Looking through the prism of her philosophical education, Otília Arantes explores the different approaches taken as a result of the Brazilian political situation⸺following the military coup d’etat that installed an iron-fisted dictatorship (1964–86)⸺specifically by the later generations of artists through the mid-1980s. In her opinion, there was a great deal of art produced during that period that sought “to be political” and even presented itself as a form of resistance against the authoritarian measures of the regime, in which “aesthetic programs and action programs seemed to intersect.” In December 1968 the AI-5 (Acto Institucional No. 5 [Institutional Act No. 5] that prohibited practically everything), prompted artists to explore indirect and marginal access to censored institutions and mediums. Brazilian art became experimental, irrational, anarchic and individualistic until 1974, when the regime loosened its hold on society and began to encourage an incipient political openness. The resulting art was “well behaved”; it favored traditional supports and started taking advantage of the galleries that were now catering to an art buying public. Only one group in Rio de Janeiro, which was affiliated with Malasartes magazine, embraced the earlier avant-garde ideas with their utopian idealism, and both movements were active until the mid-1980s, when almost every artist in the country was working with pictorial gesture, in step with what was happening in international art circles. The 1985 Bienal de São Paulo was undoubtedly a historical watershed for Brazilian-style postmodernism: young painting, “with no planning whatsoever,” attempting to create a “distortion of styles.” In the author’s opinion, although it lags behind everyone else, art can contribute to resistance, even in countries where there is almost no room for the “power of initiative,” as in Brazil.
