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Abstract
This essay historicizes the origins of the concept of “objective form,” detailing its emergence in the light of Brazilian and world political history.
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Notes
1 In Brazil, the combative turn in the arts responded to the coup of 1964. On the earlier prevalence of geometric abstraction favourably echoing developmentalism in Latin America, see Martins, ‘All this Geometry’, on the Brazilian case.
2 This phenomenon was keenly synthesised by Godard (b. 1930) in La Chinoise (1967): Maoist jargon and mannerisms appear alongside pop art and advertising spots; that is, as merely reiterative formulas spinning their wheels, as flavour of the month (Martins, ‘Godard e a Pop Art’).
3 A few of the Schwarz’s studies have appeared in English: To the Victor, ‘Complex, Modern’; A Master on the Periphery; ‘Capitu, the Bride’; ‘Competing Readings’; ‘A Brazilian Breakthrough’.
4 In the observation of 1912 (on the topic of Bulgarian literature), Trotsky pointed out the incapacity of ‘all backward countries’ to ‘develop their own internal continuity’, being therefore ‘obliged to assimilate the readymade cultural products that European civilization developed in the course of its history’ (Trotsky, ‘In a Backward Country’, 49). In the second note, from 1922, Trotsky observed that, in a few cases, ‘backward countries with a certain level of cultural development’, in appropriating the achievements of the ‘advanced countries’, ‘reflect the achievements of the advanced countries with greater clarity and force’ (Trotsky, ‘Futurism’, 135).
5 Not to mention the 1968 uprisings in many countries, in 10 years (1974–1984), for instance, a series of social-democratic governments and leaders in Europe (with roots in anti-Nazism and formed politically in the construction of the welfare state and the social safety net after the Second World War) capitulated: in Bonn (1974), Willy Brandt (1913–1992); in London (1976), Harold Wilson (1916–1995); in Paris (1984), Pierre Mauroy (1928–2013). All of them fell through intramural manoeuvres in their own party or proximate circles, to make way for a politics of the primacy of the market, based in fiscal austerity and structural unemployment.
6 ‘The seminars debated, among others, texts of Russian formalism, the structuralists, Adorno, Trotsky's Literature and Revolution’, recalls Schwarz (Schwarz, ‘Antonio Candido’, 410).
7 In turn, such reflections on the conception of form return to the interrelation between ‘literary structure’ and ‘historical or social function of the work’, that Candido had been developing since 1961 (‘Estrutura Literária’, 177–199). The theme of ‘historical function’ will return as a constant in various of Candido's writings (‘La Literatura de América Latina’, 3–9; ‘Variações sobre Temas da Formação’, 93–107).
8 At this time there emerged an unprecedented Brazilian critical system (Martins, ‘Trees’). Protests were prohibited after December 13, 1968, by Institutional Act Number Five, said also AI-5 (December 13, 1968, and the ensuing arrests, torture, censorship, and purges).
9 Only later did that restructuring, in the era of Thatcher (1978) and Reagan (1980), emerge in the terms proper to the hegemonic economies. Thus, the procedural restructuring – through structural unemployment, institutionalized violence, and the assimilation of gang violence to state structures – occurred much earlier on the periphery and, from this angle, anticipated the structural tendency toward the divorce of capitalism from democracy.
10 To a great extent, Kubrick's (1928–1999) A Clockwork Orange (1971) foresaw the end of the welfare state and aspects of the new capitalist cycle, including the fusion of the State with criminal organizations (Martins, ‘Laranja Mecânica’). In fact, European cinema – possibly because of its necessarily collective and industrial character – did not suffer, during this period, from the same aphasia that did the arts rooted in artisanal tradition and usually nourished by individual isolation – therefore more vulnerable to the dogma of the autonomy of language with relation to historical-social processes and, therefore, to linguistic speculations.
