Third Text

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Dissident Bodies

Mari Rodríguez Binnie

To cite this article: Mari Rodríguez Binnie (2019): Dissident Bodies, Third Text, DOI:
10.1080/09528822.2019.1669362

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2019.1669362

Published online: 04 Oct 2019.

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Hudinilson Jr, Pinto não pode,
1981, photocopy, stamp ink and
collage on paper, 34.5 × 21 cm,
courtesy of the artist’s estate and
Galeria Jaqueline Martins
1 Alleging that the exhibition
‘pervert[ed] the notions of
the family’, Brazil’s Christian
evangelical far right called
for and succeeded in closing
down ‘Queermuseu’ at Porto
Alegre’s Santander Cultural
on 10 September 2017, and
the exhibition’s curator,
Gaudêncio Fidelis, was
called to appear before
Brazil’s Federal Senate on the
charges of ‘Mistreatment of
Children and Teenagers’.
Also in September, members
of the far right staged
protests against São Paulo’s
Museu de Arte Moderna in
response to the nude
performance of Brazilian
artist Wagner Schwartz, and
the following month the
museum’s administration
moved to enforce, for the first
time in its seventy-year
history, a minimum age
restriction on gallery entry
on the occasion of the
Third Text, 2019
https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2019.1669362
Dissident Bodies
Materialising Xerographic Experimentation
in São Paulo, 1970–1985
Mari Rodríguez Binnie
Zona de tensão (Zone of Tension, 1981), by the late São Paulo artist
Hudinilson Junior, is blunt in its political criticism. This xerographic
work clearly features an inked impression of a penis spanning diagonally
across the paper, its dappled texture a result of the artist repeatedly enlar-
ging and copying the original image. The words ‘PINTO NÃO PODE’
(‘COCKS NOT ALLOWED’), stamped in capital letters on the bottom
right, at the time succinctly confronted the military regime’s systematic
suppression of queerness and its visibility within the artworld as well as
on the streets. Thirty-six years later, with demonstrations taking place
at cultural institutions in São Paulo and other major cities prompted by
the closing down in 2017 of ‘Queermuseu’ (‘Queer Museum’), the
largest exhibition to date of queer art in Brazil, new copies of this work
have emerged.1 A sign of protest, it is being freely circulated among the
hundreds of people protesting against a growing string of instances of
artistic censorship that since the removal from office of president Dilma
Rousseff in 2016 have become increasingly common.
Zona de tensão is located within Hudinilson’s rich corpus of performa-
tive actions with the photocopier. Between the late 1970s and the mid-
1980s Hudinilson experimented continuously with this relatively new
technology, and the majority of the works he produced with it are
iconic: they dwell on, venerate and preserve his young, lithe body. And
he was prolific, the works he produced and constantly gave away and
mailed to friends near and far continuing today to trickle out of personal
and institutional archives in São Paulo and beyond.
For years, Hudinilson explored the visual possibilities of exposing
his bare body to the photocopier’s glass, mining the machine’s gritty
© 2019 Third Text

Hudinilson Jr, ‘Narcisse’ Exercício de Me Ver, 1983, photocopy, 23.5 × 32.5 cm, courtesy of the artist’s estate and Galeria
Jaqueline Martins
exhibition ‘Histórias da
sexualidade’ (‘Histories of
Sexuality’). After much
opposition, the museum
reversed its decision and
opted for a warning notice at
the entrance to the gallery.
On 7 November far right
protesters in São Paulo
blocked the entrance to a
conference co-organised by
the theorist Judith Butler,
burning her in effigy for
‘perverting’ family values.
See Elisa Wouk Almino,
‘Curator Called Before
Senate Hearing as Brazil’s
Right-Wing Groups Target
the Arts’, Hyperallergic, 20
November 2017, https://
hyperallergic.com/412532/
brazil-art-culture-
crackdown/, accessed 21
November 2017. See also
‘Artistas protestam no Masp
contra proibição de menores
em exposição sobre
sexualidade’, O Globo, 20
October 2017, https://g1.
globo.com/sao-paulo/
noticia/artistas-protestam-
no-masp-contra-proibicao-
3
rendering of skin and hair when placed at extremely close range. The
images could be figurative studies, such as his extensive series Exercisio
de me ver (Exercise in Seeing Myself) dating from 1980 to 1983. In one
work, his hands rest on his abdomen as the glass rubs against and distorts
his skin. Another suggestively displays his naked torso, coyly framing the
image to show his pubic hair and, just below, the base of his penis. Hudi-
nilson also photocopied collaged grids of his photocopies, grafting
glimpses of hair and flesh into sensuous topographies. While varying in
their approach to creating haptic images, all these works nonetheless con-
verge to render copy paper as skin. Furthermore, they insist not only on
the familiarity of ordinary copier paper, but also on its changing appear-
ance, as the toner rapidly ages and discoloures, as well as on its pliancy,
the paper often being folded and sent to friends, or sometimes acting as
the envelope, the image sheathing itself.
Because of the renewed political relevance of Hudinilson’s xero-
graphic works – as Brazil once again becomes mired in extremist
right-wing politics – their contextual origins bear reflection. Moreover,
in order to analyse their poetic intervention it is necessary to historicise
the artistic scene in São Paulo in which Hudinilson was immersed. This
endeavour calls attention to the beginnings of a welcome historiographi-
cal sea change, as scholarly efforts are beginning to render visible the
myriad materialities of the conceptual turn in Latin America, which
include the vibrant experimentation with xerography in Brazil during
the 1970s and early 1980s. At this time artists harnessed a relatively
newly available mass print technology for both its democratic afford-
4
da-entrada-de-menores-
Hudinilson Jr, Untitled, 1982, collage of photocopies on paper, 75 × 112 cm, courtesy of the artist’s estate and Galeria
Jaqueline Martins
em-exposicao-sobre-
sexualidade.ghtml, accessed
21 November 2017, and
Scott Jaschick, ‘Judith Butler
on Being Attacked in Brazil’,
Inside Higher Ed, accessed
13 November 2017, https://
www.insidehighered.com/
news/2017/11/13/judith-
butler-discusses-being-
burned-effigy-and-protested-
brazil, accessed 22
November 2017.
2 Márion Strecker wrote a
poignant and unshrinking
obituary for him: ‘Artista
bom é artista morto’ (‘A
Good Artist is a Dead
Artist’), seLecT, 2 July 2014,
http://www.select.art.br/
artista-bom-e-artista-morto/,
accessed 26 November 2017.
ability and for its power to replicate and easily disseminate subversive
expressions, and as a conceptual manoeuvre, the thrust of xerographic
experimentation hinged equally on its potential for both artistic and
political critique. It is of little surprise that Hudinilson’s prolific cero-
graphic oeuvre has, in the last three years, risen to become one of the
most recognisable examples of this practice. His photocopies have
been exhibited nationally and internationally, and several have recently
been purchased by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the Museo de Arte Latinoa-
mericano de Buenos Aires – an almost cruel turn of events as Hudinil-
son died in 2013 of complications from long-term alcohol abuse,
penniless and notoriously bitter about the lack of recognition for his
work.2
The re-emergence of Hudinilson’s work, in exhibitions and as a
potent image of protest, prompts us to return to the archives to con-
sider how artists in São Paulo distinctly exploited the conceptual,
visual and material possibilities of the photocopy. But the works’
reappearance demands a methodological intervention as well.
Through repetition, xerography collapsed the origin–copy binary.
Thus, to take in these works as they circulate anew is not to experi-
ence the afterlives, say, of Hudinilson’s ephemeral encounters with the
photocopier; we are encountering, instead, the works as they continue
to unfold.

