Studies in Art Education

A Journal of Issues and Research

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“Tupy or Not Tupy?” Examining Hybridity in

Contemporary Brazilian Art

Flavia M. C. Bastos

To cite this article: Flavia M. C. Bastos (2006) “Tupy or Not Tupy?” Examining
Hybridity in Contemporary Brazilian Art, Studies in Art Education, 47:2, 102-117, DOI:
10.1080/00393541.2006.11650488

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Copyright 2006 by the Studies in Art Education
National An Education Association A Journal of Issues and Research
2006, 47(2). 102-117

"Tupy or not tupy?" Examining Hybridity

in Contemporary Brazilian Art
Flavia M. C. Bastos

UniversityafCincinnati

Correspondence Updating the 1920s notion of Anthropophagy developed to symbolize through

regarding this article
should be addressed
to the author at School
of Art, Universityof
Cincinnati, P.O. Box
210016, Cincinnati,
OH 45221-0016.
E-mail:
flavia.bastos@uc.edu
cannibalistic ritual the process of cultural assimilation that influences art, this
article examines issues of naming, describing, and representing contemporary
Brazilian art. In the first part of the article, the work of four contemporary
Brazilian artists recently exhibited in the United States frames criticism to the
common practice of labeling contemporary artworks according to national iden-
tity. In the article's second section, Brazil's multifaceted cultural and artistic
context will be used to outline implications for art education and institutional
practices more attuned to the transnational dimensions of art. In conclusion,
hybridity becomes a twofold framework. It describes, as Anthropophagy did
before, cultural layering, negotiations, and disputes. It also articulates a political
position more fitting to capture and interpret the art produced in our global age,
not only in Brazil.

"Tupy or not Tupy? That is the question" was the motto of a Brazilian
vanguard movement of the '20s. Reacting to European supremacy,
Anthropophagy [Antropofagia] took cannibalism as metaphor for the
process of cultural assimilation. The strong, often negative associations we
have about consuming human flesh intended to provide an image for the
symbolic (and sometimes actual) violence of cultural assimilation. Poet
Oswald de Andrade proposed in the movement's 1928 manifesto that to
break with cultural dependency on foreign models and create art that was
strongly Brazilian, it would be necessary to consume and transform
European influences, in the same way Tupinamba Indians would devour
and digest the enemy in order to take his strength (Canejo, 2004).
Therefore, to name this activist art of Brazil required avoiding the
denomination imposed by the colonizer in favor of one used by the
region's early habitants-Tupy, the name of one of the largest branches
of native languages in South America. An intentionally blatant paraphrase
of Hamlet, "Tupy or not Tupy?" encapsulated the cultural politics of
national art identity.
Issues associated with naming, describing, and representing the art of
different countries extend to present-day. On the one hand, art is in and
of a nation. Art is created within the constraints, influence, and support
of modern-era nation-states. Often art is exhibited and labeled according
to the place it was created or its creator's nationality. Nonetheless, under-
standing art frequently requires transcending the boundaries of a nation.
As the cannibalist approach underscores, at the core of making, exhibiting,
and interpreting art are the processes of transforming, appropriating, and

