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CLOCKWISE from left: Paulo Bruscky’s ‘Homage to Klebinov II’ (1995), ‘Brazil torture never more’ (1988) and a photo of the artists’ staged funeral in 1971.
Museum brings Bruscky to the Bronx Provocative Brazilian probes meaning and role of art By Shant Shahrigian sshah@riverdalepress.com
“A
rt is our only hope” is the stark sentence that greets visitors to the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ new exhibit of contemporary Brazilian artist Paolo Bruscky’s work. Two rooms full of collages, photos, videos and objets trouvés provide plenty of fodder to mull over the meaning and connotations of the provocative phrase. Mr. Bruscky championed art during a time of political and cultural repression in his home country. Brazil’s 1964-to-85 military dictatorship committed widespread human rights abuses during its reign, including the violent persecution of dissidents. In this climate, Mr. Bruscky, who was born in 1949, made daring public performances and new media works intended to challenge viewers about freedom of expression and the nature of art. Early in his career, Mr. Bruscky printed the phrase titling his current show on a billboard outside of his hometown, Recife, in northeastern Brazil. In a similar public gesture in 1978, he walked around the same town wearing a board with the questions, “What is art? What is it for?” Photos of both the billboard and the performance kick off the Bronx Museum’s exhibit. It is hard to grasp the significance of those displays with the aid of black-and-white snapshots alone. But their inclusion helps make the show an informative introduction to the artist, who started to gain fame at home and abroad in recent years. Violence seems to pervade
works of Mr. Bruscky’s throughout his career — violence to innocent Brazilians and to the psyche of the artist, who inserts images of himself in many of his pieces. The 1988 collage “Brazil torture never more” bluntly recalls the violence of the regime with pictures of contorted skeletons and photo negatives of unnamed men and women. The silence of the repressed is provocatively on display in “Personas,” a collection of wallet-sized photos with the faces disarmingly removed, leaving only foreheads attached to necks. The citizenry
becomes a voiceless mass whose disjointed hair and collars endow an eerily mass-produced look to the piece. Mr. Bruscky’s 1982 “Xeroperformances” are among the many works in which the artist is the center of attention. After receiving a grant to work with Xerox in New York City, Mr. Bruscky made copies of his face and hands for peculiar works with phrases like “art without an original” on them. For a series of images called “Bruscky in Brusque,” the artist, whose father migrated from Belarus and whose mother is
from Brazil, asserts his ties to the country of his birth. Some of the images show Mr. Bruscky’s hand and footprints stamped onto maps of Brusque, a small town whose name the artist believes is possibly connected to his own, according to Bronx Museum of Arts curator Antonio Sergio Bessa.
O
ther images feature a cutout of the lanky artist with a memorably expressionless face imposed on the Brusque town map. Mr. Bruscky’s large beard and balding crown are a familiar im-
Photo by Marisol Díaz
FROM left to right, ‘Tests’ (2008) and ‘I’m pickling myself’ (1974). Both are loans from Galeria Nara Roesler in São Paulo, Brazil.
age by the end of the exhibit. The second room includes pieces he composed while working at a hospital to support himself. Those employ electrocardiograms of his brainwaves as well as X-rays of his skull. There is also a video of Mr. Bruscky’s staged funeral in 1971, which the authorities shut down partway through. The second room of the exhibit bolsters a suspicion raised by the first; with his name and visage occupying such a prominent place in his work, has Mr. Bruscky taken the postmodern artist’s introspective leaning to the level of narcissism? It may be that after dictatorship essentially reduced the sensitive Mr. Bruscky’s ability to make art to simply crying out the word – a number of his works bare a Portuguese and English stamp saying, “Today art is this expressed” – the self-conscious habit stuck and Mr. Bruscky became fixated on himself. Yet from another point of view, Mr. Bruscky is a gadfly and poet of his city — Recife. Mr. Bessa hopes the artist’s experience of dictatorship will resonate with Bronxites who can remember the tumult of the 1970s. Though a continent apart, the two places were once plagued by an atmosphere palpable with the potential for violence that pushed art far away from people’s mind during the daily struggle to survive. Paulo Bruscky: Art is Our Last Hope is open until Sunday, Feb. 9, 2014. Admission to the Bronx Museum of the Arts is free. Mr. Bessa says Mr. Bruscky will be at a museum open house on Wednesday, Oct. 20.
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