3 Many artists in São Paulo
participated in this radical
turn to print media, but the
following names engaged in a
sustained and focused
experimentation with it:
Argentines Antonio
Lizárraga and León Ferrari,
Gabriel Borba, Donato
Ferrari, Alex Flemming,
Mauricio Fridman, Carmela
Gross, Mário Ishikawa,
Nelson Leirner, Artur
Matuck, Marcello Nitsche,
the Spaniard Julio Plaza,
Ubirajara Ribeiro, Gerty
Saruê and Regina Silveira, as
well as then art students
Rafael França, Hudinilson Jr,
Tadeu Jungle and Walter
Silveira.
5
A Scene Emerges
In 1970s Brazil, São Paulo stood apart in terms of commercial and
private access to mass printing technologies such as offset lithography,
heliographic printing, thermal printing and photocopying. Beginning in
1968, the military regime under General Artur da Costa e Silva aggres-
sively pushed for free-market policies to attract foreign investment, ush-
ering in a period of exceptional economic growth. During this so-called
economic ‘Brazilian Miracle’, São Paulo – the country’s largest city and
its financial centre – patently manifested the symbiosis between growing
international commerce and the desire for rapid and efficient methods
for circulating information. The Xerox-914 – the world’s first auto-
mated photocopier, which also crucially required standard, not
thermal, paper – arrived in Brazil in 1966, and by the beginning of
the 1970s had already become the norm in offices across São Paulo.
It was, however, a rare commodity across the rest of Brazil; indeed,
just as with the connotations implied by the term ‘Brazilian Miracle’,
the photocopier remained rare throughout the rest of South America
in the mid-1980s.
The ardent turn – starting in 1979 with the ‘Gerox’ exhibition at
Espaço Max Pochon – to the photocopier on the part of multiple São
Paulo-based artists was the culmination of a neo avant-garde scene that
had been crystallising in the city since the beginning of the decade.3
Working initially individually, artists coalesced in their appropriation of
technologies of mass print media. By mining the formal, material, concep-
tual, as well as participatory possibilities of these technologies, they pro-
duced works in multiples that were to be handled, passed on and
circulated inside and beyond exhibition spaces. The urgency for such
tactics stemmed from the charged social landscape of the time: the
country was in the grip of a military dictatorship that persecuted, arrested,
tortured or even assassinated those it deemed to be ‘subversive’. Amid cen-
sorship and repression, these artists’ deliberate use of systems of print
communication to create dispersive and democratic works – works that
were cheap to produce in large quantities and contingent on circulating
from person to person, thereby activating intimate physical encounters
beyond codified spaces for the viewing of art – was as much a political
critique as it was a lifeline.
The marginality of offset, thermal and heliographic printing in São
Paulo’s codified artworld afforded these artists creative freedom as well
as independence from the constraints of institutional and market tastes.
Moreover, photocopying – which they termed ‘xerografia’, or xerography
– required no technical training, a matrix, or even a studio space. Artists
could constitute an anti-institutional stance by producing small-scale, inti-
mate and itinerant works. In his essay for the exhibition ‘Arte Xerox
Brasil’ in 1984, Hudinilson Junior reflected on the technology’s appeal,
considering reasons beyond its ease and affordability:
here we can raise other hypotheses that would justify what has been called
the ‘boom of [X]erox art’… the Brazilian market is the third in the world in
potential sales and distribution of reprographic equipment… perhaps
precisely due to the excessive use of the bureaucratic apparatus of the
State. But we also resort to that typical way that Brazilians, especially
6
4 Hudinilson Jr, ed, Arte
Xerox Brasil: Caderno Arte
Xerox, Pinacoteca do Estado
de São Paulo, São Paulo,
1984, np, Biblioteca da
Pinacoteca do Estado de São
Paulo, item PE10355.
Hudinilson in fact uses the
Brazilian idiom ‘jogo da
cintura’, literally ‘sway of the
waist’, whose meaning most
closely resembles ‘when life
gives you lemons, make
lemonade’. Unless otherwise
noted, all translations are by
the present author.
5 The exhibiting artists in
‘Gerox’ were José Roberto
Aguilar, Alex Flemming,
Anna Carretta, Antonio
Lizárraga, Carmela Gross,
Gabriel Borba, Genilson
Soares, Gerty Saruê, Julio
Plaza, León Ferrari, Marcello
Nitsche, Mary Dritschel,
Mauricio Fridman, Mira
Schendel, Nelson Leirner,
Rafael França and Regina
Silveira.
6 In 1980 Ferrari wrote, ‘The
first exhibition [was]
“GEROX”, a word invented
by Julio. Afterwards we
numbered them as infinites. I
wanted to retain the relation
with printmaking, signing
them and numbering them
with a pencil. To make an
unlimited edition, we used
the infinity symbol.’ León
Ferrari, ‘Depoimento: o
problema da xerografia nos
anos 70 em São Paulo’, 27
May 1980, Arquivo
Multimeios, Centro Cultural
São Paulo, São Paulo, item
0671AP/TP0062.
7 The vast majority of the
works shown in these two
exhibitions were collages,
postcards, artists’ books and
collaborative magazines, all
of which were reproduced
using offset printing or
photocopying.
8 Walter Zanini in Walter
Zanini and Julio Plaza, eds,
Poéticas visuais, Museu de
Arte Contemporânea da
Universidade de São Paulo,
São Paulo, 1977, np
artists who live here, ‘make lemonade’, when forced to dodge acts of repres-
sion and censorship enforced in the country in recent years.4
That xerography acquired such currency within São Paulo’s artistic com-
munity after 1979 evidences the urgency with which artists harnessed the
photocopier to simultaneously attack both the parameters of canonical art
and the oppressive measures of the regime that facilitated access to this
very technology.
It bears noting that for much of the 1970s xerography in São Paulo was
in large part an ancillary support for artists’ conceptual propositions. This
was readily evident in 1979 with the first exhibition in Brazil entirely
devoted to this technology, ‘Gerox – Xerografias dos Artistas’ at Espaço
Max Pochon.5 The exhibited works were all unframed and directly
affixed to the wall; and in lieu of a catalogue with reproductions, visitors
could purchase, for a modest price, their own portfolio of ‘originals’ – that
is, a portfolio holding a photocopy of each exhibited photocopy work.
The Portuguese language is nimbler in addressing the plural nature of
these works: the ones affixed to the wall, and those enclosed in the port-
folio, were equally designated as ‘exemplares’ (‘issue’ or ‘copy’), with no
qualitative, hierarchical distinction between the two. The term ‘Gerox’
was coined by Spanish artist Julio Plaza, who had been based in São
Paulo since 1973: a combination of ‘gravura’ (print or etching) and
‘xerox’, it, as well as the exhibition, exemplified how artists in São
Paulo approached xerography. Reproducing drawings, collages and
photographs, they revelled in the technology’s pluralising capability, the
Argentine artist León Ferrari, active since his exile to São Paulo in
1976, signing and numbering his xerographic works as editions of
infinity using the ∞ symbol, slyly subverting the value ascribed to tra-
ditional print runs.6
Prior to ‘Gerox’, xerography had made an appearance in São Paulo as
the leading support for numerous mail artworks in the seminal exhibitions
‘Prospectiva 74’ (1974) and ‘Poéticas Visuais’ (1977) at the Museu de Arte
Contemporânea of the Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP), both
shows aimed at taking the pulse of art experimentation in Brazil and inter-
nationally, and which decisively affirmed a transnational turn to print
experimentation with mass media technologies.7 Notably, ‘Poéticas
Visuais’ placed a photocopier in the exhibition gallery for public use. As
museum’s director Walter Zanini proclaimed in his presentation essay,
‘the public will be able to obtain xerox copies of the majority of the docu-
ments exhibited, thereby also making it… a portable exhibition’.8 Never-
theless, MAC USP was marginal financially, geographically and
symbolically within the artworld of São Paulo. It did not enjoy the same
patronage as other institutions in the city, such as the São Paulo Biennial
and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, and local critics resisted its increas-
ingly experimental programming. Yet this lack of understanding ulti-
mately proved to be vital: if conservative critics could not understand
the practices exhibited at MAC USP, then less so the regime’s monitors.
It is also worth noting that MAC USP is located in the Ibirapuera Park,
miles away from the university’s campus, which means it is removed
from the routine profiling and raids of academic activities on the part of
the military police. And so, even though MAC USP was a vibrant

