_{Interview with Tanya Barson, curator of Tate Modern, London}

Legenda: Untitled (Disco), 1972, by Mira Schendel (Photo: Mira Schendel – American Fund for Tate Gallery 2007, Mira Schendel estate)

Versão em português

Brazilian contemporary art and its particular constellation are indicative of an unprecedented international movement. The visibility of Brazilian artistic production has grown worldwide and is reflected in events of small, medium and large-scale. Examples abound today. Ranging from solo exhibitions organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) and the Tate Modern in London, two of the largest instances of contemporary artworld. Read below the interview with Tanya Barson, curator at Tate Modern.

In the past few years Brazil began to stand out in the international artistic scenario, acquiring prestige. It’s possible to say today that our country has become an important artistic centre. The visibility of our production has increased. Initiatives taken by Tate Modern, such as putting up a collection with more than twenty Brazilian artists, and Mira Schendel’s exhibition in October, denote the prestigious position Brazil is currently occupying in this realm. In your opinion, is it possible to set a milestone for this projection? What particularities of Brazilian art and your system has attracted interest from renowned institutions as Tate Modern?

We actually have the work of around 30 Brazilian artists in the collection at Tate. These have been acquired over the past 10 to 15 years. During that time, we have also exhibited artists such as Helio Oiticica and Cildo Miereles, and others, in the programme. In terms of a recent history of the prominence of Brazilian art on an international stage, it might seem logical to pick the 1998 Bienal de Sao Paulo as a watershed moment, happening at the moment when Brazilian contemporary art was becoming more widely recognized. Certainly, in the last ten years, there has been a dramatic shift in the interest in, knowledge of and attention paid to art from Brazil. So, now it is indeed seen as an important artistic centre – but one that also has a long and complex history through the twentieth century that also needs to be more widely known. This is the context in which we might situate Mira Schendel and the exhibition that Tate Modern is staging in collaboration with the Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo.

The Tate Modern decided then to open an exhibition about Mira Schendel, a Swiss artist who moved to Brazil, who was contemporary to the Neo-Concrete Movement, and became an emblematic artist both in Brazil and in Latin America. What reasons justify this choice?

The first thing to say is that Schendel is a remarkable artist, her work is both complex and subtle. It displays an acute sensitivity to materials and to form. She was able to incorporate the most advanced intellectual and philosophical ideas of her time in a practice that is also extraordinary for it being so extensive and prolific that it has yet to be fully quantified. Both personally and as an artist she traversed different contexts so that now we might retrospectively apply the term transnational to her and her work. In her work we can see a new paradigm being established so that she can be seen as both a foundational figure within Brazilian art in the later twentieth century (influencing artists that might include Jose Resende, Fernanda Gomes, Rivane Neuenschwander and Maria Laet among others) and an artists whose work makes a unique contribution more broadly as she created works that are universally resonant. For Tate Modern, Schendel is of profound interest for a number of reason that include, first and foremost, the extraordinary nature of her work; she also fits within our aim to show historical women artists whose work has yet to be seen in depth internationally; she sits within another aim to show work of artists from Brazil and across Latin America more prominently in the programme; and she fits within our more general aim to show how artists radically challenge the language of modernism.

The institution hold a solo exhibition of a young artist yet consecrated internationally? What credentials an artist in the process of consecration should take to gain an individual in an institution like the Tate Modern?

As a museum Tate has to make very careful choices about the artists that are given shows both because of the limited capacity of the programme but also because as a museum there is a certain responsibility to show artists who have attained a certain level of development in their careers and made a mark in some way. We can never be too restrictive about these terms because it always varies, but it is also true to say that while we do aim to show the work of emerging artists (for instance in our Project Space programme) we also have to bear in mind the role of the museum as a place where a certain history is inscribed. We ought not to take on the role that more properly belongs to other kinds of institutions who engage with artists at an earlier point in their career. As a way to become more involved in the conversation however, we have begun to work with different kinds of institutions through Project Space, but our role in that programme of exhibitions is very much about learning, conversing and collaborating.

In your opinion, countries where there’s a more heated market in arts are necessarily the ones that legitimate the artists and their work? Is there a direct connection between market and prestige? Or, the artist’s fame is achieved despite the market expectations? What objective and subjective elements can explain the acclamation of a contemporary artist?

I think that there are many ways in which the market and prestige diverge. The market may be a guide that tells us about certain developments in the value afforded to artistic production, but it can never be the sole measure for artistic worth. Many artists work beyond the scope of the market and make extraordinary contributions and achievements. Commercial success can evade artists for many years and yet they may still be making work that is of historical importance. If we look now at Schendel, the market for her work is so far beyond anything that occurred within her lifetime (which sadly is not an unusual story) and yet she was making work that has clear and universal significance. I would worry about making judgments based on market value alone. We have to have confidence (as curators or writers or collectors) to see aesthetic value regardless of, or sometimes even despite, monetary worth.

The construction of a modern nation and the search of a national identity are central themes on the Brazilian social history. In the artistic realm, these issues were manifested through our Modernist Movement that took place in Brazil only twenty years after Europe questioned and deconstructed the aesthetics of its celebrated art. This delay established a tension in Brazilian arts, and this makes itself present until today: the dilemma between the local (nationalism) x the cosmopolitan, and it raises the following questions. Is it necessary to incorporate the foreign experience to search autonomy of a national culture? Are the character and the strength of a national culture possible with the help of foreign elements?

I am not sure that local and cosmopolitan are two different things. In both Brazil and Britain we are fortunate to have conditions of social diversity or multiculturalism which have contributed greatly to artistic movements in both countries. I would shy away from the modernist obsession with nationhood and think more about communities and conversations. Artists have always found ways to have dialogues that extend beyond national borders – whether that is through actual contact or by proxy, by travel or through print media or even circuits of circulation such as the mail or the internet – if we look we can see that the global or transnational is not such a recent phenomenon after all. What interests me is that from the 1920s onwards there has been a transatlantic exchange between Europe and Brazil which has never been a one way conversation – Schendel made a contribution in this respect to a history of experimental art in London – and it is the complexity of that dialogue that enriches the histories that we try to tell.

The core of this debate is, currently, present and reshaped when we talk about the internationalization of the Brazilian art. Is Brazil’s contemporary art defined as “Brazilian” or international”? Do you see in the Brazilian production a national identity? Do you recognize it as a universal expression? Why?

Of course, there are aspects of Brazilian art that relate to a history that occurred within the country and have to do with radical leaps achieved amongst groups of artists who were in dialogue with one another, and sometimes with (circles of) critics and curators as well. As I have indicated, I think that Brazilian artists have some unique contributions to offer a wider audience. For me it seems less necessary to enumerate what is and what is not Brazilian about their work (to identify a kind of essential ‘Brazilianness’ which seems somehow as difficult and as broad as saying what ‘Britishness’ might be), than it is to see what new developments have been achieved and how this adds to the languages of modernism and of contemporary art as they are seen today. If we think of Brazilian artists such as Mira Schendel or Helio Oticica – they are profoundly concerned with human experience and it is this that makes their works of universal significance.