THE MAIL ART OF PAULO BRUSCKY: from performance to postcard
Name: SIGRID AZEVEDO TAVARES
Publication date: 21/09/2017
Advisor:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ALMERINDA DA SILVA LOPES | Advisor * |
Examining board:
| Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ALMERINDA DA SILVA LOPES | Advisor * |
| NELSON PÔRTO RIBEIRO | External Examiner * |
Summary: This dissertation aims to bring up a reflection upon the production of the brazilian contemporary artist Paulo Bruscky. His trajectory begun in the second half of the 1960s, he explored the notion of corporality, doing performances and happenings, and always being a critical analyst of the own social and political reality. For this reason he had works censored by the military dictatorship, and had exhibitions of which he participated, confiscated, besides being persecuted and arrested a few times. The photography or video of the numerous performances that he made, individually or in partnership with the
compatriot Daniel Santiago, were transformed into works of mail art. Reproducibility is one of the characteristics of mail art, an relatively inexpensive process that allowed the artist to maintain the flow of the communication network by sending these serialized works to artists around the world. Bruscky was one of the most active artists and one of the main mentors of mail art in Brazil and throughout Latin America. The reproducibility
and authorized interference in the works by the receivers were means used by the network participants to contest the aura of the artistic object as well as the idea of unity, originality and authorship. Bruscky maintained effective contact and correspondence with a lot of representatives of this conceptual practice, especially those from countries that were in truculent dictatorial regimes, making mail art a communication process for the exchange of ideas, messages and political denunciation. Although, in its origin, the mail art was a clandestine way for the exchange of all kinds of images, texts and visual poems, it remained as such for a short time. In the 1970s, when the country still was under the military regime, correspondence art was institutionalized, entering the sights of censorship. Since then, mail art lost much of its critical spirit, although the work of Bruscky remained humorous or with a less explicit
critical sense about the brazilian artistic panorama, the dictatorial political context or everyday repressive events. Keywords: mail art, performance, Paulo Bruscky.