9 See ‘Cronologia’ in
Hudinilson Jr, ed, Arte
Xerox Brasil, op cit, np
10 The participating artists in
‘Xerografia’ were Alberto
Cedrón, Alex Flemming,
Amelia Toledo, Ana
Cristina, R P Almeida,
Anésia Pacheco e Chaves,
Anna Carreta, Antonio
Lizárraga, Bené Fonteles,
Bernardo Krasnianski,
Carlos Clémen, Carmela
Gross, Doraci Goulart,
Genilson Soares, Gerty
Saruê, Hudinilson Jr, Iara
Simonetti, José Olimpio
Pinheiro, José Roberto
Aguilar, José Wagner
Garcia, Julio Plaza, León
Ferrari, Leonhard Frank
Duch, Lucio Kume,
Marcello Nitsche, Marco
do Valle, M Frei, Maria
Luiza, Sabboia Saddi,
Mário Ishikawa, Martin
Kovensky, Mary Dritschel,
Mauricio Fridman, Michele
Bril, Odair Magalhães,
Paulo Bruscky, Rafael
França, Regina Silveira,
Roberto Kepler, Ruth
Gusmão, Vera Chaves
Barcellos and Walter
Silveira.
11 The agreement for
participation in the
exhibition stipulated that
every artist was to provide
three copies of each work,
one for each venue. See
‘Xerografia. Convite e
condições de participação’,
16 April 1980, Pinacoteca
do Estado de São Paulo,
item B.03.03.0001/
Xerografia.
12 ‘Fábio Magalhães to Xerox
Brasil’, 13 February 1981,
Pinacoteca do Estado de
São Paulo, item
B.54.01.0091/Xerografia
13 ‘Recibo de obras’,
Pinacoteca do Estado de
São Paulo, 1980,
Pinacoteca do Estado de
São Paulo, item
B.03.03.0001/Xerografia
14 The registrar’s report
indicates that, in addition to
sets of photocopies, both
artists provided diagrams of
their installations.
15 ‘Xerografia como
reprodução e como
7
hotbed of experimentation thanks to its marginal positioning, its espousal
of conceptual propositions, and of newly available technologies such as
the photocopier, would not be echoed by other institutions until years
later.
While a marginal event, ‘Gerox’ nonetheless proved to be a watershed
exhibition, heralding an intense period of experimentation with this tech-
nology within the city. In fact, more than thirty exhibitions dedicated to
xerography were organised in São Paulo between 1979 and 1984, in
alternative spaces, commercial galleries and museums.9 It was a veritable
boom unparalleled in the Americas. Yet it was the exhibition ‘Xerografia’,
which opened in May 1980 at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, that
marked the technology’s definitive entry into the institutional sphere.
In 1980 the Pinacoteca was under the new leadership of Fernando
Magalhães. An art critic, Magalhães had been a vocal advocate of concep-
tual practices and experimentation with new technologies, and at the
gallery he quickly initiated a programme akin to that of MAC USP, desig-
nating a new space solely for temporary exhibitions of emerging practices
in print, film, video and performance, which ‘Xerografia’ would inaugu-
rate on 15 May 1980. Organised by León Ferrari, ‘Xerografia’ featured
works by forty artists, the vast majority of whom were based in São
Paulo.10 The exhibition was notable for its reflexive engagement with
the practice it was showcasing: on the day it opened at the Pinacoteca,
‘Xerografia’ opened simultaneously in two other locations, at the
Núcleu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de Paraíba, in the
north-eastern city of João Pessoa, and at the Casa das Artes Plásticas, in
the city of Piracicaba.11 Moreover, the exhibition featured another
radical proposition: a few months previously, Magalhães had secured a
Xerox 3107 (a model made exclusively in Brazil, popularly known as a
brasileirinha, or ‘the little Brazilian’) for the exhibition’s participating
artists to experiment freely with. Many eagerly took him up on the
offer: in a letter from 1981 to Xerox Brasil soliciting additional supplies,
Magalhães relates how, between June 1980 and February 1981, the artists
had made approximately 110,000 copies on the machine.12 A registrar’s
report for the exhibition elucidates the considerable diversity of
approaches to the photocopy that artists developed during this period.13
Whereas artists such as Carmela Gross and Hudinilson Junior put
together several large-format photocopies to create sizeable wall-
mounted installations,14 others, such as León Ferrari and Regina Silveira,
treated the photocopier as a printmaking device, hanging individual copies
separately and within a frame.
Nowhere was this diversity made more evident than in a related public
debate hosted by the Pinacoteca on 12 June 1980. The panellists for ‘Xer-
ografia como reprodução e como linguagem artística’ (‘Xerography as
Reproduction and as Artistic Language’) included Magalhães, art histor-
ians Aracy Amaral and Lisbeth Rebolo Gonçalves, and the artists León
Ferrari, Roberto Sandoval, Maurício Fridman, Rafael França and
Marcelo Nitsche, among others.15 Even among the artists themselves,
opinions varied greatly as to what the photocopier represented. A spirited
discussion ensued as to whether the machine was simply a replicating
device, a printmaking technique that could be manipulated, or an exten-
sion of photography – even video – in the near simultaneity it achieved
between process and image. Ultimately, however, the conversation
8
linguagem artística:
debate’, 12 June 1980,
Arquivo Multimeios,
Centro Cultural São Paulo,
item 0671AP/TR1088-
TR1089
16 Amaral, for one, praised
such efforts to renew
artistic language yet voiced
concern for what she saw to
be xerography’s elliptical
poetics: ‘I get a bit
apprehensive about this
way of applying oneself, a
bit too intensely, onto an
endeavor – I do not see [in]
it, even from the point of
view of content itself, a
social preoccupation.’
Magalhães was more
receptive, seeing in
xerography’s affordability
the promise of reaching
wider audiences and an
engagement with ‘a greater
collectivity’. León Ferrari
echoed Magalhães’s
anticipation: ‘[xerox] can
be a new form, a new
technique, new images, an
anti-art… But we have yet
to be able to uncover the
audience for xerox, at the
price level of xerox. I will
believe that when we can
find this audience… ’ Ibid, p
13, p 15, pp 17–18.
17 Frederico Morais, ‘Contra a
arte afluente: o corpo é o
motor da “obra”’, Revista
de Cultura Vozes, vol 1, no
64, January/February 1970,
pp 45–59; Frederico
Morais, ‘A heliografia
como processo artístico’,
O Globo, 1 May 1981
18 Annateresa Fabris, Antonio
Lizárraga: uma poética da
radicalidade, EdUSP, São
Paulo, 2000, p 36
centred on the potential of xerographic works to activate new audiences.16
This sentiment was characteristic of the critical discourse around xerogra-
phy during this period. Many situated the thrust of xerography as a means
for artistic and social critique in its very accessibility. After initially resist-
ing the advent of photocopier technology in art, for example, by the early
1980s the critic Frederico Morais had become a champion of xerography
precisely on the grounds of its accessibility, stating:
For the artist, xerography, for its low cost and operational facilities, allows
a streamlining of artistic practice and its message, which is really something
interesting and positive. Much more than other means that allow technical
reproducibility, be it traditional printmaking, be it video-art; xerography
dynamically inserts itself in contemporary life because of its large capacity
for circulation, serving as an effective instrument of democratisation, not
only of production but of consumption itself, since the number of copies
is unlimited.17
In other words, critical discourse tended to dwell on the ramifications of
this technology. Then again, one detects a sense of unease with the
works themselves – with their presence as material objects, and with
how their ties to printmaking and photography in fact underpin their con-
ceptual thrust. Art historian Annateresa Fabris described this resistance
when she undertook a stocktake of the critical reviews of ‘Gerox’ and
the 1981 exhibition ‘Heliografia’, a show of thermal and heliographic
prints at the Pinacoteca that featured many of the same artists included
in ‘Gerox’ and ‘Xerografia’, writing:
The pursuit of artistic values implicit in the [critics’] considerations – which
are often condescending – given to the works in ‘GEROX’ and ‘Heliografia’
shows that works with new media are not analysed in their own terms.
That is, in terms of the nature and functional possibilities of art and of
experimentation with communication, in terms of the process that activates
an osmosis between the medium and the artist, in terms of the search for
another grammar and syntax, in terms of the denial of meaning and rep-
resentation in favour of mental processes, in terms of technical and oper-
ational procedures that are the basis of photo-reproductive systems.18
Without a doubt, critical writing on such works – then and even now –
often casts their distinctive poetics aside. Yet it would be myopic to
simply attribute the intensity of experimentation with xerography solely
to its accessibility. What if the search for that new ‘grammar and
syntax’ flourished precisely because these technologies held the capacity
to unfold alternate conceptual, aesthetic and affective spaces?
‘Que imagem é esta? Como se vê?’
By 1978 Rafael França and Mario Ramiro, then students at the new
School of Arts and Communications at USP, and their friend Hudinilson
Junior, a student in the newly founded studio programme of the Fundação
Armando Alvares Penteado, had been consistently experimenting with