11 Pasolini (1922–1975) was one of the few to tackle, in films and essays, the structural change that was taking place in capitalism (both in the youth milieu and at the macro level), associated with a revolution in global governance based in the unification of the world market and in the universal assimilation of consumption (including the consumption of self and other) as value – tending to the normalization of genocide. Pasolini understood ‘genocide’ as the ‘assimilation to the mode and quality of bourgeois life’ of ‘broad sectors’ (subproletarians and populations of colonial origin) that had remained […] outside of history’ (Pasolini, ‘Il Genocidio’, 281–282). See also the article ‘Il mio Accattone in Tv dopo il genocidio’, Corriere della Sera, 8 Oct. 1975 (Pasolini, ‘My Accattone’, 100–105). See also Martins, ‘A Era dos Genocídios’.
12 As to the critical state of the art and the conjunction of historical-social demands peculiar to the moment, the answer can be found in Schwarz's 1970 essay ‘Culture and Politics in Brazil, 1964–1969). Due to the dictatorship, this essay was initially published only in Les Temps Modernes in July 1970 (Schwarz, ‘Remarques sur la Culture’; Schwarz, ‘Culture and Politics’, 126–159). In parallel, in Argentina, see from Solanas and Getino La Hora de los Hornos (1968), a film produced clandestinely and premiered at the IV Festival of New Cinema, Pesaro, 1968. See also Longoni and Mestman on the multimedia series of interventions Tucumán Arde (Rosário e Buenos Aires, August–November 1968), produced by a group of about twenty artists and sociologists associated with a combative dissident union group (Katzenstein 319–326). See also Longoni, Vanguarda y Revolución; and the catalogs of the expositions curated by Longoni at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and at the MACBA (Barcelona): Roberto Jacoby; Perder la Forma; Oscar Masotta (I thank Gustavo Motta not only for his comments on this essay but also for the examples of the synthetic and totalising tendency of Argentine art).
13 On the movement to construct a new realism in response to the 1964 coup, see Martins, ‘Trees’.
14 On Dias's offensive operations, once established in Europe, see Martins, ‘Art Against’.
15 In English in the original. The program comprised 10 proposals for works following specific open structures (Oiticica, ‘Special’, 1–2; Dias, ‘Project-Book’).
16 For further reflections by Oiticica, also connected to the reconstruction of realism in the Brazilian arts, see Oiticica, ‘Environmental Program’; ‘Appearance of the Supra-Sensorial’.
17 In the essay ‘Dialectic of Malandroism’ (1970), Candido established aesthetic form as the structural reduction and formal condensation of social rhythms (Schwarz, ‘Objective Form’, 10–32; Candido, ‘Dialectic of Malandroism’, 79–103; see also Candido, ‘De Cortiço a Cortiço’, 105–129).
18 The grid-marked structure, laid down with adhesive tape, was installed for the first time in 1969, at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, as part of the show Contemporary Art: Dialogue between the East and the West. In this and subsequent installations, the work gained a complementary work: To the Police, described next.
19 See forthcoming book on Mendes da Rocha and Amilcar de Castro referred in the next note.
20 For the analysis of such operations, whose details space does not allow for here, see the essay (published in two parts): Martins, ‘Amilcar de Castro’. The publication of this text in book form (in preparation, projected 2023) – Paulo Mendes da Rocha e Amilcar de Castro: A Força do Negativo (provisional title, São Paulo: MuBE / WMF Martins Fontes) – will include a full English version.
21 Begun in 1927 and completed in 1931, the building served as the headquarters for the Província, Nacional do Comércio, and Sul Brasileiro e Meridional banks successively, before meeting in 2001 its current fate, to be designated as Farol Santander. [Farol is a lighthouse or beacon; Santander is the Spanish-based multinational banking conglomerate, which has a substantial presence in Brazil. Farol Santander, as will be clear from context, is now a cultural and exhibition space. Trans.]
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Luiz Renato Martins
Luiz Renato Martins (researcher and doctoral supervisor at the Post-graduation programmes in Visual Arts and Economic History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil); author of The Long Roots of Formalism in Brazil (Chicago, Haymarket, 2019) and executive-editor of the journal Cadernos do Movimento Operário (São Paulo, Sundermann/ WMF Martins Fontes). Email: [email protected]
Nicholas Brown
Nicholas Brown teaches in the departments of English and Black Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Past president of the Marxist Literary Group, he chairs the editorial board of the journal Mediations. He has published widely on Marxist theory and criticism and has translated essays by Georg Lukács and Roberto Schwarz. Email: [email protected]