{"id":144920,"date":"2014-02-19T16:51:39","date_gmt":"2014-02-19T19:51:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=144920"},"modified":"2014-04-04T17:16:28","modified_gmt":"2014-04-04T20:16:28","slug":"end-borders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/end-borders\/","title":{"rendered":"An end to borders"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo

IMAGEM\u2002Y ARQUITETURA<\/span>Photo by the firm Y Arquitetura, which is proposing a new headquarters for the MAM. The firm\u2019s idea for the museum is a building connected to Line 5 of the S\u00e3o Paulo Metro system. Movable structures filled with helium would be responsible for aerial transportation of works of art.IMAGEM\u2002Y ARQUITETURA<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Ferreira Gullar\u2019s Poema Enterrado (Buried Poem) was one of the passions of artist H\u00e9lio Oiticica, an international leader in Brazilian neo-concrete architecture. Enchanted with the poet\u2019s idea of suggesting an object instead of a text for the poem\u2014concentric cubes as matryoshkas that had to be buried\u2014Oiticica hastened to find a spot to bury the work. The chosen address ended up as part of the site of a structure built by a family, but on exactly the spot intended for the water tank. Thus the 1960 Poema Enterrado was swallowed up by the water. Today the work, a symbol of the neo-concrete movement, belongs to the public collection of the S\u00e3o Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM) where, however, it can never be built since there is no space under the Ibirapuera Park marquee that could be excavated in order to bury Gullar\u2019s poem.<\/p>\n

The story illustrates a question that is becoming increasingly important for the production, study, and exhibition of the visual arts: what is the place of an art work in today\u2019s world? The problem of what to do with the Gullar poem is mentioned in one of the proposals submitted as part of the 33rd Panorama of Brazilian Art, an urban-themed exhibit held at MAM\u2019s facility in S\u00e3o Paulo. The display, which traditionally consists of works by artists, this time featured an impressive cast of architects and urban planners who had created proposals for relocating the museum within the city.<\/p>\n

The firm of Y Arquitetura re-designed the site of the institution, founded in 1948, so that it could be accessed by routes well equipped for public transportation with enough space to house the 5,400 items in its collection, works now scattered among other technical reserves owing to the cramped quarters. The firm\u2019s proposal included the realization of Poema Enterrado, something that hasn\u2019t been possible so far because the marquee that extends over the entire front of the museum building has been designated as an historic landmark.<\/p>\n

Architect Vinicius Andrade, a professor at the Escola da Cidade also made his debut in the exposition. He says that urban planning and art are converging ever more closely. \u201cDespite the excellent eclectic education offered by FAU-USP [School of Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo], where I got my degree, I notice that my students these days are naturally more comfortable moving among the different spheres of expression. They belong to a generation that is trans-disciplinary by nature, something we were not, even while understanding that this is a path,\u201d emphatically states the author of projects that are distinguished by harmonious interaction between urban occupation and the landscape.<\/p>\n

\"The

SUPERSTOCK \/ GLOWIMAGES<\/span>The abandoned house, slashed through the middle by Gordon Matta-Clark. The record of that intervention resulted in the 1974 series entitled Splitting. SUPERSTOCK \/ GLOWIMAGES<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Andrade is participating along with colleagues from his firm, Andrade Morettin, in a phase of a real change in the face of the city, starting with projects that have an artistic function. Andrade Morettin won the bid to design the S\u00e3o Paulo headquarters of one of Brazil\u2019s most important art institutions, the Instituto Moreira Salles. The building, expected to be ready in 2015, is part of the urban mesh that is Avenida Paulista and encourages people to flow through the exhibit space. The floor, for example, will be composed of the same Portuguese mosaic that was designed by architect Rosa Kliass for the plan for that avenue in the 1970s. Not far from there, in the city\u2019s downtown area the Pra\u00e7a das Artes houses rehearsal and meeting rooms in a block that is similarly open to the city. That project, by the firm Brasil Arquitetura, revived an underused and dangerous part of the city with a modernistic sculptural construction whose design was heavily influenced by the architecture of another fervent advocate of the appropriation of art by architecture and vice versa, the Italian Lina Bo Bardi, designer of the building occupied by the S\u00e3o Paulo Museum of Art (MASP).<\/p>\n

Vinicius Andrade says the legacy of the work of U.S. architect Gordon Matta-Clark is present on all fronts of his firm\u2019s activity\u2014including its participation in the 33rd Panorama. Son of Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta, Matta-Clark is, alongside Robert Smithson and Oiticica himself, the front line of a vanguard that in the 1970s chose the city as raw material for its art\u2014a trend that is reappearing today. One of the best-known actions by the former student of architecture consisted of the inclusion of tears and cuts in the structures of buildings and houses. Those interventions, which called attention to the urban junk pile borne of real estate boom times, became known as \u201cnegative architecture.\u201d From then on, records of that process began to travel around the world as representatives of a combative art. In 1971, Gordon Matta-Clark led the boycott of the S\u00e3o Paulo Biennial on behalf of the victims of the military dictatorship in Latin America, thus delaying by some years any local contact with his negative architecture.<\/p>\n

