the incredible assumption thatthese sculptures originate in a movement that is strictly analogous tothat of the Neoconcretist history of modernist painting: the passagefrom two-dimensional plane to three-dimensional space.51 It may beunsurprising that Clark’s trajectory from her Cocoons and Counter-Reliefs towards the Animals (and it is worth recalling that this is theavowed site of Gullar’s encounter with his primordial non-object) prac-tically invites such a reading, or that Helio Oiticica would cast his own

86

44. Gullar, ‘Theory of the non-object’, op cit, p 172

45. Ferreira Gullar, et al,‘Neoconcrete Manifesto’ inAsbury, Menezes and Barbi,eds, op cit

46. It is telling in that respect thatSao Paulo Concretists often‘accused’ Gullar of being inthrall to Surrealism. See, forexample, Haroldo de Campos,‘Arte Construtiva no Brasil’,Revista USP 30, 1996, pp251–261.

47. The Stages series begins oneweek after the publication ofthe ‘Neoconcrete Manifesto’and changes its title roughlytwo months later, that is,several months before thepublication of the ‘Theory’.See Varela, op cit, pp 24–25.

48. Castro eventually developedother lines of work, but thisparticular procedure, which headopted in the mid-1950s (firstby cutting and then weldingtogether the iron/steel piecesand soon after folding theplaque or slab rather thanwelding it) accompanied himthroughout his career.

49. For a compilation ofstatements of the sort, drawnfrom the critical literature onCastro, see Joao FranciscoAlves, Amilcar de Castro: UmaRetrospectiva, RobertoCataldo Costa, trans, PortoAlegre, Fundacao Bienal deArtes Visuais do Mercosul,2005, pp 236–37.

50. For Naves, this schematismoverlooks the fact that ‘theexperience offered byAmilcar’s pieces is in arigorously inverse relation tothe simplicity and clearness ofhis method’. Rodrigo Naves, OVento e o Moinho: Ensaiossobre Arte Moderna eContemporanea, Companhiadas Letras, Sao Paulo, 2007, p108. He clearly stateselsewhere that ‘In fact, we faceobjects that repel the idea ofprocedures that can beperceptually reconstituted.’Rodrigo Naves, A FormaDifıcil: Ensaios sobre ArteBrasileira, Atica, Sao Paulo,1996, p 241

51. In an exhibition catalogue, arthistorian Jose Francisco Alvescompiles statements by anumber of the authors whoinsist on that matter – and hehimself is no exception:‘Therefore, the operation ofcutting and folding the planeinto elementary geometrical

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

03:

49 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

Neoconcrete trajectory as a ‘transition of colour from painting intospace’ – both were originally painters, after all.52 But should we notat least stop and ask whether it is proper also to interpret Castro’s sculp-tures with such painterly eyes?

Of course, one might point out that Castro himself endorsed thisreading.53 His sculptures, he would explain, are ‘made from ironslabs. . . because I want to demonstrate, departing from the surface, thebirth of the third dimension’.54 Art historian Jose Francisco Alvesfurther emphasises Castro’s obsession with the origin of the sculpturesin drawing, pointing out that the sculptor would draw several lines ona white sheet of paper, with a hard pencil, in order to come up withshapes and ways of cutting his steel plaques and slabs.55 It is here thatthe potential objection falls short. That the artist himself would easilyenvisage a smooth passage from the moment of production to that ofthe finished work is fair enough, but this does not entail so smooth apassage if we start from the viewer’s side. This is especially true vis-a-vis the Neoconcretist paradigm of experience which couples phenomeno-logical primacy (‘. . .by virtue of being the first appearance of a form, [thenon-object] founds its signification in itself’)56 with a remarkable lack ofinterest in the production aspect of art-making.57 It is not that those pre-paratory drawings are irrelevant (and I will return to them). But to seethem determining the meaning of experience is to ignore the fact thatthat the autonomy of phenomenological experience over making, orperhaps their evident out-of-jointness, is one of Neoconcretism’s most

Amilcar de Castro, preparatory drawing, undated, licensed by inARTS.com, photo: Daniel Coury

87

forms (circular andquadrangular) is what makesthe third dimension emerge.’Even Gullar himself – who, inthe Neoconcrete period,refrained from describing sucha passage – is later quotedmarvelling at the how ‘thetwo-dimensional plate hadbecome three-dimensional –volume!’. See Jose FranciscoAlves, op cit, pp 236–237.For critic Tadeu Chiarelli,likewise, ‘the incision in thesesculptures is a means toconfigure the final form,which the work assumes themoment from two-dimensionality totridimensionality’ (sic). TadeuChiarelli, Amilcar de Castro:Corte e Dobra, Izabel MuratBurbridge, trans, Cosac Naify,Sao Paulo, 2003, p 25

