Antonio Sergio Bessa – författare

"Undoing is just as much a democratic right as doing."---Gordon Matta-ClarkThis revealing book looks at the groundbreaking work of Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978), whose socially conscious practice blurred the boundaries between contemporary art and architecture. After completing a degree in architecture at Cornell University, Matta-Clark returned to his home city of New York. There he employed the term “anarchitecture,” combining “anarchy” and “architecture,” to describe the site-specific works he initially realized in the South Bronx.The borough’s many abandoned buildings, the result of economic decline and middle-class flight, served as Matta-Clark’s raw material. His series Cuts dissected these structures, performing an anatomical study of the ravaged urban landscape. Moving from New York to Paris with Conical Intersect, a piece that became emblematic of artistic protest, Matta-Clark applied this same method to a pair of 17th-century row houses slated for demolition as a result of the Centre Pompidou’s construction. This compelling volume grounds Matta-Clark’s practice against the framework of architectural and urban history, stressing his pioneering activist-inspired approach, as well as his contribution to the nascent fields of social practice and relational aesthetics.Published in association with The Bronx Museum of the ArtsExhibition Schedule:Bronx Museum of the Arts(11/08/17-04/08/18)Jeu de Paume, Paris(06/04/18-09/23/18)Kumu Kunstimuuseum, Tallinn, Estonia(03/01/19-08/04/19)Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA(09/12/19-12/15/2019)

“What I want to do is code-switch. To have there be layers of history and politics, but also this heady, arty stuff—inside jokes, black humor—that you might have to take a while to research if you want to really get it.”—Sanford BiggersSanford Biggers (b. 1970) is a Harlem-based artist working in various media including painting, sculpture, video, and performance. He describes his practice as “code-switching”—mixing disparate elements to create layers of meaning—to account for his wide-ranging interests. This catalogue focuses on a series of repurposed quilts (many made in the 19th century) that embodies this interest in mixture. Informed by the significance of quilts to the Underground Railroad, Biggers transforms the quilts into new works using materials such as paint, tar, glitter, and charcoal to add his own layers of codes, whether they be historical, political, or purely artistic. Insightful essays survey Biggers’s career, his art in relation to music, and the history upon which the series draws. Also featured is a short yet powerful graphic essay by an award-winning illustrator that introduces the layered meanings inherent in the art and craft of quilting.Published in association with The Bronx Museum of the ArtsExhibition Schedule:The Bronx Museum of the Arts(September 9, 2020–January 24, 2021)  California African American Museum, Los Angeles(July 28, 2021–January 23, 2022)Speed Art Museum, Louisville(March 18–June 26, 2022)

A generous introduction to one of the key literary figures to emerge from Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century, this book offers English-speaking readers an ample selection of this prodigious writer's celebrated poetry and widely influential critical work. As a poet and as a cofounder of the renowned group Noigandres. Haroldo de Campos made a unique and substantial contribution to the theory and practice of experimental writing, particularly the form known as concrete poetry, and to the Latin American avant-garde as a whole. These contributions, acclaimed worldwide by figures such as Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, Octavio Paz, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, include poetry selections ranging from de Campos' early work before concretism through his most recent production, and theoretical texts that trace his evolution as a critic from an early interest in baroque and modernist writers to his development of an innovative model for reading, translating, and writing. This second, critical section of the book includes de Campos' encounters with the tasks of translating and reading some of the most important texts of Eastern and Western culture - from Ecclesiastes to the No play Hagoromo, from Dante to Paz - thus charting a genealogy of modern literature.

Oyvind Fahlstrom (1928-76), the Brazilian-born Swedish multi-artist, is one of the mid-twentieth century's most intriguing cultural figures. His work, as profoundly political as it is aesthetic, spans two tumultuous decades in the avant-garde world and comprises concrete poetry (his own innovation), manifestos, plays, performance, filmmaking, paintings, multiple prints, sculpture and installations. Initially poorly received in Sweden and little appreciated in the English-speaking world, Fahlstrom's role as one of the creators of concrete poetry is now increasingly recognized worldwide.The first study to give this major twentieth-century artist his due, this book serves as both an informative and entertaining introduction to Oyvind Fahlstrom and a valuable critical analysis of some of his most important works. ""Oyvind Fahlstrom: The Art of Writing"" focuses on how Fahlstrom's early experiments with concrete poetry influenced his later work in the visual arts and offers a close reading of the seminal work ""Bord"", the series of paintings ""Ade-Ledic-Nander"", the radio play ""Birds in Sweden"", the interactive painting ""The Painting"" (based on Natalie Sarraute's novel ""Le planetarium""), and the series of game-paintings based on the board game Monopoly. Bessa's ""Oyvind Fahlstrom"" is without precedent or parallel as an overview of Fahlstrom's art, an assessment of his place in twentieth-century cultural history, and an examination of trends and movements, such as concretism, in which he figures large.