19 Mario Ramiro, ‘As
xerografias de Rafael
França: o renascimento das
linhas de força’, in Helouise
Costa, ed, Sem medo da
vertigem: Rafael França,
Marca D’Agua, São Paulo,
1997, p 37
20 Ibid, p 36
21 Ibid
9
offset and photocopying to create artists’ books, postcards and other
small-format works for circulation. This was an ebullient period for the
young artists, as they set about experimenting with myriad conceptual
practices in their efforts to clandestinely critique Brazil’s fraught socio-pol-
itical context. The following year, the three began performing interven-
tions as the collective 3NÓS3 – perhaps the most notable of which was
placing hoods on several of São Paulo’s landmark sculptures to publicly
decry the regime’s persecution and torture of political dissidents. Yet
França, Ramiro and Hudinilson always maintained an individual, albeit
collaborative practice. And it was their serendipitous encounter, in
1978, with a then new photocopier in the office of the Literature Depart-
ment at USP that would merge together their interests in the engaging mass
print media and with the body – their individual bodies, but also that of
the spectator. Two department assistants, however, exclusively operated
the photocopier, which was meant for reproducing theses, academic
papers and meeting minutes.19 After months of cajoling, the assistants
relented, giving França, Ramiro and Hudinilson unsupervised access to
the machine.
It was a momentous step, for it meant they no longer had to limit them-
selves to making copies of collages or flat surfaces. It also meant they could
devote much more time to exploring the machine’s possibilities: turning a
blind eye to the artists’ activities, the assistants effectively made it so that,
in Ramiro’s words, ‘the cost of copies was wholly subsidised’.20 In secre-
tive, after-hours sessions they could now experiment with depth and,
notably, with using their own bodies:
The novelty of copying our own bodies, beginning with our hands simply
placed on the screen, brought to mind a sort of immemorial gesture, like
that of pre-historic man stamping the imprint of his hand on the wall of
a cave. Right at the start, we were thus all induced to carry out experiments
with xeroxed bodies, transforming the copying machine into a sort of fixed
camera.21
This approach to the photocopier would be transformative for these artists
and novel to the São Paulo art scene. In performatively engaging with the
machine, França, Hudinilson and Ramiro reorientated a tool designed for
the faithful mechanical reproduction of text, making it image what lay
beyond it: spatial depth, ephemerality and flesh. Once these artists
began to linger on xerography as a visual language in its own right by dis-
tinctly incorporating the body, this technology became truly generative.
Yes, making a photocopy was a physical act, something that was particu-
larly evident when things went awry – most of us are all too familiar with
jammed papers, bleeding toners, fingerprints on the glass, the blinding
flash from lifting the cover prematurely – yet when these artists pressed
their bodies onto the glass, they were not only reorientating the machine’s
function, they were also altering how the viewer would approach these
works.
In a 1984 essay, Hudinilson posed a twofold question the translation
of which betrays its apparent simplicity. A succinct observation, ‘Xerogra-
phy as language has now become the proposal/concern for these artists.
What image is this?’ is followed by a complex sentiment with a double
10

Rafael França, Untitled, c 1979, four photocopies, 21 × 29.7 cm each, courtesy of Hugo França and Museu de Arte Contem-
porânea da Universidade de São Paulo, photo: Renato Parada

meaning: ‘Como se vê?’, ‘What does it look like?’, but also, ‘How do we
look at it?’ As we examine these later works, we should consider Hudinil-
son’s complex question and elaborate upon it. How do we define these
images? How do we experience them and what do they bear?
Xerography had already proven itself to be a potent manoeuvre for
artistic and social critique in its poetics of repetition: not only did rep-
etition collapse the ontology of original and copy demarcating the art
object; the insistence inherent in repetition, to allow for circulation and
dissemination, was a politically subversive act. Yet there was another,
more vital aspect that these later works would flesh out from the poetics
of repetition – one, in fact, encapsulated in Julio Plaza’s neologism
gerox, but which Plaza never directly addressed: that this term can also
be read as the amalgamation of gerar (‘to generate’) and xerox. In the
early 1980s xerography was indeed generative: it became a means by
which to reproduce, on humble sheets of paper, insubordinate bodies
anathema to the military regime.

Dissident Bodies
On the whole, São Paulo artists’ xerographic works directly relied on
embodied perception, asking people to physically handle, hold, fold or
even crumple the objects. In their manipulation of the photocopier,
França, Hudinilson and Ramiro created images that engaged in a haptic
visuality, which harnessed the textural surfaces of flesh and hair pressed
onto the machine’s glass.22 And while all xerographic works, because of
their pedestrian support, activated a mode of spectatorship that hinged
on familiarity rather than reverence, França, Hudinilson and Ramiro’s
works introduced a much more intimate encounter by asking the viewer
to touch and handle their imaged bodies. Take, for example, Rafael
França’s untitled photocopy from 1979. A grid of masking tape, with its
jagged edges and speckled, uneven texture, grounds the composition of
22 ‘Haptic visuality’ is two pairs of contorted, disembodied hands that materialise from the
borrowed from Laura void. Over- and under-exposure render wrinkles and folds palpable.
Marks in order to address
the sensuous formal and
The image is grainy and textural, with gritty tonal contrasts, biotic
textual qualities of these creases and undulations. We are touched by an image in which the tips
images, as well as the of the middle, ring and little fingers of the bottom right hand make
notion of a visceral and
mimetic relationship contact with the glass. This is a simple yet significant gesture. In making
between a viewer and an direct, tactile contact with the machine, França reorientates the machine’s
image. See Laura U Marks, function away from the expedient aesthetic of bureaucracy to an aesthetic
The Skin of the Film, Duke
University Press, Durham, of urgency: of imagery requiring physical immediacy, of perverting the
North Carolina, 2000. technologies facilitated by the regime, and ultimately, of corrupting the
 11