102 Studies in Art Education

 Examining Hybridity in Contemporary BrazilianArt

exchanging ideas, perspectives, and cultural norms. In the global system

we experience today, these boundaries between nation and culture are
constantly being re-drawn, raising questions about taken-for-granted
practices of labeling works of art according to national origin. I invite
readers, especially art educators in the United States, to explore other,
perhaps more productive, ways to think about works of art from other
nations, particularly Brazil. This article inquires into the contemporary
condition of hybridity through the examination of four internationally
known contemporary artists recently exhibited in the United States,
Mestre Didi, Helio Oiricica, Anna Bella Geiger, and Adriana Varejao,
Brazilian art provides a case in point to investigate the transnational
dimensions of contemporary art and invites awareness of the political
implications of a hybrid position.
A Renewed Interest in Brazilian Art
In 1998, for the first time since its establishment, the Sao Paulo
Biennial was completely devoted to the truly Brazilian subject of
Anthropophagy. More recently in 2000, the large-scale exhibition Mostra
do Redescobrimento: Brasil 500 anos [The Rediscovery Show: Brazil 500
years], also held. in Sao Paulo, examined the multiplicity of Brazilian
artistic production from the indigenous to the contemporary. In 2002 the
Guggenheim Museum organized Brazil: Body and Soul, the largest and
most comprehensive exhibition of Brazilian art abroad. Partaking in the
spirit of the Rediscovery Show, the Guggenheim shows in New York and
Bilbao, Spain, presented prominent works created by Brazilian artists to
foster a more comprehensive understanding of the country and its art.
As a Brazilian art educator working in the United States, I have mixed
feelings about the usefulness of the label "Brazilian art." On the one hand,
it serves to draw attention, qualify, and perhaps justify, the unfamiliarity
of certain audiences with certain artists or forms. By and large, Brazil has
been excluded from the efforts of English-speaking America to correct
Eurocentric practices by directing scholarship and exhibits on many
aspects of Latin American art during the last two decades (Sullivan,
2001). Therefore, the label Brazilian art can be useful in focusing curato-
rial and interpretive practices on artists and visual culture manifestations
at risk of being excluded. On the other hand, Brazilian art can be a
misleading and perhaps problematic label. As Canclini (2004) observes,
the modern history of art has been practiced and written, to a great extent
as a history of art of nations.
Nations appeared to be a logical mode of organization of culture and
the arts. Even the vanguards that meant to distance themselves from
the socio-cultural codes are identified with certain countries, as if
these national profiles would help define their renovative projects:
thus, one talks about Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, and
the Mexican Muralist school. (p. 702)

Studies in Art Education 103

 Flavia M. C. Bastos

The tendency to oversimplify the national and cultural identities of

works of art and visual culture obstructs understanding. As an interpretive
device, national affiliation or origin is a weak category. By stressing
national boundaries, the dynamics of cultural influences that are both
regional and transnational are often overlooked. In the case between
Brazil and the United States an emphasis on national borders has stressed
differences and promoted stereotypical views.
Brazil, A North American Gaze
For most people in the United States, Brazil evokes cliched notions
that have permeated Hollywood cinema since the early twentieth century.
Eccentric Brazilian characters were present in silent movies as early as
1925 (Augusto, 1982). However, in the 1930s, with the growth of capital
investment by the United States in Latin America and the beginning of
Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy, the deformation of Brazil, and for
that matter the rest of Latin America, in Hollywood movies began in
earnest. The 1933 musical Flying Down to Rio, with Ginger Rogers and
Fred Astaire, transformed the ciry in a world-renowned romantic vortex.
In Breakfast at TiffimJ's (1961), the heroine played by Audrey Hepburn,
falls in love with a man from Rio. Hitchcock gave the ciry a new spin,
depicting it as a site for Nazi spies in his 1946 film Notorious. But
certainly, the most prominent Brazilian Hollywood icon was Carmen
Miranda. Born in Portugal and raised in Brazil, Miranda served as the all-
purpose Latina bombshell in films throughout her career. Brazilian audi-
ences disliked Miranda's "Americanized" music, Caribbean outfits, and
tutti-frutti hat, considering them all emblematic of Yankee ignorance
about Latin America (Sullivan, 2001). Other stereotypes of Brazil exist in
the popular imagination, most of these deriving from television. Soccer is
seen as the national preoccupation, Carnival the national orgy, and
violence the norm. I know, along with many other Brazilians, that these
elements are to a greater or lesser degree present in Brazilian society. Yet,
due to the power of mass communication, they stand in the minds of
many as the defining characteristics of the country. Contrasting these
truisms with greater levels of understanding is a prerequisite to a more
profound engagement with the country's realities and art.
Another way of thinking about Brazil embraces its similarities with
the United States. The two vast continent-size New World countries are
comparable in both historical formation and ethnic diversity. Brazil
constitutes "a kind of southern twin whose strong affinities with the U.S.
have been obscured by ethnocentric assumptions and media stereotypes,"
(Starn, 2003, p. 203). After millennia of indigenous habitation and
culture, both Brazil and United States were discovered as part of Europe's
alleged search for a trade route to India. Their histories ran on parallel
tracks. Both countries' official histories start as European colonies, one of
Portugal, the other of Great Britain. In both countries, colonization led to

