1970s

Waldemar Cordeiro’s work shifts from his involvement with Concrete Art in São Paulo (of which he was one of the central artists, critics, and curators), to landscape design, a unique take on Pop Art through his “Popcretos,” and his final 1970s experiments with computer art. Cordeiro’s 1970s works were produced while Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship that was skilled and innovative in its manipulation of mass media to control society and manage dissent.

Through Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso to ancient Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder, scholar Luis Pérez-Oramas outlines and contextualizes Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s vast body of work. Part two of this essay positions Clark’s paintings as architectural explorations and living organisms.

In 1939, the South African artist Ernest Mancoba turned toward abstraction for the first time. Although this artistic development has been associated with Mancoba’s relationship to the CoBrA movement, Joshua Cohen argues that his embrace of abstraction also can be read as a turn away from the burdens of representation imposed by patrons upon a black South African artist.

Through Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso to ancient Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder, scholar Luis Pérez-Oramas outlines and contextualizes Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s vast body of work. Part one of this essay examines Clark’s early works as form-based and the underlying performative aspects of their construction.

Thoroughly committed to novelty, invention, and atomic and space-age practices, the Crystalist group proposed completely new directions for art in Sudan in the 1970s. Their manifesto published in a Khartoum newspaper within the artistic context of the time introduces the Crystalist themes of transparency and dualism.

The publication, Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (2018), edited by Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout, offers an unprecedented resource for the study of modernism: a compendium of critical art writings by twentieth-century Arab intellectuals and artists. The selection of texts—many of which appear for the first time in English—includes manifestos, essays, transcripts of roundtable discussions, diary entries, letters, and the guest-book comments including those featured here.

This series presents newly translated texts from the 1970s by Conceptual artists from Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia.

Juan Acha highlights the role of the artistic avant-garde in the achievement of a “cultural revolution,” or the awakening of a revolutionary spirit against the values of the bourgeoisie and the socio-economic and political structures established in the Third World.

The interview with Zarina considers the artist’s life and work as a bridge between New Delhi and New York.

Experimenting with ideas of disruption, participation, community, and institutional critique, Argentine artist Marta Minujín blindfolded and “kidnapped” fifteen audience members as part of Kidnappening.

Going beyond the context of modern Brazil and its experimental art scene, this essay traces a wide genealogy for his body of work, from local traditions such as samba to European intellectual figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche.

This series presents newly translated texts from the 1970s by Conceptual artists from Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia.