Book Description

"Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, in the wake of the installation of Brazil's military dictatorship, artists and art collectives in Brazil used their work to critique the government and its sanitized images of Brazil, its use of torture, and its targeted persecutions. Mari Rodríguez Binnie's The São Paulo Neo-Avant Garde studies this art and its engagement with politics and mainstream institutions and traditions. During this period São Paulo was home to a growing number of high-rise office buildings, and many of the artists studied here held day jobs that gave them after-hours access to new technologies of mass production that became foundational to their work. As the author writes, "By appropriating processes such as photocopy, offset lithography, and thermal and heliographic printing, these artists simultaneously challenged the hidebound institutions of São Paulo's art world, as well as the regime's own manipulation of mass media through censorship and propaganda. The artists did so through works that, in their radical content and form, hinged on establishing alternative networks of communication both at the local and international levels." The study moves forward chronologically and thematically, with each chapter examining a particular set of works in their broader contexts"--