From new figurations to expanded pop: the dialogue between brazilian and argentinian artists in global art pop exhibitions

• Grant number: 17/23149-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: August 01, 2018
• End date: September 30, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Art Fundamentals and Criticism
• Principal Investigator: Nelson Alfredo Aguilar
• Grantee: Alexandre Pedro de Medeiros
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The exhibitions International Pop (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2015-2016) and The World Goes Pop (Tate Modern, London, 2015-2016) reopened the discussion about pop art and presented it as a global phenomenon. These shows, in which 300 works by artists from more than 30 countries, such as Brazil and Argentina, were present, sought to introduce the public to the production of artists not previously included in the pop canon and to propose dialogues with them from of a common experience identified with the "return" to figuration, especially in painting, and the appropriation of images through the visual readymade, techniques and materials of the mass media and also objects of everyday life. This PhD research project aims to analyze these exhibitions as radiating nuclei of theoretical, historical and critical issues related to the artistic production of Brazilians and Argentines from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s that has been read in the key of pop, especially to those works participants of the shows. It will also seek to explore possible dialogues proposed within these among artists of these two specific nationalities, who have been since the 1960s, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the time and interests involved, related to a pop aesthetic. It is proposed to investigate these events as spaces for the circulation and fabrication of discourses about art, i. e., as mediation devices, that from the histories of the exhibitions can be understood as an occasion for the contact between artistic production and the public. From this, the spatial configurations in which this contact occurs taking into account the curatorial discourse that programs it are approached. Both global pop art shows try to account for the local specificities of each of the works selected by their curators, but in some moments we perceive a gap between what they would want to be (curatorial thesis) and what they went (aesthetic experience).