Mário Ramiro, Narrativa em xerox, 1979, eight photocopies, 21 × 29.7 cm each, courtesy of the artist and
Galeria Zipper
12

Documentation of Hudinilson Jr performing Exercício de me ver II, 1982, 46 × 29.5 cm, courtesy of the artist’s estate and
Galeria Jaqueline Martins
 13

Hudinilson Jr, HEROS HART, 1980, photocopy with rubber stamp imprints, 21 × 29.7 cm, courtesy
of the artist’s estate and Arquivo Multimeios/Divisão de Acervo, Documentação e Conservação,
photo: the author
14
23 Lygia Clark cited in Guy
Brett, ‘Lygia Clark: In
Search of the Body’, Art in
America, July 1994, p 62
24 In 2014 the Museum of
Contemporary Art,
University of São Paulo
organised the exhibition
‘Hudinilson Junior: Em
torno de Narciso’; see
http://www.mac.usp.br/
mac/expos/2014/
hudinilson/home.htm,
accessed 18 September
2019. Erin Aldana briefly
touches upon Hudinilson’s
xerographic works through
the theme of Narcissus in
her study of the collective he
formed with Mario Ramiro
and Rafael França, 3Nós3,
‘Interventions into Urban
and Art Historical Spaces:
The Work of the Artist
Group 3Nos3 in Context,
1979–1982’, doctoral
dissertation, University of
Texas at Austin, 2008.
precision and purported neutrality of mechanical duplication by forcing it
to convey parts of individual bodies.
Mario Ramiro also explored an aesthetic of urgency and immediacy
through haptic and visceral images. Two works from 1979, Prisioneiro
2 (Prisoner 2) and Linha-fagia (Line-phagy), employ the same motif: mul-
tiple panels reveal a sequence in which Ramiro, his hands and face so near
that his nose presses against the glass, ingests or regurgitates a strip of
white paper. In Prisioneiro 2, we witness Ramiro’s hands peeking
through seemingly rigid horizontal lines that encase the surface. Ramiro
then divulges their fragility, violently devouring them into a pulpy mass
of tendril-like ribbons. Linha-fagia, meanwhile, reverses the action:
Ramiro first appears to frame his face, in profile, with his right hand,
only to produce the white band from his mouth. The paper eventually
overtakes the image. Yet in this reversal it gathers, like viscera; contrasting
with the stark parallel lines of the first panel of Prisioneiro 2.
There are clear resonances between Prisioneiro 2, Linha-fagia and
Lygia Clark’s emblematic action Baba antropofágica (Anthropophagic
Drool), staged in Paris in 1973. Here, participants knelt around another
person lying supine on the floor. With eyes closed, those kneeling continu-
ously pulled a string of cotton thread from a spool in their mouths, letting
the thread fall on the reclining figure to eventually envelop their body. Pur-
posefully messy and eliciting a certain level of revulsion, Baba antropofá-
gica relied on the exchange of metaphorical viscera to establish an
affective, intersubjective connection where, in Clark’s words, ‘word com-
munication is too weak’.23 Taken together, Prisioneiro 2 and Linha-fagia
re-enact the premise of Clark’s work, yet their execution situates them in
Ramiro’s distinct context: São Paulo, in 1979, the year marking the fif-
teenth anniversary of Brazil’s first military coup. And whereas Baba antro-
pofágica fostered collectivity through exchange, Ramiro’s performative
action is poignant in its solitude. Unreciprocated, his solitary ingestion
and regurgitation of his own viscera is circular, Sisyphean. The images
of his violent hunger and regurgitation are confining and claustrophobic,
a forceful representation of the political climate that surrounds him,
imploring the viewer’s affective response.
Hudinilson’s work, particularly the aforementioned series Exercísio de
me ver, also translates ephemeral performative actions into affective,
haptic surfaces. Here it bears noting that throughout his career Hudinilson
was intensely intrigued by the figure of Narcissus, relentlessly exploring
the theme of his own image and reflection. During the 1970s and 1980s
he would even insert the word Narcisse in his titles and habitually
stamp the name on his xerographies. When we turn to documentary
photographs of him performing Exercísio de me ver we essentially
witness a sexual act with the machine, as, completely unrestrained, he
interacts with it. Unsurprisingly, analyses of his oeuvre have pivoted
entirely around the auto-erotic.24 But are these xerographic extensions
of his body merely solipsistic impressions?
Along with performing collective interventions as part of 3NÓS3,
during this period Hudinilson devoted himself to creating subversively
queer collages, often making them first in scrapbooks and then photoco-
pying them. Narcisse-HerosHart, from 1980, is paradigmatic: it is a col-
lection of illicit homoerotic images, clandestinely reproduced, then titled
and ‘signed’ with rubber stamps. The now familiar ‘Narcisse’ is also

