Beyond the Supersquare: Art and Architecture in Latin America after Modernism

Introduction

Antonio Sergio Bessa

The boom of modernist architecture throughout Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century is often associated with the end of the colonial era. As that narrative goes, the essential tenets of modernism—which emphasized structure, modularity, and flexibility—embodied values shared by young nations in their plight for self-reliance. As an eminently social construct, modernist architecture became in many centers the fodder for popular debate disseminated to the masses by the press and often articulated by nonpractitioners—writers, poets, and visual artists among them. Building (or rebuilding, for that matter) in Latin America thus became a metaphor, an image to be decoded, and that ought to be of everyone’s concern. Certainly, a building metaphor was at play during the proliferation of constructivist art throughout Latin America from the 1920s to the 1950s.¹ In the 1960s and 1970s, however, following a succession of military coups that swept across the southern cone, the very cultural elite that initially welcomed the modernist program would begin to articulate a pointed critique of the movement as a whole. Unarguably, a critical stance toward modernism has been a distinctive trait in some of the most important art manifestations that emerged in Latin America in the last half century.

Brazil offers an obvious starting point due to the messianic nature of its commitment to the modernist agenda. The construction of Brasilia in an unpopulated area in the middle of the country—a scheme already envisioned in the nineteenth century during the monarchy²—was tantamount to providing carte blanche to an architectural program charged with moving the country away from its colonial roots. This move to the center—the country’s physical center, as well as that of the world stage—is leaden with symbolic overtones that can be read differently depending on one’s perspective. A prime example is Lucio Costa’s proposal for Brasilia as an open city in which the common man and woman would be free to decide his and her own path. The fact that his design equally met the need for control by the military regime that took power only four years after its inauguration might seem preposterous. As we consider the troubling incorporation of nineteenth century militaristic strategies into the modernist lexicon, however, the fallacy of the modernist utopia will become apparent.

Rooted in the deep historical transformations that took place in Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and having evolved during an era plagued by two world wars, modernist architecture, as it were, was naturally invested with the mission of reshaping a landscape that might have seemed at the time like a blank page. In a perceptive study of the transformations undergone in Paris during and in the aftermath of the Commune, Kristin Ross called attention to the effect that the changing environment had on language, as evident in the work of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who as an adolescent experienced the city during those years of unrest. Ross singles out, for instance, the practice of lateral piercing of houses so that insurgents can move freely in all directions through passageways and networks of communications joining houses together.³ This kind of anarchitecture, which anticipates the piercings of Gordon Matta-Clark a century later, is parallel, Ross maintains, to Rimbaud’s lexical anomalies.⁴ Ross also likens some of Rimbaud’s verbal tactics to that of the barricade, that antimonument par excellence that replaces "monumental ideals of perfection, duration or immortality . . . by a kind of bricolage—the wrenching of everyday objects from their habitual context to be used in a radically different way."⁵

The rubble witnessed by poets like Rimbaud around the early 1870s in Paris finds a magnified counterpoint in the ruins left throughout Europe in the aftermath of World War II. By then, the anarchitecture lexicon of lateral piercings and barricades had become an international lingua franca—no longer used as a strategy of resistance, but progressively co-opted by mainstream architecture and urban planning, and updated into a new paradigm. The architectural innovations and strategies brought forth by the communards are in sharp opposition to European modernism’s stated ideal of clarity and pure forms and as such they might account for those instances of impurity and chaos that erupt occasionally throughout the modernist canon. Costa’s layout for Brasilia, with its arrangement of superquadras that balance individual freedom and the need for state control, owes a debt to this aesthetics of barricades and piercings. And so does the concrete art produced at the time, for despite its emphasis on precision, objectivity and clarity, the architectural ideas that inform the movement are rooted in that pivotal moment in the nineteenth century when the machine began to replace manual labor.

Fig. 1 / Advertisement for luxury apartments. Published in O Estado de São Paulo, October 7, 1965.