104 Studies in Art Education

 Examining Hybridiry in Contemporary Brazilian Art

the occupation of vast territories and the dispossession of indigenous

peoples. In the United States, the occupiers were called pioneers; in Brazil,
they were called bandeirantes [explorers]. Subsequently, both countries
massively imported Africans to form the two largest slave societies of
modern times, up until slavery was abolished, with the Emancipation
Proclamation in 1863 in the United States and the "Golden Law" of
1888 in Brazil. Both countries received parallel waves of immigration
from all over the world, ultimately forming multicultural societies with
substantial indigenous, African, Italian, German, Japanese, Slavic, Arab,
and Jewish populations and influences (Almeida, 2003). This view of
Brazil and the United States can support a dialogue in which issues of
culture, identity, and representation as examined by artists of different
backgrounds can be discussed in a novel way.
A Personal Selection of Brazilian Contemporary Art
My selection of four artists seeks to exemplify significant themes in
Brazilian contemporary art and their transnational connections. For
example, an awareness of Black Atlantic cultural patterns and aesthetics is
embodied in Mestre Didi's Afro-Brazilian art; a negotiation between
international fine arts discourse and local references is at the core of
Oiticica's Tropicalism; and an attempt to represent the dual subaltern
status of Latin American women is common thread in Geiger's and
Varjeaos creations. These works are not emblematic of an essential
Brazilianess, but indicative of the diverse cultural influences shaping a
multifaceted contemporary art production.
Mestre Didi and the Art of Candornble
During the Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries,
hundreds of thousands of the Yoruba were exported to the New World to
work on plantations. Yoruba slaves preserved a significant part of their
cultural heritage, which markedly influenced the New World's culture in
the new religions that were created, including Candornble in Brazil. In
contemporary culture, these New World religions of Candornble,
Santeria, and Shang6, among others, create spaces of African culture not
diluted within the national cultures, although the practitioners are part of
their respective national entities and within these boundaries consider
themselves Brazilian, Cuban, Trinidadian, and so on (Lindsay, 1996).
According to Thompson (1984), the Yoruba have sophisticated artistic
sensibilities. One of the earliest dictionaries of the language, published in
1858, included the entry amewa, which means knower of beauty,
connoisseur. The Yoruba appreciate freshness and improvisation in the
arts, qualities that are evident in the vast body of artworks celebrating reli-
gion. This balance between tradition and renewal marks the artworks
created by Mestre Didi.
Mestre Didi is an 80-year-old Afro-Brazilian artist who is a devout
follower of the Orishas, Yoruba ancestral deities. His own religious

Studies in Art Education 105

 Flavia M. C. Basros

authority formed the basis for his work in sculpture. Using diverse voices
to express himself and his art, Mestre Didi is a writer who narrates stories
and myths of origin, a priest, and a visual artist (Araujo, 200 l ). The
vigorous insertion of Mestre Didi into the international scene started in
the mid 1960s (Costa, 1997). His work was shown in African museums
(in Accra, Dakar, Lagos) as well as in European, Latin American, and
New York venues.

Figure 1. Mestre Didi, abd

Obadena (King ofthe
Sentinels). Bundled palm
ribs, leather, beads, and
cowrie shells,
68 x 24 x 24 em. Collection
of the artist. Used with
permission of the artist.

