This article contains a survey carried out on the occasion of the exhibition Depoimento de uma geração [Statement of a Generation] curated by critic Frederico Morais. The show, which took place at the Galeria de Arte Banerj in 1986, intended to provide a vision of the state of art in Brazil, on the basis of the work of artists based in Rio de Janeiro, after Institutional Act Number 5 (AI-5) was decreed (December 1968); with that decree, the military dictatorship in power from 1964 to 1985 suspended the individual rights stipulated in the Brazilian Constitution. The following artists were interviewed for the article’s survey: Wanda Pimentel, Ascânio Maria Martins Monteiro [Ascânio MMM], Cildo Meireles, Teresa Simões, Luiz Alphonsus de Guimarães, Antonio Manuel, Guilherme Vaz, Umberto Costa Barros, and Morais himself. The following questions were put to them: Is radicalism no longer fashionable? Where has that rebellious spirit [from 1968] gone? Where is the avant-garde today? What happened to utopia? Written jointly by journalists Reynaldo Roels and Joaquim dos Santos, the text that precedes the artists’ answers describes the art produced by those creators in 1969 and 1970 as a “sort of armed art.” According to the journalists, that moment in Brazilian history witnessed the emergence of a strain of conceptual art that privileged action, and the idea and procedures at stake in making, over “the work” itself. The radical artists of that generation (that is, artists active in the early seventies) fully agree with the journalists on the idea of works “still held captive by form” (that is, painting, sculpture, and drawing) and of works in “barely artistic” media (in reference to actions and performances). The aim of the journalists was to determine if the works produced in those years were a response to a specific set of circumstances or if—in the mid-eighties, when the fall of the dictatorship was at hand— some of their concerns still reverberated in Brazil’s “artistic and political consciousness.”

This article by Reynaldo Roels and Joaquim Ferreira dos Santos is a comparative assessment of the work produced in the late seventies and in the mid-eighties by the same group of artists. In their statements, all of the artists interviewed seem to agree that the avant-garde has come to end. They comment on the reaction against works that challenged the repressive apparatus of the military dictatorship, works produced after what is known as AI-5 was issued in 1968. Regardless, the artists claim that their more recent work continues to uphold a certain radicalism and notion of utopia. According to Frederico Morais, the artists active in the late sixties did not distinguish between politics and language, which is why—in his view—they brought the guerrilla movement into their art. Artist Cildo Meireles expresses his disenchantment, describing what he sees as growing “blatant cynicism” and a vision of the artistic “as investment” in the eighties, largely due to an expanding art market.