The Mathematical Poetics of Wlademir Dias-Pino. Prehistory of the Present

• In Event: The Expansion of the Arts III: Mediums and Materials

Abstract

Recently art institutions and scholars have revisited Brazilian concretism and neoconcretism: the 2012 São Paulo Biennial resuscitated Waldemar Cordeiro, echoed by an Itaú Cultural 2013 retrospective of his work; MoMA held a retrospective of Lygia Clark (2014) and the New York’s Jewish Museum restaged its 1966 Primary Structures show (2014); several new monographs on Brazilian art are out or forthcoming. The interest owes in part to Brazil’s increasing global power, in part to a boom in Latin American art, in part to rethinking genealogies of modernism or antecedents for participatory art. It also owes to current interest in the digital era’s textual and coded support for images, and the simultaneously imagistic nature of text. Concrete and neoconcrete art in this regard uniquely emerged out of the language/visual art nexus, indebted to poetics (notably Ferreira Gullar’s writings) and to information and code theory (Abraham Moles; cybernetics): in short, to language. Wlademir Dias-Pino is perhaps the most influential and—with the notable exception of critic Moacy Cirne—the least celebrated figure in this history. Dias-Pino not only created mathematic poems in the early 1950s but spearheaded the poema/processo movement in the 1970s that followed concretism. This talk explores Dias-Pino’s early mathematical poetry from 1953, his 1956 combinatorial book “A Ave,” which influenced artists Lygia Pape, Neide Dias de Sá and others, his little-known compendium of Brazilian logotypes, his visual encyclopedia, and an interview with the artist in 2013, to suggest his uncommon relevance to contemporary concerns.

Author

• Rachel L Price, Princeton University