106 Studies in Art Education

 Examining Hybridiry in Contemporary Brazilian Art

Mestre Didi's works begin wirh a systematic unit: a bunch of palm-tree

ribs bound together by strips of leather. His sculptures range from about
2 to 10 feet and are adorned with leather, glass beads, cowrie shells, and
fiber skirts of different colors. His materials are evocative of straight and
looped Yoruba ritual brooms, shashara and ibiri, sacred implements for
purifying spaces, places, and persons, and assuring of well being and good
fortune. According to dos Santos (2001), his works convey both a sense
of tradition and renewal. Starting with a shashara, each sculpture repre-
sents a variation, fugue, an ode dedicated to the perpetuation of tradi-
tional form. During most of his life he has made ritual objects; his
aesthetic production, inspired by traditional matrixes, has led to new
symbolizing interpretations, offering innovative insight into tradition.
Didi's work is part of the important tradition of Afro-Brazilian ritual
and aesthetics. The role played by Africa in the formation of the Brazilian
collective consciousness cannot be overstated. From the earliest contacts
between the New and the Old Worlds, cultural patterns emerged in
Brazil that parallel those of many of the African civilizations from which
the slaves were taken. Food, language, visual art, music, dance, and reli-
gion are all elements of Brazilian culture that have permeated and have
been forged in these contacts with Africa. The aesthetic experience of
African-Brazilian religion is part of a system of references in which each
object has a function and an objective with regard to the sacred (Montes,
2001). The sacred is the source of an entire production of art that has
remained clandestine, and the origin of an aesthetic that is not recognized
by official history but which nevertheless presents unique Afro-Brazilian
characteristics. Mestre Didi's works reflect this vibrant tradition brought
to Brazil by the African Diaspora. The assimilation of African-Brazilian
art such as Didi's in the contemporary international art milieu can be
understood as a layered Anthropophagic phenomenon. Yoruba's roots
form the core layer that is surrounded by New World's oppression, and
finally festooned with mainstream art world's recognition. These power
struggles shape not only the art itself, but more importantly, how it is
absorbed into our experience.
Music, Art, and Revolution: Helio Oiticica and Tropicalism
An inclusive art movement of the late 1960s, T ropicalism began with
pop music, as a reaction to the international popularity and lax political
message of bossa nova, Brazilian cool jazz. Initiated by two musicians,
Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, the rebellious art movement voiced
strong opposition and resistance to the military dictatorship that started
in 1964. In Veloso's words, Tropicalism's purpose was
... to sort out the tension between Brazil-the parallel universe and
Brazil the country peripheral to the American Empire. A country,
which at the time was ruled by a military dictatorship, believed to
have been fostered by anticommunist maneuvers of the American