Consider, for instance, Augusto de Campos’s Luxo, a collage-poem from 1965 conceived in response to the noticeable capital gains of the upper middle class that supported the military coup in Brazil. Inspired by a newspaper advertisement for luxury apartments that was published on October 7, 1965, Luxo effects a powerful critique of rampant consumerism in bourgeois circles and their members’ disregard for the common good. A collage of repeated newspaper clippings, its individual elements (luxo) laid out to spell its opposite (lixo, trash), Luxo veers close to semiotics. While the overlapping of micro- and macrostructures in Luxo clearly alludes to linguistic concepts current at the time, the poem’s layout also hints at modernist proposals for urban planning based on grids. With each icon luxo standing for a luxury tower unit, the ensuing composition presents a dismal vision of the modern city.

Fig. 2 / Augusto de Campos. Luxo (1965).

By the late 1960s the newness of Brasilia was giving way to what Robert Venturi deemed the Brazilianoid International style.⁶ Meanwhile, the pioneering works by artists like Hélio Oiticica, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Juan Downey, among others, played a pivotal role in broadening our perception of modernity by introducing elements associated with the so-called third world and in clear opposition to the clean aesthetics of modernism. Oiticica’s embrace of vernacular forms around Rio’s slums; Matta-Clark’s interest in destruction and the abject; and Downey’s search for an invisible architecture inspired by indigenous constructions have become part of the vocabulary of mainstream architecture. It’s worth noting that with the rise of the military rule in Latin America in the late 1960s, artists like Oiticica and Downey settled in New York at a time when their North American peers—Matta-Clark, Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, and Carolee Schneemann, among others—were proposing new (architectural) strategies on how to cope with a city on the brink of bankruptcy. The experimental nature of the era was spectacularly summed up in Fantastic Architecture, a seminal book organized by Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostel featuring contributions by poets like Franz Mon and Gerhard Rühm; environment artists like Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim; as well as those operating in between language and the visual arts, like Dieter Roth, Lawrence Weiner, and Ben Vautier. In his introduction to the volume, Higgins seems to imply that modernist architecture ought to be seen less as a contribution to art history, and more as a set of technical innovations in construction:

Architecture, to the extent that it is an art, is the last art still intact in a primitive state. . . . The main innovations have been structural, as methods of manufacture have become more sophisticated, and in the direction of introducing new materials. The perception of space, the use of space . . . has been allowed to remain quagmired in 19th century or pseudo-Marxist or even narodnik assumptions.⁷

His notion of our contemporary space quagmired in nineteenth-century ideology is also well taken, and gives fresh new context to reading works like Oiticica’s Nests, which he created in his loft in the East Village, Matta-Clark’s Food, a communal restaurant in SoHo, and Trisha Brown’s groundbreaking Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, Roof Piece, and other choreography for the roofs in downtown Manhattan. This pivotal moment, often associated with the emergence of the counterculture movement, is notable for its acentric nature. With increasing access to international traveling in the 1960s and 1970s, the modernist experience in Latin America would no longer be the object of long-distance fetishizing, and in the following decades, a growing number of international artists would look at modernist architecture as a means to effect social critique. Among the major works produced since the mid-1980s, Martin Kippenberger’s Magical Misery Tour (1985) is notable for its incisive look at the various applications of the modernist program, while also relating to painful personal memory.⁸

Last but not least, one must also consider the important contribution of women artists to a reevaluation of modernism based on a new vision of architecture that included concerns for the body. Lygia Clark, who studied art with the landscape designer Roberto Burle-Marx between 1947 and 1949, produced several works early on in her career in collaboration with architects. A breakthrough for Clark happened in 1956 when she addressed architecture students in Belo Horizonte and urged them to engage visual artists early on in the design phase.⁹ A decade later, Clark would present the installation A Casa é o corpo, at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, and later that same year at the Venice Biennale. Coincidentally, that year Carolee Schneemann was also at work on Parts of a Body House, a project that looked at architecture as an organic body. Although never realized as an installation, the work was rendered in drawings and texts.¹⁰

Fig. 3 / Martin Kippenberger. Tankstelle Martin Bormann, (Seaside) from The Magical Misery Tour, 1985–1986. Photo: Ursula Boeckler. Courtesy Ursula Boeckler.

Beyond the Supersquare

The present collection of essays proposes multiple possibilities of reading the multifaceted modernist fable from different perspectives. While the conference Beyond the Supersquare—At the Corner of Art and Architecture, organized by the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2011, has provided the premise for this collection of essays, the original presentations have been expanded into more substantive texts. In addition, new contributions by Julieta González and Dan Graham were added with the goal of expanding and enriching the scope of the subject.

