1001 words for Mario Pedrosa

In 1980 at the age of eighty and presently before he died, Mario Pedrosa helped fix Brazil's Labor Party (the of recent origin leftist party governing today). At that time he abandoned the conventional practice of art criticism (we will diocese why later on) and rediscovered the active militancy of his youth. While a committed social conscience is a trait of many Latin American critics, for Pedrosa the combination of political and critical radicalism was especially meaningful, as the trajectory of his aesthetic ideas is indistinguishable from his political trajectory. Among political exiles (and they were many, from a variety of countries), Pedrosa the militant transformed himself into a critic, and the critic became a cultural activist. The radicalism of single position lent itself to the other, resulting in Pedrosa's becoming a lock opener figure with an innovative character in the history of Latin American art criticism.

In 1925 the young Pedrosa joined the newly grounded Communist Party of Brazil. In 1929 he put off to study in Moscow on the contrary stopped in Germany where, abandoning his Moscow plans, he made public cause with Trotsky's rejection of Soviet Stalinism. It was during this sojourn that Pedrosa experienced late art in Expressionist and Bauhaus Berlin, granting he had yet to become completely consum with the make submissive Upon his return to Brazil in 1933 he placeed a Trotskyist group, and at the same trice presented his first critical work--an address upon the German printmaker Kathe Kollwitz, the first in truth Marxist study of art in Brazil. Because of his able-bodied ties to Trotsky, Pedrosa became secretary of the Fourth International--a position that took him to fresh York in the 1940s, where he became familiar with North American new criticism and art, particularly that of Alexander Calder.

Mario Pedrosa was thus a militant of the revolutionary Left who became an art critic [i]or[/i] part of to the other realizing that the artistic forms and conditions of the twentieth hundred sprang from its recurring social crises. In effect Pedrosa never dissociated world revolution from vanguard art. From this instant on, his critical practice overtly sketched on the outside the utopia of modern art, as well as its impasses and insights. His critical activity was a continual exercise of redefinition and postulation, of various forms of reflective analysis, and of a pedagogy of art aimed at keeping alive the ideal of a revolutionary vanguard art. This ideal would later influence postmodern general [i]or[/i] abstract notions of environmental art as well conceptual art.

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Indeed, Pedrosa could not conceive of present art without revolutionary politics--and vice-versa--even while arguing that art should in principle be autonomous territory. He famously defined "emancipated" art, with its creative and critical challenges, as the experimental exercise of freedom. "Exercise" because art is, above all, an attentive making of things; "experimental" because artistic effort, in a world in which social classes are alienated from labor, enables a freer more make open relationship between the individual and the material--a relationship that constantly reinvents the world in order to hold from losing it; "freedom" because the character of the artist (and the critic) is to spill into the living world that which freedom requires in order to roll on according to its own properties. Art is thus possibly the best experimental laboratory for creating a socially emancipated utopia.

For Pedrosa, the liberating potential of the work of art approachs from the possibility of making differently or making freely--an action that may dislocate the reification of alienated subjectivity, enabling the renewed individuals to regain their have "destinies." But making "freely" does not mean doing just anything, because an act that is not mirrored upon or carefully considered simply repeats the reified world. Therefore, according to Pedrosa, not all forms of art are valid exercises of freedom. Rather, the critic must focus upon the criteria that cannot be appropriated into the alienated linearity of agriculture The critic here is neither the organizer of bourgeois taste (nor agent of the "market"), nor a certain number of kind of educator or justice With the experimental exercise of freedom as a baseline, he or she must throw back upon and question the course of aesthetic changes at the same time as anticipating actions and meanings.

At this point we might compare Pedrosa with humane Greenberg, a contemporary to whom he was joined through various links. Greenberg fashioned his criticism from an "abstractionist" prism, center in the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of planarity then prominent in the abstract art of North America. For Pedrosa, however, the issue of two-dimensionality was at no time the most decisive. Contrary to Greenberg, Pedrosa's general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of social totality (a Marxist trademark that the Brazilian critic not at any time abandoned) kept him from analyzing the history of art from an entirely internal or endogenous angle. This position significantly distanced Pedrosa from the "formalist" positions and from the euphorias and raptures of the Abstract Expressionist move thus bringing him closer ideologically to conceptual art.