52. See Helio Oiticica, ‘TheTransition of Color from thePainting into Space and theMeaning of Construction’, inMari Carmen Ramirez, ed,Helio Oiticica: The Body ofColor, Stephen Berg andHector Olea, trans, Tate,London, 2007, pp 222–227.The translation of sentido de

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

03:

49 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

basic tenets (in keeping with Pedrosa’s Gestaltian emphasis on reception).Folding the meaning of experience onto that of production is a Concretisttenet, not a Neoconcretist one.

The vicissitudes of the plane in Castro’s work can be clarified by com-paring it with that of Sacilotto. It is clear, for example, that the emptyintervals in his sculptural Concretions are not meant as openings forour gaze, or frames for the space that lie beyond them. This kind of trans-parency is not meaningful to their sculptural form. As I argued, those gapsare equivalent to (ie occupy the same plane as) the material segments ofthe sculpture. It is because of their complementarity and regularity thatthey are able to form a gestalt, a perceptual whole, as if both took partin defining a planar geometric form. Experience thus becomes a closedcircle (or square). Castro’s sculptures, on the other hand, are based onthe plane as that indispensable structuring element that is neverthelessunattainable to experience as such. The plane never presents itself, butremains somehow attached to the experience of these sculptures – it con-tinuously lurks there.58 By virtue of its insistent reluctance to form itself,both actually and virtually, the plane here acts, so to speak, as a negativebenchmark, an absent ‘ground’ that lends formal and phenomenologicalconsistency to the visible configuration of the work. The sculpture is notmeasured against the plane (as if it were a visible ruler) but against itsabsence (as if it were a failed structural function). Far from positivelydetermining the sculptural form, the plane becomes the name of that irre-solvable tension that animates the sculpture. We cannot get rid of it, butwe cannot resolve it either.59

Amilcar de Castro, Untitled, early 1960s, steel, 54 x 54 x 1.2 cm, Delcir da Costa

collection, licensed by inARTS.com, photo: Daniel Coury

88

construtividade into ‘meaningof construction’ is misleading,in that it loses the polysemy ofthe word sentido, inPortuguese, which can meaneither ‘sense’, ‘meaning’ or‘direction’. Besides,construtividade denotes asubstantive quality, which‘construction’ largely misses. Abetter translation alternativewould have been therefore‘sense of constructivity’.

53. In a way Castro was veryinvolved in the discursivespace of Neoconcretism: hewas the graphic designer ofthe SDJB, being responsiblefor its complete andrevolutionary reconfiguration.For more on Castro as agraphic designer, see YanetAguilera, ed, Preto noBranco: A Arte Grafica deAmilcar de Castro, Discursoand UFMG, Sao Paulo andBelo Horizonte, 2005.

54. Amılcar de Castro, untitled, inAracy A Amaral, ed, ProjetoConstrutivo Brasileiro na Arte(1950–1962), exhibitioncatalogue, Museu de ArteModerna and Pinacoteca doEstado, Rio de Janeiro and SaoPaulo, 1977, p 243

55. Jose Francisco Alves, op cit,p 236

56. Gullar, ‘Dialogue’, op cit, p 91

57. For a discussion on theNeoconcrete rejection ofproduction, see Brito,Neoconcretismo, op cit, pp108–109.

58. For critic Sonia Salzstein,Castro’s sculptures create ‘astate of ambiguity, alwaysreferring back to the originalunity, which, however mustnever be fully there’. Sheoscillates between arguing thatthe works carry an ‘originalfracture’, and casting theinsistence of the plane as ‘thememory of the primordialplane that generated [thesculpture]’. See Sonia Salzstein,‘Amılcar de Castro’, in Guiadas Artes Plasticas, 8/9, 1988,p 78. In my argument, as weshall see shortly, the planeinsists more on the repetitionof a missed encounter than ona positive memory or originalunity. Likewise, RodrigoNaves argues that ‘we knowhow to reconstitute the ironslabs that lie at the origin of thepieces, but a thick layer ofwork blocks this movement.This is why knowledge of thesteps involved in the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

03:

