Date:
Location:
"Predicated Internationalism and the Brazilian Case"
Speaker:
Caroline Jones, Professor of Art History, Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Contact:
Heather Conrad
hconrad@wcfia.harvard.edu
Chair:
Panagiotis Roilos, Faculty Associate. George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies, Department of the Classics; Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
Abstract:
The Sao Paulo biennial (1951+) first invented the idea of replicating the biennial form beyond Venice, and then audaciously planted it in the Southern Hemisphere, offering a privileged case for demonstrating what I call “predicated internationalism”–in which the dominant center and its obedient peripheries determine certain linguistic constructions, such as a “Brazilian Rodin,” or “Brazilian modernism.” Yet the moment such conjunctions are drawn together to enforce an international art world system of values, the force of cultural difference begins working to pull them apart. Drawing on unpublished research and the arguments in my forthcoming book, The Global Work of Art, this talk first examines how such predication happens (through the discourse machines of art history, particularly the textual and spatial operations of the world’s fairs), and then digs into the extraordinary developments inaugurated by São Paulo cosmopolitans during the Cold War. Within two or three iterations of their Eurocentric biennial, what “the international modern” could be was hybridized in São Paulo through the theory and practice of antropofagia–a globally-minded Brazilian theorization of how colonial or imperial forms can be devoured and metabolized by the “Native,” local Other.
