”There is no single sequence or logic in my work”, says Paulo Bruscky in a conversation with Jonas (J) Magnusson in OEI # 60–61/2013: ”It’s like in a warehouse in my head, and everything has its own compartment. But I don’t stop to do one work or one artist’s book. I work in many registers, on several things at the same time.” This quote sums up the restless energy and multiple forms of expression of Paulo Bruscky, born 1949, who tomorrow will stage two Xerox performances at Andquestionsmark in Stockholm.
Bruscky who is based in Recife in northeast Brazil has since the sixties carried out artistic actions across the world by, among other things, corresponding within the international mail art movement, known in Brazil as “arte correio”. Mail art became – and still is, according to Bruscky – the only “uncontrollable medium”, a “movement without author”. By contrast, the Noigandres movement of concrete poetry in Brazil was claimed by self-designated leaders Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari.
Like many of the post-concrete generation, Bruscky’s work was largely an attempt to find ways out of the political turbulence following the Brazilian coup d’état. This was done with a balanced sense of humor, a strategy to surviving as an artist under political repression. Bruscky has over the years worked with artist’s books, performance and conceptual writing as well as xerography and Super 8mm film. Central to his work has been to work with new formats and strategies for distribution and circulation that elude surveillance, controll and censorship.
Kunstkritikk got in touch with Paulo Bruscky to ask a few questions before his visit to Stockholm. The interview was conducted in English and Portuguese, and is published here in English.
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Paulo, you have on many occasions emphasized the fundamental importance of the word in your practice, and the fact that you often start with a word. This led you to concrete poetry, but also to a body of work that Antonio Sergio Bessa talks about in terms of “dissemination of messages” (postcards, newspaper ads, billboards). Could you say something about these activities and how they related to the political situation in Brazil at the time?
The palavra [Portuguese for “word”], or rather the PaLarva – which is the embryo and more than words – is very important in my work, from the title of the work to the work itself: LÓGICACASO [word play: could mean case logic or perhaps logic].
I have always worked with diverse media as part of the International Mail Art Movement, which allowed me to use different media simultaneously. Artists from around the world came together. It is the first movement without nationality, since it already worked in networks, with cons/ciência da rede [word play that can refer to network science or network consciousness], anticipating the internet: InFormação Global [global information or the global in formation].
Since the mid-1960s, I have been working with poem/process and visual/sound poetry. In the 1970s, I initiated contact with members of Fluxus and Gutai, like Ken Friedman, Dick Higgins, Felipe Ehrenberg, Robin Crozier, Saburo Murakami and Shozo Shimamoto.
Paulo Bruscky, Xeroperformance, 1980.
You’ve also always stressed the importance of audience participation in your interventions. Could you expand a bit on how you see the role of the audience in your work?
I have always considered the participation of the public key in several of my actions: PúblicObrArtista [word play merging the terms public, work and artist]. During the period of the military dictatorship in Brazil, I was very much persecuted and imprisoned for three times as a result of my artistic practice. The artist has to be contemporary with his or her own time, oppose censorship, and not self-censor. I de-educated myself very early in relation to aesthetics and the utilitarian function of the idea: I see what others do not see.
As an outgrowth from your interests in transmission, you’ve also experimented with x-rays, radiographs, electroencephalograms and fax art, among many other formal and conceptual means. Would you say that there is a common agenda operating within all these variable forms of expressions and devices?
I work with Art in Transit in every sense. Among the various media that I use, I quote telexart (1973) and faxart (my initial transmission between Recife and São Paulo, in 1980, together with artist Roberto Sandoval, was the first in Brazil ). In these media, the work already then dematerialized and rematerialized in any part of the world, and in some of my proposals, the route itself was the work. Yet in the pesquisAções [“pesquisa” means research and “ações” actions] that I perform with an electroencephalogram since the 1970s, my thoughts are the work (telearte). They are printed tracings and brain sections: a record of the action, made by the machine. The artist must dissect the machine, as a medical student dissects a cadaver.
Working with Xeroxart or, as it variously has been labeled, copy art, electrostatic art, or xerography goes back to the 1960s. What attracted you to work with this in the first place?
In electrophotography (heliography, xerography and faxart), art is the copy and the copy con/forms the original. Among contemporary media, the one that best realizes Walter Benjamin’s 1936 text “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is the artistic xero/grafia [can mean “xerox copies” or “xerox spelling”]. The reasons for this range from the immediate multiplication of works, mostly without template, to the small costs of production and dissemination, especially via the circuit of Mail Art.
Could you say something more about what you intend to do Friday night at Andquestionmark, with your Xerox performance? What can we as participating audience expect from your intervention, with this “co-authorship with machines”?
As for the two xeroperformances that will take place at Andquestionmark, there will be, as always, the participation of the machine. Once I know my co-author, I combine with it, and make some de/constructions.