25 See Suely Rolnik, ‘The
Geopolitics of Pimping’,
Transversal Texts, Journal
of the European Institute
for Progressive Cultural
Policies, October 2006,
http://eipcp.net/transversal/
1106/rolnik/en, accessed 10
October 2017. See also
Fernanda Marcondes
Nogueira, ‘The Porn-Art
Movement in Brazil:
“Fictional Genealogies” of
Southern Pornographies’, in
Alianças de corpos
vulneráveis: feminismos,
ativismo bicha e cultura
visual = Alliances of
vulnerable bodies:
feminisms, queer activisim
and visual culture, Edições
SESC/Associação Cultural
Videobrasil, São Paulo,
2016, p 18.
26 Nogueira, ‘Porn-Art
Movement in Brazil’, op cit,
pp 28–29
27 ‘Rubber stamps, Letraset,
photocopy – the most
prosaic elements and
techniques can engender the
unexpected. They reveal a
truth of the contemporary
world that is concealed to
those who are apocalyptic:
that there is no fatally dark
destiny in serialization. By
multiplying it is possible to
build difference, to open
ourselves to the
unknown… In uniformed
societies, the place of art is
dispersion.’ Néstor García
Canclini, ‘El arte se hace en
fotocopias’, Unomásuno, 8
April 1982, p 16.
15
stamped repeatedly in red ink on the top left corner. The work mocks the
paraphernalia of bureaucracy – those ordinary forms, rubber stamps and
photocopies – for the easy transmission of information, directives, power.
As a final provocation, Hudinilson inks the head of his own penis and
stamps it underneath the title.
Such works at the time directly confronted censorship and repression
through images of queer ‘perversion’. The dictatorship had always main-
tained animosity towards queer communities, but during the specific
context of Brazil’s abertura (opening) period in the late 1970s and early
1980s, when the regime entered its final phase and began implementing
policies aimed at its eventual transition to democracy, Hudinilson’s
stance gained ever more urgency. Part of the government’s programme
was an official campaign to ‘cleanse’ public spaces of those deemed ‘unde-
sirable’ – gays, lesbians, transvestites and prostitutes – by unleashing
droves of military police into urban centres at night to crack down on
bars and gatherings. Indeed, cleansing the public space of ‘deviancy’
became an integral component of a set of measures taken by the regime
to make the country fit to enter the neoliberal world stage.25
The Movimento Arte-Pornô (Porn Art Movement, or MAP) was
founded in 1980 as a direct response to the oppressive actions of the
regime. Originally organised by Rio de Janeiro-based artists Eduardo
Kac, Claufe Rodrigues, Leila Míccolis, Tanussi Cardoso, Denise and
Cairo Assis Trindade, MAP was a loose collective of artists and poets. It
staged public interventions that included nude demonstrations, and circu-
lated self-published zines full of poems and texts that harnessed explicitly
vulgar and sexual language, or what was termed ‘libidinal grammar’. Art
historian Fernanda Nogueira outlines the group’s objective:
The Movement’s interventionist programme was about blowing open the
habitual, intimate, and fatal relationship with words and situations faced
on a daily basis during those dictatorial decades… The idea was to take
everything seen as abnormal, immoral, and censurable by the repressive
regime, starting with stigmatised language and words (swearwords, blas-
phemies, and sexual slanders), and turn it on its head in order to
provoke, performatically, a radical inversion of those values whilst inciting
another form of sexuality and relationship with the body, indiscriminately
stripped and cross-dressed to poke maximum fun at that (hetero)patriar-
chal, chauvinistic, but purportedly ‘neutral’ regime.26
MAP’s provocative stance was soon gaining attention beyond Rio de
Janeiro: later that year, several artists added their names to its manifesto,
including Hudinilson. Zona de tensão, which would re-emerge in public
protests three decades later, became the cover image for poet and fellow
MAP member Glauco Mattoso’s 1981 text, ‘O que é poesia marginal’
(‘What Marginal Poetry Is’).
‘By multiplying it is possible to construct difference, to open ourselves
to the unknown… In uniformed societies, the place of art is that of dis-
persion.’27 So proclaimed the Argentine scholar Néstor García Canclini
upon encountering León Ferrari’s xerographic and heliographic work in
1982. Xerography in São Paulo was always about an insistence to disse-
minate, circulate and, ultimately, connect rhizomatically with others at
the margins. França, Ramiro and Hudinilson multiplied their politically
16

subversive bodies – and Hudinilson reproduced what allegedly could not

be procreated: his queer body. He reoriented one of the more ubiquitous
bureaucratic objects produced by a society that defines an upright citizen
as productive and reproductive, normative and obedient. To contemplate
his reflection is not to indulge in his supposed vanity, but to consider the
poetic subversion posed by the multiplied image of a body unkempt, pros-
trate and queer.

Different versions of this article were presented at the ‘Exhibiting and Narrating Latin
American/Latino Art’ seminar hosted by the Getty Foundation at the Universidad Tor-
cuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires in May 2014 and at Williams College, Williamstown,
Massachusetts in March 2016. I would like to thank the organisers for inviting me
to participate in these events, and also for the valuable feedback I received on these
occasions, especially from Andrea Giunta, George Flaherty, Ondine Chavoya, Brynn
Hatton, Catherine Howe and Kailani Polzak.