Studies in Art Education 107

 Flavia M. C. Bastos

Empire Central Intelligence Agency. [... J Tropicalism wanted to

project itself as the triumph over two notions: one, that the version
of the Western enterprise offered by American pop and mass culture
was potentially liberating and two, the horrifying humiliation
represented by capitulation to the narrow interests of dominant
groups, whether at home or internationally. (2003, pp. 6-7)
Helie Oiticica (1937-1980) has been credited with developing the
visual art component to this politically charged movement. The name,
Tropicalism, derives from the made up word Tropictilia, a 1967 installation.
Already an established artist at the time, Oiticica's Tropicdlia revisited
Anthropophagy's ideas to inquire into national identiy and representation.
Oiticica attempted to impose an obviously Brazilian image upon the
current context of the avant-garde and national art manifestations in
general.
Tropicdlia installation. The work consists of two structures that can be
penetrated by the spectator, called penetrdveis [penerrables]. According to
Canejo's description (2004), the larger of the two works, PN3, is a small
labyrinth that combines international modernist concepts with the innov-
ative architecture of the favelas (squatter housing on the hillside of Rio de
Janeiro). This combination of canonical art and vernacular style questions
set values in raising the structural design of the favelas to the level of high
art. Oiticica was highly conscious of the latest contemporary perfor-
mances, installations, and happenings and Tropictilia must also be seen as
his attempt to co-opt these forms. The other penetrable in Tropicdlia,
PN2, is an open-roofed "booth" in which the spectator is enclosed with
sensory objects: fragrant herbs and soil. The two structures in Tropictilia
are to be seen and experienced together. They are multi-sensory installa-
tions surrounded by stereo typically emblematic Brazilian elements. This
backyard is made up of picturesque sandy paths, small rock beds,
common tropical plants, and, originally, live macaws. From the outside,
the visitor hears the sounds of birds mixed with muffled voices from
inside the labyrinth. Walking barefoot across the sand, the spectator
enters the small corridor of the labyrinth. As s/he ventures further inside,
the hall darkens; the material overhead becomes solid and the slits of light
between the exterior wallboards grow smaller and finally close up. Thus,
once in the interior, space diminishes and there is a gradual loss of light
and air. The corridors are narrow and there is no out at the other end.
Rounding the last corner, the participant sees a fluctuating glow and hears
a low sound, although not yet discerning the source. Then, suddenly s/he
encounters a flickering television set. Oiticica has described the internal
spiral of the structure as a "shell." At its center, the participant is capti-
vated by a constant bombardment of "global" images. According to
Helie's 1968 diary entry (as cited in the 1996 Helio Oiticica exhibit cata-

108 Studies in Art Education

 Examining Hybridiry in Contemporary Brazilian Art

logue), "it is the image that devours the spectator. .. [this] is in my

opinion the most anthropophagic work in Brazilian art" (p.12S).
Oiricica proposes to cannibalize features of international contemporary
and modernistic artistic styles. At the same time, the work intends to
absorb the power of the colonizers in reproducing the exotic Brazil of
their imagination in the backyard of his environmental work. Surpassing
original Antbropophagic tenets proposed by Oswald de Andrade, Oiricica
was deconsrrucring the myth of a Brazilian tropical paradise through a
contrast between the isolated calm exterior fashioned with typical
elements of the tropics (birds, colorful fabric, white sand, erc.) and the
interior assault of broadcast television images. This combination of
symbolic situations (interior vs, exterior) and cliched objects (national vs.
international) is effective and powerful. This way of alluding indirectly,

figure 2. Helie Oiricica. Tropicdlia pmetrable! PN2 and PN3, 1967, installed at State University
of Rio de Janeiro, 1990. Used with permission of the artist.

Studies in Art Education 109

 Flavia M. C. Bastos

rather than explicitly confronting issues, becomes the trademark of

Tropicalisr artists, including musicians, playwrights, film directors, and
poets (Canejo, 2004). Additionally, this subtlety of expression was a
necessary strategy to sidestep the increasing censorship to the arts imposed
by the military dictatorship at the time.
Counter-narratives of Conquest: Two Contemporary Women Artists
Unveiling the dynamics of conquest that have marked Brazilian history
from the arrival of the Portuguese in 1500, these two women artists
working today in Brazil explore continuities and discontinuities in time
and space. The conceptual maps of Anna Bella Geiger and the post-
modern history paintings of Adriana Varejao illustrate the dualities of
center/periphery, hegemony/subordination, globaillocal as they apply to
Latin America's relationship to European colonialism and dominance by
the United States (Sterling, 2001).
Anna Bella Geiger's maps incorporate the constituent elements cartog-
raphers have used to represent the world since the voyages of discovery. In
this reinvented cartography she does nor offer the rypical coherent vision
of global order. Instead, Geiger's mapping strategies have emphasized
geographic fragmentation, elision, and discontinuity, played out in a

Figure 3. Anna Bella Geiger. Orbis Descriptio (Description o/the WorldJ.

Courtesy of Tepper Takayama Fine Arts.

