Here Fernando Cocchiarale discusses how the fields of contemporary art have overflowed past their previous boundaries, going beyond painting, sculpture, printmaking, and drawing; he cites collage and photomontage in the early twentieth century as well as the replacement of the artisanal task by the appropriation of objects and/or fragments. He states that given the crisis of the abstract/Constructivist poetics in the late 1960s, artists turned to technological media (photography, film, and video), which allowed them to record images without calling upon manual dexterity.

This text is the chapter “Sobre filmes de artista,” written for the catalogue of the exhibition Filmes de artista: Brasil 1965–80, held in the space Oi Futuro, in Rio de Janeiro, from May 1– June 17, 2007, curated by Fernando Cocchiarale. This was an important and inclusive retrospective of pioneering work in film and video by Brazilian artists. It provides a significant contribution to the discussion of this type of artwork, which until now has been little studied and, obviously, is little understood.

Fernando Cocchiarale (b. 1951), who first worked as an experimental artist in the 1970s, later turned into one of the most consistent critics and curators of Brazilian art. Before serving as a curator and arts administrator, while he was still working as an artist, Cocchiarale was one of the main promoters of the Experimental Room at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio). Starting in the 1980s, and to date, 2016, he has been a distinguished art critic, performing notable work as a curator as well. His work as an arts administrator included stints as director of Fundação Nacional de Arte (FUNARTE) and of MAM-Rio.

To better understand some of the critical views of Cocchiarale’s open-minded perspective, there are two texts: “A produção contemporânea e as imagens técnicas = Contemporary production and technical images” [doc. no. 1111427], and “Artes do espaço e fluxo do tempo = Arts of space and arts of time” [doc. no. 1111426].