Vilém Flusser's proposals for the São Paulo Art Biennial: ethnography, primitive art, religiosity

• Grant number: 24/03070-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: April 01, 2025
• End date: March 31, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Eduardo Sterzi de Carvalho Júnior
• Grantee: Rafael Miguel Alonso Júnior
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In early 1972, Vilém Flusser (1920-1991) was invited to join the team responsible for organizing the São Paulo Art Biennial, which was in crisis. The challenge was to dispute a dispersed sensibility without incurring alienating falsehood. In theory, the philosopher starts from a simple premise: it is not art that is in crisis, but the way it communicates its concepts. Flusser's suggestion is to re-sacralize the relationship between the spectator and artwork by de-sacralizing the artwork. This is at this point that the so-called primitive forms of art come into question. According to Flusser, it's as if such objects could prove that another path of articulation, before the split between art and technique, was still possible. Having said that, the project proposes to go back a few decades (the first half of the 20th century, above all) in order to bet, in what is its main presumption, on a comparative reading between Flusser's texts and the texts of European ethnographers and art theorists (in particular, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Carl Einstein, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris). The working hypothesis is to critically postulate the similarity between the epistemological position of the ethnographer-traveler of the 1920s and 1930s faced to a non-Western peoples and objects and that of the spectator at a contemporary art exhibition in the 1970s. In order to achieve this objective, the project considers a specific historical moment, but potentially comprehensive in its imbrications. In the end, the spectator of the Biennial should, on entering the pavilion, be amazed again, just as the Europeans who "discovered" African and Oceanic art were enchanted. The research hopes that this discussion extends to the way we relate to artworks even today (visual, literary or performative) and allows us, within the framework of initiatives based on the so-called "ethnographic turn in the arts", to reflect, in perspective, on the discourse that is named decolonial.