first experimental photographers, has the unique distinction of having sparked an entire political-cultural movement. Affiliated with the Neo-Concretist group, he came of creative age amid the very specific conjunction of forces of Brazil in the 1960s. A dictatorship had seized power in 1964 and set itself the task of capitalist modernization. In Latin America, such developmentalist philosophies found a cultural parallel with elites’ fascination with the streamlined forms of European modernism. Brasília, the purpose-built modernist capital, had opened at the beginning of the decade, a powerful symbol of this fusion. Radicalizing against this backdrop, Oiticica set himself the task of articulating a defiantly indigenous form of avant-garde art, looking to meld European aesthetic traditions with a romanticized vision of the popular participatory spectacle of Brazil’s Carnival.
The result was a prescient series of projects that made a virtue of participation: artworks that were meant to be worn (his cape-like Parangolés), handled (his box-like Bólides), or walked through (his proto-environmental artworks, known as Penetráveis). Such interactive art struck “against everything that is oppressive, socially and individually—all the fixed and decadent forms of government, of reigning social structures,” he declared.3 In 1967, he showed his landmark installation Tropicália in the “New Brazilian Objectivity” show at Rio’s Museum of Modern Art, a labyrinth-like environment that invited viewers to explore “a tropical scene with plants, parrots, sand, pebbles” (in his own words),4 semi-ironic totems of Brazilian identity. In most other contexts, Oiticica’s political claims for his art would be absurd hyperbole. In late-sixties Brazil, against the background of worldwide youth rebellion, they landed like a match on dry tinder. Much to the artist’s own surprise,5 his messianic project for a popular/avant-garde fusion of Brazilian culture actually came to be when a radical pop singer, Caetano Veloso, adopted the name of his artwork “Tropicália” for one of his anthems. In a few momentous months, the term blossomed into a brand name for an entire countercultural movement.
Lest there by any doubt about Tropicália’s anti-establishment aura in its moment, after the increasingly paranoid Brazilian dictatorship issued its infamous Fifth Institutional Directive in 1968, consolidating power and sanctioning censorship, it immediately moved to jail the movement’s musical leaders, Veloso and Gilberto Gil. Oiticica, for his part, went into exile. Yet the powers-that-were were also too canny to simply repress a style with so much mass cachet; they simply insisted that Tropicália’s representatives eschew the radical sentiments associated with its inaugural moment. (“There is no more hope in organizing people around a common ideal,” a resigned Veloso was compelled to say in 1972.6) As it made its way into official culture, Tropicália morphed into what Oiticica viewed as a defanged, commercialized simulation, and from exile he spilled much ink trying to defend the original critical potential of his cultural movement.7 And so the final irony is that a man whose entire project was promoting interactivity and merging the avant-garde with popular art ended up decrying how his most celebrated creation was used almost as soon as it truly became popular art.
What can be generalized from such examples? Each at least illustrates an artist trying to work through how a very esoteric program might relate to the popular struggles of the day. The results have had lasting significance—in fact, in each case, the works in question have contributed decisively to our images of the struggles of which they were a part, and are known to people who have neither interest nor knowledge of the steel shortages in Russia during the civil war, the dilemmas of the United Front in revolutionary Spain, or the hardening of military rule under the Costa e Silva dictatorship. Our political iconography would be poorer without them. Yet the record also shows that it would be too much to consider any of these men political visionaries; their art has been an eccentric component part of political struggle, carried along by its larger machinations. This doesn’t mean they aren’t to be greatly celebrated; just that some sense of proportion is required in doing so.
In more recent decades, as the global tide of social protest that marked the 1960s receded, there have been fewer examples of vibrant mass movements for art to plug into. At the same time, art theory was one of the places within the university where some of the radical energy of the sixties found some continued life (to be a feminist, a queer theorist, or even a Marxist of some kind are relatively mainstream positions within cultural theory, and musings on such subjects are common enough in art magazines like Frieze and Artforum). One of the paradoxical results of this isolation within the academy is that, while the idea that art has some political role attached to it still has robust support among many art professionals, the conversation about what it means to be a “political artist” has become completely compacted into the question of artistic practice itself. The question of what, if any, relation artists might have to activism has receded into the background.
“Political art”—of a certain stripe, at least—was even a sort of mainstream in the recent past, though by the end of the 1990s its evident lack of attachment to a real political public had managed to elicit a kind of public backlash. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl coined the term “festivalism” to describe the kind of facile, posturing radical art made for international art biennials and museum shows—academically infused conceptual or environmental works of great liberal pathos and self-righteousness directed toward an uncertain audience (as Schjeldahl defined his term: “Installation art . . . used to nurture a quasi-political hostility to ‘commodity capitalism’”).8 More recently, such attitudinizing has become less fashionable as “festivalism” has become displaced by the “conceptual bling” favored by the ascendant culture of art fairs, where edgy baubles reign—but for those enmeshed in the debate about art, it remains important as the symbolic other pole to market-based aesthetics, soaking up a great deal of the energy of politically curious artists.
For me, one of the clearer examples of the paradoxes of this type of political art came in 2006, when the Danish art troupe Wooloo Productions staged a project called AsylumNYC at the generally progressive White Box space in New York City. The piece was meant to draw attention to the plight of immigrants and the cruelties of US immigration policy through a faux reality competition in which Wooloo invited a group of foreign-born artists to live in the gallery, while attempting to construct art installations using only materials they could convince visitors to bring to them. The “winner” would get a rarely granted O-1 visa granting them “creative asylum.”
The sensationalism and mock cruelty of this weeklong stunt (“It’s sort of a gladiators’ arena in a sophisticated setting,” one of the contestants told the New York Times9) was justified by the need to generate a media spectacle that would call attention to the issue of immigration—a justification that was considerably undercut in that the show happened to coincide with the massive May Day marches of 2006 in the United States, in which literally millions of undocumented workers flooded the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City in a stand against the shameful Sensenbrenner Bill, which would have criminalized the undocumented to an unprecedented degree. Set against the historic May Day supermarches, this art project looked completely gratuitous or even distracting because of its deliberately provocative moral ambiguity.10
A much more prominent example might be the work of Swiss installation artist Thomas Hirshhorn, who has staged numerous projects that purport to be some kind of righteous experiment in artistic consciousness-raising. In 2006, at the Gladstone Gallery in New York, he created a bracing installation featuring fashion mannequins riddled with nails, festooned with gory, graphic images of casualties from the war in Iraq. The title of this spectacle, Superficial Engagement, was connected to a rather messianic theory about how Hirshhorn’s art praxis represents a needed model of intervention. As the press release explained it:
The events of the world, both the violence and glamour, cannot be cast aside; the imagery that stares back from the news reflects and creates the collective view of the world. This form of “superficial engagement,” as the artist dubs it, keeps the argument on the surface, not giving room to pundits or politicians to equivocate. As he puts it in his own formulation of the show, “To go deeply into something, I first must begin with the surface. The truth of things, its own logic, is reflected on the surface.” The current climate of constant war and oppression