49 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

This allows us to speak of multiplication in Sacilotto and repetition inCastro. In the former, negative elements are additive but rather strictlynegative (as intervals become constitutive parts of planes they help to mul-tiply), while in the latter the negative remains as such (since the plane isnever actually in sight). Castro’s famous coherence, his insistence on thesame sculptural matrix throughout his career, can be reinterpreted fromthis viewpoint. The reason why his sculptures uncannily read as being allthe same and yet different from one another is because, being based onsheer negativity, their relation to the plane can never be pinned down.Castro’s confident repetition of the same procedure over and over againwas supported, paradoxically enough, by the certainty that each andevery sculpture he set out to make would stumble upon the same irreducibleincompleteness – what is fundamentally constant in them isnot their formalrepertoire per se, but the absence they articulate without ever representing.

This phenomenology of the negative may be at odds with Gullar’sMerleau-Pontian approach, but it is properly theorised elsewhere: in psy-choanalysis. What I have in mind here is Joan Copjec’s suggestion thatphenomenological consistency (or ‘reality-testing’ for Freud) is not amatter of finding ‘an object in real perception which corresponds to theone presented, but to re-find such an object, to convince oneself that it isstill there’.60 The ‘re-found’ object, as Freud often insists, is never anactual object once experienced by the subject, but an always-alreadylost one. ‘Reality-testing’ is thus the paradoxical name of ‘the permanentloss of that reality – or Real: a reality that was never present as such –which is the precondition for determining the objective status of our per-ceptions’.61 Perceived objects are then ‘fleeting perceptions’ that seem toacquire ‘the weight of objectivity only when they are weighed or anchoredby the excluded real object’.62 From this standpoint, it is clear that thenegativity Castro’s sculptures articulate is ultimately at odds with thenon-object: they acquire their specific consistency as they become nega-tively anchored by their unattainable planarity. It has been alreadynoted that Neoconcretism as a whole represents a critical limit of the ‘Bra-zilian constructive project’, ie that it prefigured its implosion.63 But herewe achieve a striking formulation: Castro goes as far as accepting the geo-metric plane, that pillar of Concretist aesthetics, as an impossible object.In this sense, his work constitutes a critical limit of the Constructiveproject not simply because it participated in its undoing, but because ittook it beyond its limits of representability; it accepts and affirms thebreakdown of the constructive form, excludes it from perceptual reality,but nevertheless retains it as a negative benchmark of this same reality.

I can now propose that even Castro’s preparatory drawings strengthenrather than undermine my case. Citing Paul Valery, critic Ricardo Fab-brini imagines Castro’s relationship with that mesh of lines traced‘without any previous calculation’ on paper so as to suggest that thesculptor:

. . . goes forward, backwards, bends himself, blinks, behaves with all hisbody as an accessory of the eye, becomes one and all viewing, aiming,modulating or focusing organ in order to, then, with a well-aimed trace,detach from this labyrinth of lines a project of the work.64

So the project comes after the work of the eye. Castro’s interwoven linesbecome a field through which the eye searches for the sculptural form. But

89

construction of the works isinsufficient to apprehend ortame them.’ The apparentlyodd idea of a ‘layer of work’ isindeed suggestive, for it pointsprecisely to a transversal cutinto a more conventionaltemporality of experience, justas the psychoanalytic notion ofwork also interrupts theseemingly mechanic linearityof conscious experience. SeeRodrigo Naves, A FormaDifıcil, op cit, p 238.

59. This account by no meansignores the sheer materiality ofthese works, which is crucial,since Castro’s choice of cor-tensteel shows that he wasevidently interested in lendinga rusty look to his sculptures.As a matter of fact, the plane isinitially excluded, partly as aresult of such an opaquemateriality, in that it disruptsabstract autonomy. After all,why should we ascribe to thesedensely material plaques andslabs of steel – rusting ones,moreover – the automatic andabstract identity of planes?