110 Studies in Art Education

 Examining Hybridity in Contemporary Brazilian Art

variety of media. She fills shallow file drawers with elegantly reconfigured
maps of the Southern and Northern Hemispheres. Whether stamped out
in encaustic or traced in precious and base metals, her waxen seas are
fluid, the continents drift, meridians reposition themselves, and their exis-
tence seems poised to continue outside the box. Since the early 1970s,
Geiger has explored representation, redefining maps to allude to her own
interrogations about the territorial construction of Brazil's new global
sphere.
As many artists of her generation, Geiger explored the function and
nature of the work of art. However, in the politically and culturally
repressed Brazil of the early 1970s (post-Tropicalism), Geiger found
herself torn between criticizing the concept of "Brazilianess" that had
been co-opted as part of the authoritarian ideology of the government
and having her work attacked as ideologically traditional. Fearing her
work would simply illustrate this tension, Geiger opted for using parody,
turning her work into derritorialized and dissonant fragments (Cocchiarale,
2001). These disturbing orbs and charts also speak of the Brazilian artist
cultural exile as s/he occupies a secondary position in an international and
hierarchical art system.
Adriana Varejao's contemporary baroque history paintings created in
the style of Portugal's famed azulejos (blue-and-white decorative tiles)
deftly invert the official history of Brazil's invasion by appropriating a
language favored by the Portuguese conquerors. She recontextualizes
cannibal scenes lifted from early explorers' travel narratives, depicting
relics and votive offerings, and incorporating images of dismembered
organs on her chosen canvas of Portuguese tiles. Visually representing
Anthropophagy's notion of absorption with the Other, Varejao's works
depict parallels between the alleged cannibal practices of Brazil's natives
and the Eucharistic ritual as a symbolic consumption of the body of
Christ (Carvajal, 2001).
Evoking a sense of passage, a journey among divergent images,
cultures, times and spaces, Varejao appropriates and re-maps a vast body
of images, forms, and ideas disseminated by the Europeans during their
colonization of Brazil. Commenting on this history of violence and domi-
nation, resistance, displacements, and syncretisms, she says,
I am interested in verifying in my work dialectical processes of
power and persuasion. I subvert those processes and try to gain
control over them in order to become an agent of history rather
than remaining an anonymous, passive spectator. I not only
appropriate historic images-I also attempt to bring back to life
the processes, which created them and use them to construct new
versions. (cited in Carvajal, 2001, p. 116)
Varejao makes us aware of the continuous reformulation of history
and our role in it. A common thread in these two artists' works is, on the

Studies in Art Education III

 Flavia M. C. Bastes

Figure 4. Adriana Varejao. Proposalfor a Catechesis: Part I Diptych: D~ath and Dismemberment;
1993. Oil on canvas, 53 1/ 8 x 94 1/ 2 in. Used with permission of the artist.

one hand, unveiling the processes of the construction of Brazil as an

entity with a geographic, historical, and cultural existence; and on the
other, representing transnational relationships that inform Brazil's position
in past and present history. Highly political, their works make a powerful
commentary about Brazil's subjugated relat ionship with Europe and ,
more recently, the United States . Adriana Varejao and Anna Bella Geiger ,
like Helie Oiticica before them, give continuity to the Antbropopbagic
preoccupation of examining Brazilian cultural and artistic identity,
providing counter-narratives of identity that encompass history, domina-
tion, and otherness.
Beyond Essentialist Conceptions of Brazilian Art
Museum and cultural institutions that have recently exhibited Brazilian
art, such as the Guggenheim, the Walker Art Center, and the National
Museum of Women in the Arts, have revisited traditional practices,
Echoing some of the same concerns voiced in this article, these institutions
strived to address and minimize rhe problems of representing geograph -
ical-political enti ties such as nation-stares through selected works of an.
In practice, however , these efforts to meet the demands of a global agenda

