This is an interview with Julio Plaza where he revealed his personal views about art, stating that he considered it a cultural product, as he did not believe it had the capability to universally please all audiences and social groups. He commented on the inventive influence that the São Paulo Concrete poetry group contributed through its works and translations. He did not find that an artist or art could be defined by technique as he considered art to be an exchange of knowledge. Plaza did not care about the reception his artistic work received nor did he care to have his work displayed at any gallery, as he found these to be a tainted environment. Plaza was aware of the existing difficulty at the national level for marginal (“underground”) creations to circulate.

This interview with graphic artist Julio Plaza was published in the Zero Hora newspaper of Porto Alegre, written shortly before his first solo exhibition in Brazil, in December 1975. The text revealed his ties to the Concrete poetry group of São Paulo consisting of Décio Pignatari and the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos. The interview also highlights Plaza’s thoughts on the marginalization experienced by an art of ideas that opposes the traditional art markets. His emphasis was targeted toward art with ties to mass media.

The Spanish multimedia artist, professor, and theorist Julio Plaza (1938−2003) played a key role in Brazilian Conceptualism and electronic art. Additionally, in concert with the poet Augusto de Campos, Plaza is recognized for the graphic configuration of several Concrete poems. They also produced artists’ books such as Poemóbiles in 1974 and the Caixa Preta in 1975. Plaza was a professor of multimedia art at the Instituto de Artes da Unicamp in Campinas, as well as a professor in the visual arts department at the ECA/USP [Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo]. He organized and laid the groundwork for the exhibition Arte pelo Telefone: Videotexto, held in São Paulo at the Museu da Imagem e do Somin 1982, and he was placed in charge of the special multimedia exhibition hall of the seventeenth São Paulo Biennial in 1983, a singular moment in the country for electronic art. Plaza dedicated his doctoral thesis, later published as a book, to the idea of intersemiotic translation or the interpretation of verbal signs by means from which literary texts are transposed to both visual and auditory codes.

[For additional reading, please refer to the ICAA digital archive for the following texts by Julio Plaza: “77: quase-apresentação” (doc. no. 1110719), “Arte e interatividade: autor-obra-recepção” (doc. no. 1111093), “Arte e videotexto” (doc. no. 1111090), “Câmara obscura” (doc. no.  1110718), “Imagemega” (doc. no. 1111133), “Info foto: grafias” (doc. no. 1111091), “O livro como forma de arte (I)” (doc. no. 1111238), “O livro como forma de arte (II)” (doc. no. 1111239), “Mail Art: arte em sincronia” (doc. no. 1110592), “Nem oito, nem oitenta: oi, tô aí” (doc. no. 1111270), “Poéticas visuais” (doc. no. 1110587), and “Transcriar” (doc. no. 1111237)].