Poéticas do processo: arte conceitual no museu by Cristina Freire is a pioneering work in Brazil that addresses the ties between contemporary art (in particular, Conceptual art) and the museum institution. Freire questions categories that are still used even though they do not reflect the specificities of art today. At the core of her concerns are methodological challenges that necessitate adjusting the conservation, study, and exhibition of this new sort of production.
Cristina Freire has a master’s degree in art management from City University in London, England, and a doctorate in social psychology from the Universidade de São Paulo. Since 1990, she has been on the teaching staff of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP), presiding over its Comissão de Pesquisa since 2004. Her work revolves around art theory and criticism with a specialization in contemporary and Conceptual art.
Art critic, historian, and curator Walter Zanini (1925–2013) was the first director of MAC-USP. From that post, which he held from 1963 to 1978, he encouraged the production of emerging artists and supported marginalized forms of artistic expression, including technological, Conceptual, and multimedia work that made use of visual poetics. Zanini was also a professor at the Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo (ECA-USP).
In an “interview-statement” [see doc. no. 1111244], Zanini discusses the role he played during his tenure as the director of MAC-USP in furthering artistic expression that engaged new communication media. Even during a period marked by authoritarianism and censorship at the hand of the military dictatorship (1964–85), in Zanini's view, the museum was a space of freedom where experimental projects that made use of the new media (experimental art, multimedia, and in this case, Mail art) were able to have an impact. In an international context marked by the dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile, artist Eugenio Dittborn, who was himself Chilean, gained considerable recognition around the world. See as well Zanini’s text “A arte postal na busca de uma nova comunicação internacional” [doc. no. 1110591]. Wlademir Dias Pino, an experimental poet associated with what is called the “process-poem”, wrote a text on Mail art in Latin America entitled “América Latina, ahora! Acción postal” [doc. no. 1111014]. In it, he advocates Mail art as a means of communication, and also as a source of a new Latin American art from remote regions of the continent—in his case, the Amazon region. See as well the text by artist Paulo Bruscky, another specialist in the field, entitled “Arte correio e a grande rede: hoje, a arte é este comunicado” [doc. no. 1110683].