The public and the private in short circuit

crossings between art and architecture in Brazil in the late 1960s

Abstract

In the late 1960s, the peak of repression in the period of the military dictatorship, artistic and architectural productions in Brazil reached a unique radicality. The Brutalist architecture of the so-called “Escola Paulista”, led by Vilanova Artigas, started to carry out austere and obscure residential works, with little intimacy and privacy, conceived as if they were public facilities. At the same time, the ‘carioca’ visual artist Hélio Oiticica begins to build his environmental works, in which the inclusion of the participant-spectator body promotes a great subjectivation of the public spaces (museums and galleries) in which it is installed. Taking these two trajectories comparatively, we realize that the main lines of artistic and architectural productions in Brazil follow opposite paths. On the other hand, they are equivalent in the sense of tensing the line of separation between the public and private spheres.