The Limits of Co-Creation: The Reception of New Criticism in 1970s Brazil

• In Event: Art, Arquivo, Activism

Abstract

In 1970, the Brazilian art critic Frederico Morais proposed a new form of art criticism, based on the assembly of visual and sonic montage rather than the written word. By way of slides synchronized with sound recordings, the art critic hoped to engage artworks as “co-creator” rather than “judge.” On the heels of the Brazilian publication of Roland Barthes’s 1966 Critique et Vérité that same year, Morais named his new form of criticism “Nova Crítica.” In Barthes’s influential defense of New Criticism, he had argued that literature and criticism were both investigations into language by language; the critic was not to translate the body of literature into a supposedly more objective language, but to further its inquiry with a new act of writing. Yet if literary critics and writers were united by language, how would the art critic, further an artistic inquiry that operated beyond the discursive? Where Barthes could effortlessly notice a correspondence between his act of writing and the writing of literature, Morais had to construct this commonality with a new medium, and it was in this search of this connective medium that he turned to slide projection. This paper analyzes two moments of reception that tested the limits of co-creation between artist and critic as a cross-disciplinary “diálogo de saberes:” first, Morais’s extension of Barthes’s concept of New Criticism beyond the limits of discursive, and second, the ambivalent reception of Morais’s project by artists engaging situational and media based practices.

Author

• Sonia de Laforcade