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.This, ofcourse, did not preclude the fact of a subaltern condition of which theywere clearly aware and that informed too their cultural practices, anadversity that, to Oiticica, was foundational to their distinctive artisticformulations and unfinished cultural negotiations.I ve attempted here to delineate an argument in the name of a productivedialogue on the widespread assumption that Western art, the modern,modernity, postmodern, postmodernity, and contemporaneity (the list cango on) is a delimited concept or paradigm whose locus is a center of politicaland economic power whose institutions coalesce around certain narrativesof canon formation.I ve spoken specifically of a situation that is generallycontemporary with what American critics liked to called in the 1960s advanced art.But what interests me here, more than the chronology, isthe complexity of an operation that is construed in relation to a universalhorizon, say the modern, the experimental, the avant-garde, but closelytied to specific necessities and local concerns and thus, largely because of avery different institutional and political makeup, much less compartmen-talized or prone to congealed narratives: Instead we find a fluidity and pli-ancy of discourses and practices that had to cope with a sense of urgencyderived from all-over present contradictory and hybrid conditions.AsOiticica firmly concluded in his New Objectivity essay: Of adversity welive, and the result of his and Pedrosa s acting upon this adversity was nota borrowed modernism or postmodernism tweaked here and there toupdate the cultural production of the country but a profound reflection onthe means and sites of artistic production, the circulation and reception ofaesthetic practices, the institutions of art, and the relation of all of this tothe social, political, and economic situation of the country.Of course, contradictory conditions are not unique to the decenteredlocales of the world (just pervasive), and thus one of Brazil s cultural lessons Of Adversity we Live! 57has been to derive pleasure and knowledge from those conditions.An artistsuch as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, who grew up in la Villeneuve, a neigh-borhood in Grenoble designed in the early 1970s by L AUA under the aegis ofprogressive urban ideals and with ambiguous results, has found in Brazilianculture and history plenty of material to engage critically the ideological andmaterial conflicts of modernity.A series of works developed under theexploratory concept of Tropical Modernity deploys props and objects,images and sounds, which attempt to evoke unique environmental situationsand ponder on the identity of a place.No doubt Oiticica s Tropicalia, pre-sented in 1967 at the aforementioned exhibition, is for Gonzalez-Foerstera key influence.Another European artist, Marine Huggonier, explores, inher parsimonious film Traveling Amazonia (2006), the unfinished modernityof Brazil.Here, a crew of local workers constructs a dolly to make the cameraroll in a last and unrevealing shot of the road that was to become in the 1970sthe unrealized trans-Amazonian highway, the vastness of the landscape chal-lenging any possibility of its representation.Francis Alÿs s recurrent and met-aphorical returns to the question of modernity, as so vividly manifest in hisabsurdist films and videos in which the old and the new, craft and technology,reality and dream juxtapose, also deal with a desire to think the relationshipof an imaginary periphery to an imaginary center, to unpack and repackthe objects and discourses of a landscape that is perceived as failure but thathe finds pregnant with poetic and affective matter.But the relationship between the specific modern/postmodern Brazilianconfiguration that I ve delineated above and contemporary art, as increas-ingly acknowledged, can also be diagnosed in a tendency toward collectiveand participatory practices for which agency, subjectivity, and affect havebecome areas of paramount concern.The public projects of Marjetica Potrcdedicated to exploring and recreating low-tech, informal, and self-sustainableurban solutions and the bartering exchanges that open up the possibility ofalternative aesthetic and economic intersections in the work of CarolinaCaycedo owe much to the predictions and conceptualizations of Pedrosaand Oiticica in the 1960s.The same can be said about the careful usage ofsite, the productive reflections on the legacies of constructivism, and thehistorical archive of distinct artists such as the duo Dolores Zinny and JuanMaidagan and the younger Alessandro Balteo.These artists are committedto investigating the entangled trajectories of aesthetic form and institu-tional history to tease the past, our memories of the past, and its currencyin the present
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