Rio de Janeiro, 1956 to 1964: When Geometry Learned to Move

In March 1959 the Sunday supplement of the Rio newspaper Jornal do Brasil carried a text by the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar that put a name to something already happening in the city’s studios. The Neo-Concrete Manifesto was signed by Gullar with Amílcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Reynaldo Jardim and Theon Spanudis, according to the biography of Pape published by the Anozero Coimbra Biennial. Its argument, as an essay in Harvard’s ReVista puts it, was that the visual arts needed to be freed from the rational and technological tone of the Concrete movement centred in São Paulo.

The manifesto sits at a hinge between two bodies of work. Behind it lies the disciplined geometry of the mid 1950s. Ahead of it lie objects that had to be handled, walked through, worn and danced in. In about five years, three artists in Rio, Clark, Pape and Hélio Oiticica, took abstraction off the wall and put it into the viewer’s hands.

Grupo Frente and the discipline of the grid

The starting point was Grupo Frente, a Rio association of artists working in a Concrete idiom. The Hammer Museum associates Clark with the group alongside Oiticica and Pape during the 1950s. Oiticica, born in 1937, was still in his teens when he made the paintings and gouaches that Tate dates to 1955 and 1956 and describes as showing an affinity with Paul Klee, Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian.

Those European models gave the Rio artists a vocabulary of flat colour and hard edges. What they did with it next was less European. Oiticica’s Metaesquemas, a series Tate dates to 1957 and 1958, are compositions of geometric forms on board. In the audio guide to the Whitney Museum’s retrospective Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium, the curator Donna De Salvo compares them to blueprints or floor plans for the participatory work that followed, and the guide draws attention to the lines incised into the support. The shapes read as stable at first glance. Look longer and they tilt and crowd against one another, as if the grid were under pressure.

Clark came to the group by a different route. Born in Belo Horizonte in 1920, she returned to Rio in 1952 for her first solo exhibition, according to the Hammer. From 1958, the Museo Reina Sofía notes, she was exploring unexpected, invented spaces in her work. Pape had been born in 1927 in Nova Friburgo, in the state of Rio de Janeiro; she died in the city of Rio in 2004.

A ballet of solids

In 1958 Pape and the poet Reynaldo Jardim conceived the Balé Neoconcreto I, presented at the Copacabana Theater. The Anozero biography describes it as a staging of Jardim’s poem “Target Eye” through geometric solids, colour, movement, sound and light. The piece is usually filed under performance. It reads just as well as an abstract painting whose shapes have been set in motion on a stage.

In 1959, the year she left Grupo Frente and signed the manifesto, Pape made O Livro da Criação (Book of Creation). It has sixteen pages, each a 30 centimetre square, cut and coloured so that the reader unfolds them into three dimensional forms. The Anozero text describes it as alluding to the genesis of the world and to the active role of the person handling it. The book has no text in the ordinary sense. Its story of creation is told by the reader’s hands.

The manifesto year

The manifesto gave this work a public argument and a public platform. Its signatories were not only painters and sculptors. Gullar, Jardim and Spanudis were writers, and the group moved easily between poetry, publishing and the gallery. The ReVista essay counts the artist Willys de Castro among the founding members alongside Clark, Oiticica and Pape.

For Oiticica, the years after 1959 brought a rapid sequence of steps away from the flat support. Tate dates his Bilaterals to 1959 and his Spatial Reliefs to 1960. The Whitney guide presents P58 Spatial Relief, Red (1960), made in polyvinyl acetate resin on plywood, as a painting that hangs in real space. The Nuclei followed, a series Tate dates from 1960 to 1966. The Grand Nucleus, worked on from 1960 to 1968, gathers more than thirty suspended paintings through which visitors move. In NC6 Medium Nucleus 3 (1961 to 1963), mirrors multiply the effect, and the Whitney guide frames the series around a simple question: does the viewer stand at the centre of the work or at its edge?

Clark’s creatures

Clark’s answer to the same problem was hinged metal. Her Bichos, or creatures, are made of metal plates joined by hinges. The Reina Sofía, which holds Bicho desfolhado (Husked Creature), dated 1960 and produced in 1973 in aluminium sheet, describes the hinges as forming a spine that allows the piece to be articulated. A Bicho has no single correct shape. It is meant to be picked up and folded into new configurations, and the museum records Clark’s view that its organic quality lay not in its geometry but in the way it presents itself as a living, active organism.

The Bichos were first shown at the 6th São Paulo Biennial in 1961, where, according to the Hammer, they won Clark the sculpture prize. The Reina Sofía calls the series her first major contribution to interactive art. For a movement launched in a newspaper supplement, it was national recognition of a high order, and it came for a work whose meaning depended on the visitor being allowed to touch it.

From the gallery to Mangueira

The early 1960s also changed where Oiticica spent his time. The Whitney guide records that he became involved with the samba school of the Mangueira favela, building relationships with residents and with figures on the margins of the law, among them Cara de Cavalo, who was later killed by police. The ReVista essay dates his becoming a samba dancer with the Estação Primeira de Mangueira school to 1964.

The work changed with him. Tate dates the Bólides, boxes or bottles holding pigment, foam, mirrors, shells, earth, fabric and poetry, to 1963 through 1969, and the Whitney guide describes them as tabletop objects with movable parts and tactile materials. Then came the Parangolés, which Tate dates from 1964: capes, tents and banners of coloured fabric worn by participants who move to the rhythm of samba. Tate’s phrase for them is “habitable paintings”. The Grupo Frente gouaches of 1955 and the first Parangolés are separated by less than ten years, and by the entire distance between a composition on paper and a garment in motion on a dancing body.

1964 and what followed

The year Oiticica joined Mangueira was also the year of Brazil’s military coup, and the ReVista essay reads the later work of the Rio artists against that event. Gullar had already turned in another direction. In 1963 he published Cultura posta em questão (Questioning Culture), in which, the essay notes, he rejected art he now regarded as bourgeois.

The consequences of 1964 played out over the following years. In 1965 the exhibition Opinião 65 opened at Rio’s Museu de Arte Moderna, and in 1968 the dictatorship enacted Institutional Act No. 5, both recorded in the ReVista essay. Pape’s Divisor of 1968 belongs to that later moment: a cloth 20 metres by 20 metres, cut with openings and activated by a crowd of participants. Its premise had been worked out in Rio a decade earlier, in a ballet of coloured solids and a book without words. A work of art, these artists proposed, could be something people complete with their own bodies.