The collection opens with an intriguing reflection on language and style as it relates to the important contribution of early modernist Mexican architect Juan Legarreta. Building upon an astute overview of the aftermath of the Mexican revolution of 1910, Alejandro Hernández-Gálvez discusses in Identity as Style the paradoxes of enforcing the modernist program onto a culture that could not speak architecture. Legaretta’s greatest achievement, Hernández-Gálvez emphasizes, was his resolve not simply to design works according to the modernist canon but to prod the growing urban populations in Mexico to be modern. And paraphrasing the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz, Hernández-Gálvez pointedly notes that modernity is less about ideas and more about critique. In Modernism and Contemporary Art in Latin America, Ana María Durán Calisto advances the thesis that in Latin America modernist architecture and the favela developed in tandem as two symbiotic entities. Duran’s provocative essay also suggests that architects and artists who grew up under the sign of this duality often attempt to address it through artistic expressions that seek to translate for the common man and woman the complexity of this schizoid reality that remains for the most part unaddressed by traditional methods of architectural representation.

The following three essays focus on pivotal works by seminal architects in Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Venezuela. In From the Internal to the Radical, Javier de Jesús Martínez explores the career of German-born architect Henry Klumb in Puerto Rico, considering how specific formal developments in his style manifested an evolved notion of autonomy in Puerto Rico. In Brazilian Machineries (or the Collapse) of Pleasure Architecture, Eroticism and the Naked Body, José Lira explores the quasi-delirious programs of two groundbreaking projects in Brazil: João Filgueiras Lima’s Beijódromo and Lina Bo Bardi’s and Edson Elito’s Oficina Theater. And in Concrete Modernity in Venezuela, Carlos Brillembourg develops a study of two buildings that in his view are exemplary of the transformative possibilities of architecture to convey a sense of modernity as a life-affirming practice: Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s Casa Quoma and Gio Ponti’s Villa Planchart.

The following essays tackle the topic of collaboration between architects and artists, starting with Eduardo Luis Rodríguez’s Integrating Vanguardisms: Dialogues between Art and Architecture in Modern Cuba, which offers a valuable overview of the complementary and often conflicting interactions between art and architecture in Havana from the 1930s to 1950s. In Secret Lines: Interweaving a New Territory, Hannia Gómez discusses the indirect influence that the geometric abstract work of artists like Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt) and Jesús Soto wielded on the visual culture of Caracas. Ligia Nobre’s Time of Cohabitation contributes a perceptive insight on the challenges faced by Milanese architect Lina Bo Bardi as she followed her husband Pietro Maria Bardi to Brazil in the late 1940s to open the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. The collection closes with a revised version of Julieta González’s From Utopia to Abdication: Juan Downey’s Architecture without Architecture, a defining essay on the elusive Chilean artist and architect Juan Downey originally written for the catalogue of Juan Downey—The Invisible Architect.

Throughout this selection of essays—including Dan Graham’s winning valentine to architects Lina Bo Bardi and João Batista Vilanova Artigas—the complex relationship between visionary modernist architects and Latin America’s common man is examined with great insight and honesty, a topic perceptively captured by Mauro Restife’s photograph for the cover of this volume. With its dramatic light and superb sense of theatrics, Restiffe’s Oscar 17c captures the historic moment when the citizens of Brasilia lined up in the presidential palace to pay homage to its master builder.

Notes

1 /    For an informative overview of the period, see Mary Kate O’Hare’s introduction, and opening essay in Constructive Spirit—Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920–50s (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate, 2010), 8–45.

2 /    A proposal for building a new Brazilian capital in the country’s hinterland was already in discussion as early as 1823, according to Lilia Moritz Schwarcz. For more on this subject see Schwarcz’s impressive study of nineteenth-century Brazil, As Barbas do imperador, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2010), 232.

3 /    Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 38.

4 /    Ibid., 102.

5 /    Ibid., 36.

6 /    Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 35.

7 /    Wolf Vostel and Dick Higgins, eds., Fantastic Architecture (New York: Something Else Press, 1969), 11.

8 /    Kippenberger’s Brazilian tour culminated in a performative act involving the purchase of a defunct gas station in Salvador, Bahia, which he titled Tankstelle Martin Borman, hinting at the possibility that survivors of