Beyond the Supersquare: Art and Architecture in Latin America after Modernism, which developed from a symposium presented by the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2011, showcases original essays by distinguished Latin American architects, historians, and curators whose research examines architecture and urban designpractices in the region during a significant period of the twentieth century. Drawing from the exuberant architectural projects of the 1940s to the 1960s, as well as from critically engaged artistic practices of the present day, the essays in this collection reveal how the heroic visions and utopian ideals popular in architectural discourse during the modernist era bore complicated legacies for Latin America—the consequences of which are evident in the vastly uneven economic conditions and socially disparate societies found throughout the region today.The innovative contributions in this volume address how the modernist movement came into being in Latin America and compellingly explore how it continues to resonate in today's cultural discourse. Beyond the Supersquare takes themes traditionally examined within the strict field of urbanism and architecture and explores them against a broader range of disciplines, including the global economy, political science, gender, visual arts, philosophy, and urban planning.Containing a breadth of scholarship, this book offers a compelling and distinctive view of contemporary life in Latin America. Among the topics explored are the circulation of national cultural identities through architectural media, the intersection of contemporary art and urban social politics, and the recovery of canonically overlooked figures in art and architectural histories, such as Lina Bo Bardi and Joao Filgueiras Lima ("Lele") from Brazil, Juan Legarreta of Mexico, and Henry Klumb in Puerto Rico.

Winner, 2022 Association of University Presses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Scholarly Illustrated Category A significant contribution on the development and aftermath of post–World War II Concretism in BrazilForm and Feeling features a collection of essays by noted scholars exploring the sensorial, experience-based, and participatory practices pioneered in the 1950s by artists and poets such as Flávio de Carvalho, Ivan Serpa, Hélio Oiticica, Haroldo de Campos, Mary Vieira, Lygia Pape, Anna Maria Maiolino, Lygia Clark, Waly Salomão, and Emil Forman, among many others. Fourteen thought-provoking essays examine how many of their strategies constituted a pertinent critique of the country's wide-ranging embrace of Eurocentric modernity while anticipating a number of practices prevalent among contemporary artists today—namely, the rise of art as social practice, the embrace of pedagogical concerns by artists, and relational aesthetics.The fourteen essays collected in this volume consider the ramifications of modernist abstraction in the second half of the twentieth century and contribute to a growing academic field in postwar Brazilian and Latin American art history. Contributions to this anthology examine the development of modernist ideas that flourished in Brazil during a controversial period interspersed by dictatorial regimes. The global aspect of Brazilian art is especially evident in these studies, presenting the relational complexity of their subjects as transcultural, transnational actors while simultaneously contributing to a growing, increasingly nuanced understanding of visual and material culture, performance, and criticism in Brazil.Form and Feeling continues the important process of re-analyzing the intersections of Concretism and Neo concretism, arguing for greater affinities between the primary and lesser-known cast of characters while equally redistributing the strict geographical divisions of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. This anthology broadly situates this extraordinary period of artistic experimentation in direct relationship to contemporary factors, such as psychoanalysis, educational systems, poetry, politics, and feminism. It crafts innovative relationships about the constructive hierarchies of form and space, poetry and painting, and mathematics and philosophy, thus engendering new positions for a deeply ensconced period in Brazilian history.

The Noigandres group was one of the key movements in Brazilian modernism. Bessa’s account works through the specific poetic innovations that are the hallmark of the concrete poetics the group developed. These include their unprecedented reevaluation of Brazilian literary history, their distinctive exploration of graphic space inspired by emerging studies on cybernetics, and their embrace of a range of Modernist traditions, from Mallarmé’s vision of poetry as a constellation of words, to Joyce’s concept of the "verbivocovisual," to Pound’s writings about the Chinese ideogram.Bessa’s account begins with the core traits of concrete poetry developed by the Noigandres poets throughout the 1950s (the so-called "heroic phase" of concretism) and continues to the poetic experiments the group undertook after the military coup of 1964 in Brazil. The book concludes with translations of key primary texts: essays by the poets Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos and correspondence between the three poets and Ezra Pound.

The Noigandres group was one of the key movements in Brazilian modernism. Bessa’s account works through the specific poetic innovations that are the hallmark of the concrete poetics the group developed. These include their unprecedented reevaluation of Brazilian literary history, their distinctive exploration of graphic space inspired by emerging studies on cybernetics, and their embrace of a range of Modernist traditions, from Mallarmé’s vision of poetry as a constellation of words, to Joyce’s concept of the "verbivocovisual," to Pound’s writings about the Chinese ideogram.Bessa’s account begins with the core traits of concrete poetry developed by the Noigandres poets throughout the 1950s (the so-called "heroic phase" of concretism) and continues to the poetic experiments the group undertook after the military coup of 1964 in Brazil. The book concludes with translations of key primary texts: essays by the poets Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos and correspondence between the three poets and Ezra Pound.