O Igual e o Diferente: The Culture of the Other ca. 1970

• In Event: Arte y cultura visual de los años sesenta y setenta 1

Abstract

What does it mean to chart cultural, aesthetic, and political affinities by way of images? This paper investigates conceptual connections between three visual treatments of the Brazilian carnival bloco Cacique de Ramos produced c. 1970. The first, a collage displayed at the Cacique de Ramos headquarters in the working class district of Ramos, Rio de Janeiro, juxtaposes photographs of the carnival bloco with ethnographic photographs of Amerindian and African groups, thereby charting explicit affinities between the tribal character of indigenous practices and those of Cacique de Ramos, whose characteristic black-and-white costumes and seal were inspired, in a twist of transnational popular culture, by Hollywood images of Native Americans. The second, a set of images compiled by curator Kynaston McShine for the catalogue of his epochal 1970 exhibition Information at the MoMA, places an image of a Cacique de Ramos procession alongside Man Ray’s photograph of dust accumulating on Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass and another of the scar across Andy Warhol’s chest. A third set of images, constitutes a photographic series by the Brazilian artist Carlos Vergara, who between 1972 and 1974 repeatedly photographed the bloco as a quasi-ethnographic investigation of self and other. Drawing from a text by the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro written at Vergara’s request, I consider how Cacique de Ramos’s “passion for the same” offered a model of ecstatic, anarchic deindividuation defined not by distinction, but by the absorption of figure into ground.

Author

• Irene V Small, Princeton University