\"At

SPBR on photo by Nelson Kon<\/span>At left, a study by the firm SPBR for the new MAM building proposes an elevated walkway that would extend around Ibirapuera Park.SPBR on photo by Nelson Kon<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The idea that Andrade and his partner Marcelo Morettin developed for the MAM exhibit, which can be viewed on the museum\u2019s website, www.mam.org.br<\/a>, recovers and updates that orientation. The architects propose a very simple design that houses the building underground\u2014literally buried. Illumination would be provided by a large tear in the ground, under which the institution would operate in Ibirapuera Park, its present address.<\/p>\n

\u201cContemporary art underwent a very introspective period in the 1990s, in response to a lack of clarity as to the new ideological context of the world after the demise of Cold War logic and the paralysis of the sexual revolution brought about by the AIDS epidemic,\u201d observes Felipe Chaimovich, curator of the museum and a post-doc researcher in philosophy at USP. \u201cEarly in the 2000s, however, there was a change in the course of artists\u2019 commitment. They began to propose micro-political actions that were not haunted by the same ideological specter and were more diluted by everyday living. It was in that context that cities and life in today\u2019s metropolitan areas became a subject matter that was increasingly used in the production by young artists,\u201d he believes. Chaimovich is the author of the essays \u201cObjects or Reflection: the Brazilian Cultural Situation,\u201d that appear in the book entitled On Cultural Influence (New York: Apexart, 2006), and \u201cGreenberg After Oiticica,\u201d which appeared in The State of Art Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2007).<\/p>\n

A Research Base<\/strong>
\nIt was curator Lisette Lagnado\u2014who also holds a doctorate in philosophy from USP, having written her dissertation about H\u00e9lio Oiticica\u2019s Environmental Program\u2014who was behind the idea to invite urban planners to take part in an exhibit that, ironically, was established to form a collection for a museum that doesn\u2019t have enough space to maintain the collection it already has. \u201cLarge exhibits these days typically use their host city as a research base that unites the artists that will be invited,\u201d she says. In 2010, she coordinated an exhibit at the National Museum \u2013 Queen Sofia Arts Center in Madrid that demonstrated that the key architect of European modernity, Le Courbusier, had absorbed characteristics of the physical and human geography of Latin America into his work. Lagnado is the advisor to the master\u2019s degree studies by Ana Maria Maia on the activities of Flavio de Carvalho, an architect who thought about the city. Maia\u2019s thesis was presented to an arts panel at Santa Marcelina College last year. This year, she was a member of the curator\u2019s team that gathered projects from some of the busiest architectural firms in Brazil.<\/p>\n

\"The

Nelson Kon<\/span>The fa\u00e7ade of the Pra\u00e7a das Artes in downtown S\u00e3o Paulo.Nelson Kon<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Taking art into the cities has become a tradition that, if not obligatory, has been eagerly awaited by major exhibits in large urban centers. In Brazil, S\u00e3o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have hosted top rated contemporary art exhibits that reach the streets before they show up in the galleries. This was the case with the famous PhotoEspa\u00f1a, which, in its first appearance on Brazilian soil, posted throughout the streets of the city photographs that young artist Raquel Brust had taken of residents of the center of the S\u00e3o Paulo state capital.<\/p>\n

Curators and architects agree that the contact between art and urban planning is a trend visible among both new artists and students, and seems to be growing in importance every year, and having a real impact on society. \u201cI\u2019m astonished by the number of references to languages like dance, theater, and poetry that students bring to their discussions about architecture,\u201d says Vinicius Andrade. Felipe Chaimovich notes that the exchange of information among areas has led to achievements and advances heretofore unimaginable. \u201cCollective artistic movements in favor of urban orchards, for example, are creating farming technologies that are publicized via social networks, thus changing the relationship between citizens and the vacant lots in cities, raising the question of urban property along with ecology and sustainability, and coupling experimental art with cooking,\u201d the curator points out. \u201cIt\u2019s an international action that arises from the environment of contemporary art and is having a real impact on present-day urban life.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New generations recover commitment of the 1970s","protected":false},"author":506,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[203,228,241,204],"coauthors":[1265],"class_list":["post-144920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities","tag-architecture","tag-engineering","tag-history","tag-visual-arts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/506"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144920\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144920"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=144920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}