While this analysis of contemporary Brazilian art by Otília Arantes focuses on the period that spans from 1965 to 1969, it comments as well on the fifties, seventies, and eighties. For the sixties generation, Arantes argues, making art meant engaging in politics, that is, taking a stance against the repressive regime that took power pursuant to the military coup in 1964 and against the resulting conformism. Abstraction was eschewed in favor of a strain of realism and the “nova objetividade”; experimentalism, even a notion of “anti-art,” was pursued in a combination of art, life, and action that attempted to go beyond the limits of “the artistic.” Art would penetrate the (mined) fields of the political-ethical-social and of collective production. Joining the violence of destruction and the impulse to construction in the spirit of the historic avant-gardes, the sixties and seventies evidenced in no uncertain terms disillusion with the modern project. A strident attitude, along with the absurd, was seen as an efficacious weapon of protest. The idea was to undermined order, to reject art as merchandise, and to cultivate ambiguity as tactic of resistance. As political repression grew harsher in Brazil, art moved underground, though that space was gradually absorbed by the status quo.

In this text, Otília Arantes offers a broad critical overview of art from Brazil during the first years of a military dictatorship that would last for two decades, from 1964 to 1985. She addresses the dead-ends that modernization in Brazil had run into and the conservative turn resulting from authoritarianism. Influenced by the work of art critic and political activist Mário Pedrosa, Arantes engages Pedrosa’s idea of a “rearguard” art or an art of “resistance” given the failure or infeasibility of the avant-gardes. Arantes considers Pedrosa’s stance overly rigid, and she broadens it by looking to the dialectical vision Roberto Schwarz put forth in his widely read “Cultura e Política 1964-69,” published in 1970.