112 Studie« in Art Education

 Examining Hybridity in Contemporary Brazilian Art

and the need to educate English-speaking audiences about largely unfa-

miliar artworks, resulted in Brazilian art exhibits that sought to capture
"the essential nature of an extraordinary country" (Krens, 2001, p. xiii).
I am the first to acknowledge that Brazilian art is a recognizable cate-
gory. Nonetheless, as Schultz, Sims, Rotilie, Atkinson, and Walters (2003)
observe, while descriptors such as Brazilian art or Japanese art may give
audiences some familiar information, their usefulness is questionable. A
considerable risk is to make the meaning behind one artist's work speak
for an entire culture. Additionally, increasingly nomadic lifestyles make
nationality an incomplete indicator of artists' cultural background.
Clearly, it is relevant to know if the person making the work has lived or
studied other places or is connected to other cultures. However, as we
become aware of the limitations of understanding of contemporary works
of art though nationality labels, we are faced with a paradox. On the one
hand, the existence of nation-states cannot be denied, along with the
intellectual habit of expecting to gain insights into artworks from their
geographical provenance. On the other hand, postmodern perspectives
have sensitized us to multi-layered and complex understandings of culture
that cannot be contained by national frontiers. According to Canclini
(2004), the current interest in investigating artistic and cultural identities
is shaped by a discordant dialogue between fundamentalism and global-
ization. The pretension of constructing national cultures and representing
them by specific iconographies is challenged in our time by the processes
of an economic and symbolic transnationalization. Herkenhoff (2003)
reminds us that the mechanisms of global articulation are all-encom-
passing, including immigration, drugs, corporations, terrorism, commu-
nications, weapons smuggling, capital, omnipotent governments, war,
weather, human-made global warming, natural catastrophes, disease, sex,
AIDS, tourism, and art. The world in which we live today is marked by
the dual presence of abject misery and unprecedented abundance, both
outcomes of the global economic order (Sen, 2001). To understand the
art produced in this complex, layered, and many times incongruent
world, it is important to operate outside conventional labels and notions
of art history, making room for what Becker (2002) calls "unruly forms of
intelligence." The modern affair of looking at art and artifacts from other
cultures and other countries must evolve in response to postmodern
concerns and world order. The final section of this article will propose an
alternate way to access the art recently produced in Brazil.
Considering Hybridity in Contemporary Brazilian Art
International interest in Brazilian art invites robust interpretive frame-
works that break usual cliches (Farias, 1997). Such frameworks can enable
viewers and institutions to engage with these works in a novel way.
Particularly in the United States, this renewed interest in Brazilian art can
open up a conversation about complementary perspectives that take into

Studies in Art Education 113

 Flavia M. C. Bastos

account socio-cultural and political issues. On the one hand, these issues
influence artworks' form and content; and, on the other hand, they struc-
ture the experience of viewing such works in the United States. More
specifically, the American hegemonic relationship with Brazil and other
Latin American countries, in a similar vein to the earlier European domi-
nation of the New World, is an important theme in Brazilian art.
Therefore encounters with these works must inquire into the power rela-
tions that forged the two countries and informed their current and past
relationships. Art educators interested in cultural understanding (Chanda,
1995; Krug, 2003; Mason, 2004; Stuhr, 2003; Zimmerman, 1990)
propose a shift from binary relations of difference that stereotype what we
think of as culture. Gooding-Brown (2000) suggests a disruptive model of
interpretation that highlights the social construction of interpretation,
self, and difference. Inspired by border studies, Garber (I995) discusses
the development of a border consciousness, which implies the knowledge
of at least two sets of reference codes operating simultaneously. The
ability to simultaneously negotiate two codes-as seen in Mestre Didi's
coalescing of Brazilian experiences and Yoruba traditions, Oiticica's juxta-
position of fine art and vernacular architecture, and Varejao and Geiger's
pulsing internal and external perspectives-is essential to grasp contem-
porary works. The four Brazilian artists presented in this article beg for an
unruly analysis that requires a rupture from conventional ways of engaging
with art from other countries.
Alternative approaches such as these have the potential to concurrently
denounce the perils of nationalism and offer a framework to understand
contemporary hybridity. For Canclini (I995) hybridity is the ongoing
condition of all cultures, which contain no zones of purity, because they
undergo continuing processes of transculturation (two-way borrowing
and lending between cultures). In other words, hybridiry is a character-
istic of contemporary times and art, underlining the existence of multiple
and simultaneous influences and associations. Ir acknowledges that
neither the artist's nor the work's identity can be reduced to a simplified
notion of nation. Enwezor, curator of the most recent Documenta,
suggested contemporary art practices should model the "hybridization of
the world where roots are replaced by routes taking people on unsure
travels into the future" (Belting, 2001, p. 337).
A dynamic concept, hybridiry refers to the coexisting influences nego-
tiated in and through works of art. It focuses less on the mixed cultural or
ethnic codes that may have been articulated, then on the power dynamics
that produced these various references. Hybridity encompasses a political
dimension, rendering cultural borrowing and landing visible as well as the
frequently inequitable social conditions in which it occurs, such as colo-
nization, war, or imperialism. Pointedly, hybridity can refer us to our
shared humanity, without simplifying or homogenizing cultures or
nations. Furthermore, it can become a valuable tool to delve deeply into

