In this document, Brazilian art critic Márcio Doctors gathers Guy Brett’s testimony on the fundamental role of Brazilian artists in London, specifically, in the space opened by the Whitechapel Gallery in the late 1960s. The article addresses the internationalization of culture and the place destined for Brazilian artwork in that sphere; it investigates Brazil’s image abroad, what kind of “identity” is in play, and the inevitable polarity between “the specific” and the “international.” Among statements made by the well-known English critic is a reference to the “mistaken reading” of Brazilian art in the hegemonic centers of world art. Brett goes on to weave in certain comments about works executed in the 1970s by artists such as Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Mira Schendel, and Sérgio Camargo.

Guy Brett (b. 1942) is a theoretician on kinetic experience and an art critic based in London. He has been a prolific writer since the mid-1960s in newspapers and international journals and has written anonymously for The Times. Brett has also undertaken monographs of artists such as Rasheed Araeen, Mona Hatoum, and Susan Hiller. Beyond Europe, he has done research on the Brazilians mentioned, the work of Mail art by Chilean Eugenio Dittborn, and incipient attempts at Kinetic art, such as those created by Filipino David Medalla. In the 1960s, Brett began what turned out to be his great contribution to the reading of Latin American and European Kinetic art. The critic was the chief curator for major exhibitions within this trend, including In Motion (1966), organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain, Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic (2001), held jointly by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and the Hayward Gallery in London. In its own way, his significant contribution to Kinetic art is parallel to that of Frank Popper.

Art critic and independent curator Márcio Doctors was the private secretary of the well-known Brazilian theoretician, politician, and critic, Mário Pedrosa, and wrote on art in the Rio de Janeiro daily newspaper O Globo. He currently serves as curator for the Fundação Eva Klabin Rapaport, also located in Rio.