60. Joan Copjec, ‘Sex and theEuthanasia of Reason’, in JoanCopjec, ed, Supposing theSubject, Verso, London, 1994,pp 16–44, p 39

61. Ibid

62. Ibid, p 40

63. Ronaldo Brito’s seminalaccount is definitive in thisrespect.

64. Ricardo Fabbrini: ‘Pulsoes doConstrutivismo’, NataliaGiossa Fujita, trans, inAguilera, ed, op cit, pp 159–163, p 160

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

03:

49 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014

what does it find? Again, it is never the flat plane, but the partial form of afuture sculpture that he will still have actually to find by cutting yetanother piece of paper.65 In other words, Castro does not turn the flatsheet into a sculpture, but tries to capture an already-formed sculpture– a partial ‘view’ of it – as it springs forth from his drawn mesh. Helets his searching gaze be caught by the web of lines he draws on thepaper and the sculptural form is the product of this encounter. Thatmesh is thus opposed to the modernist grid, in that the latter underpinsthe originality of the picture plane.66 So, rather than take the drawingsas evidence in favour of the 2D–3D account, I can now suggest thatthe plane is excluded from them as well. Instead of doubling a blanksurface that would be receptive for a projective look, the drawings actas screens that capture a gaze fraught with anxiety: they already stagethe failed re-finding of the lost object.

Castro’s sculptures thus make evident the blind spot in the ‘Theory’.More specifically, they question its ultimate coupling of phenomenologi-cal openness and historicist closure. For it is clear now that those sculp-tures, hinged as they are on the plane qua lost object, are not simplyexpressions of the heterodoxy of the Brazilian Constructive project butrevelations of its historical crux. Let me put it another way: what if wesubstitute the ‘real satisfaction’ that the lost object is supposed to offer(in Freud’s theory) for, so to speak, a ‘historical satisfaction’? Does notutopianism, especially in the quasi-positivist tone it had in 1950sBrazil, legitimise this operation? With hindsight, we may perhapssuggest that Castro’s sculptures, from Neoconcretism onwards, articulatethe loss of a neat identification between the language of geometricabstraction and a palpable sense of historical fulfilment (thus theanxiety I evoked). We might be led to think of his oeuvre as a melancholicand repetitive re-enactment of a lost utopia, but there may be more to it. IfNeoconcretism did indeed introduce negativity at the very core of the Bra-zilian Constructive projective – as Brito argues – it does not follow that itsimply led to its eventual demise. It also means that this negativity wasitself objective and that, as such, it was prone to being reclaimed and rede-ployed – precisely as the non-object would be in the late 1960s. It is truethat Constructive identity was quickly losing its ability to provide a legit-imate historical ground for art practice, but it may be that the same nega-tivity that disrupted a certain notion of the Constructive may havesimultaneously opened up the possibility for another, different one toemerge.67

Different versions or sections of this article were presented as papers at the Sub-Objectand Studiowork conference, University College London and Camden Arts Centre, 6February 2010; at the Meeting Margins International Conference Transnational Artin Latin America and Europe 1950–1978, University of Essex, 4 December 2010;and as a talk in the Smart Lecture Series, University of Chicago, 6 January 2011. Iwould like to thank all who invited me to participate in those events, and also forthe valuable feedback I received on those occasions, and especially to Briony Fer,Michael Asbury and Christine Mehring. Translations of Portuguese originals aremine unless stated otherwise.

90

65. Writing in 1967, as the ‘NewBrazilian Objectivity’ showbrought the notion of theobject back into the spotlight,Pedrosa also emphasised theunplanned character of thesesculptures: ‘What is special in[Castro’s] operationaldemarche is that he doesn’tdepart from an a priori, butfrom a vague drawing on paperso that later, in face of a planecircle, square or rectangle, hewill open it, unfold it. He doesnot construct violently, or infact he does not reallyconstruct. He follows amysterious totality that lies forhim in no a priori.’ The criticwould suggestively, but notfully question the plane as astarting point, and would stillsubscribe to the 2D–3Daccount, but it is clear in hiswriting that he wasnevertheless struck (as laterSalzstein and Naves would beas well) by the challengeCastro’s sculptures posed to anorigin-orientated narrative.Pedrosa, Mundo, Homem,Arte em Crise, Perspectiva, SaoPaulo, 1975, p 166

66. In Rosalind Krauss’s famousargument, the modernist gridunderscores the illusion ‘of theoriginary status of the pictorialsurface’ by creating a double, a‘representational text’ thatmanages to become even moreoriginary than the blankcanvas itself. Krauss, TheOriginality of the Avant-Garde and Other ModernistMyths, MIT Press, Cambridge,Massachusetts, 1985 p 160

67. For a discussion of how, forexample, the notion of theConstructive would beconceptually developed inHelio Oiticica’s works andwritings following thebreakdown of Neoconcretism,see my article ‘Helio Oiticica:Mapping the Constructive’, inThird Text, 113, vol 24, no 4,pp 409–422.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

03:

49 1

1 N

ovem

ber

2014