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 Examining Hybridity in Contemporary Brazilian Art

the complexities of cultural negotiation and creativity that surpass modern

conceptions of nation.
Tupy or not Tupy? The Conclusion May Be Both
By criticizing domination through parody-literally and metaphori-
cally depicting cannibalism as the ultimate act of absorption with the
orher, the Anthropophagic movement has inspired Brazilian artists to
politicize their practice. As a result, this critical genre of art sought to
denounce the historical, political, cultural, and economic domination;
celebrate the mixed ethnic and cultural heritages that existed in Brazil as a
result of that; and promote a twofold understanding of Brazilian art and
culture as, (1) a counter-narrative of oppression, and (2) the articulation
of a hybrid position. Contemporary Brazilian artists such as Didi, Geiger,
Oiticica, and Varejao have drawn upon a mix of cultural influences to
articulate a progressive political position. We can learn by engaging with
their art that hybridity is not only a condition of contemporary artworks,
but also an empowering position from which to speak.
Our engagement with these works can give priority to concerns about
labeling their characteristics "Brazilian" or "Tupy" or "Latin." This
labeling practice only invites disembodied expertise and reinforces the
status quo. Alternatively, a transformative approach inquires into social
construction of the artwork. Such an encounter has the potential to
engender an act of cultural translation that according to Bhabha (1994),
"desacralizes the transparent assumptions of cultural supremacy" (p. 228).
Therefore, encounters with contemporary artworks demand debunking
monolithic views of nation, culture, and art, in favor of a more nuanced
and layered examination of self, other, and context. Such encounters also
require embracing the notion of hybridity as a powerful and more appro-
priate analytical framework to reflect upon and interpret art created
within the complex cultural negotiations of the global system.
It seems to me, hybridity can become a framework with the potential to
transcend traditional nation-state boundaries, and a more fitting approach
to inquiry into contemporary artworks. Hybridity can be seen as a shared
condition of these four Brazilian artists, and conceivably of many other
contemporary artists who seek to make statements about the transitional
cultural spaces they occupy and their journeys in getting there. Building
on the post-colonial notion of contact zone, or Garber's concept of
borderland, both spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with one
another, hybridity has the potential to replace imperialist understandings
of nation with an organic articulation of cultural identity. Men and
women of our global and multicultural age, among them artists, do not
necessarily find their place within any particular culture, but in these
many in-between and transitional spaces they occupy. Embracing a
hybrid view of art and culture is a challenge that art educators and
cultural institutions begin to recognize as essential in an age when the
articulation of difference strives to replace hegemonic art practices.

Studies in Art Education 115

 Flavia M. C. Bastos

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