Christopher Dunn: Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (2001)

“In the late 1960s, Brazilian artists forged a watershed cultural movement known as Tropicália. Music inspired by that movement is today enjoying considerable attention at home and abroad. Few new listeners, however, make the connection between this music and the circumstances surrounding its creation, the most violent and repressive days of the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. With key manifestations in theater, cinema, visual arts, literature, and especially popular music, Tropicália dynamically articulated the conflicts and aspirations of a generation of young, urban Brazilians.

Focusing on a group of musicians from Bahia, an impoverished state in northeastern Brazil noted for its vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture, Christopher Dunn reveals how artists including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Tom Zé created this movement together with the musical and poetic vanguards of São Paulo, Brazil’s most modern and industrialized city. He shows how the tropicalists selectively appropriated and parodied cultural practices from Brazil and abroad in order to expose the fissure between their nation’s idealized image as a peaceful tropical “garden” and the daily brutality visited upon its citizens.”

Publisher University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2001
ISBN 0807849766, 9780807849767
276 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (82 MB)

Clemens Apprich, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Florian Cramer, Hito Steyerl: Pattern Discrimination (2018)

“Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation—in a digital world, identity politics is pattern discrimination. It is by recognizing patterns in input data that Artificial Intelligence algorithms create bias and practice racial exclusions thereby inscribing power relations into media. How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs?”

Publisher meson press, Lüneburg, in collaboration with the University of Minnesota Press, 2018
In Search of Media series
CC-BY-NC 4.0 International License
ISBN 9781517906450
xii+123 pages

Reviews: Nicola Bozzi (Theory, Culture & Society, 2019), Ulrike Wirth (rezens.tfm, 2020, DE).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF

Umbrella: The Anthology, 1978-1998 (1999)

Essential anthology of writings from 1978-1998 published in the periodical Umbrella.

“It is hard to believe that more than twenty years have passed since the first issue of Umbrella was issued as a fledgling newsletter catering to the ever-changing vicissitudes of contemporary visual art, especially that of artist books, mail art, video art, rubber-stamps, audio art, and everything else that was considered not very important in the realm of the nearly new ‘market’ which came with the eighties and the boom in contemporary and modern art. … Many of these articles respond to a conference, symposium, a book art exhibition, all referring to date-sensitive events. But in a strange way, it also marks a trace of a historic moment, one in which there was a vitality and an energy, in which book publishers, resource collectors, multi-faceted artists, and curators did whatever seemed right at the moment. Many of our colleagues are gone, the publishers have quit their businesses, and alternative spaces and foundations which nourished their work are no longer extant. So read these chapters as if you were reading ‘you are there’ historic moments, traces of memory, and the markers in the history of alternative in the contemporary art world of the past twenty years.” — Judith A. Hoffberg (1934-2009) from book’s foreword.

Contributions by Clive Phillpot, Ken Friedman, Ita Aber, Walter Askin, Anna Banana, Mariona Barkus, Guy Bleus, Sas Colby, Patricia Collins, Jules Engel, J.C. Gagnon, William Harroff, Dick Higgins, E.F. Higgins III, Ruggero Maggi, Janet Pyle, Marilyn Rosenberg and Miriam Schaer.

Articles about and interviews with Ulises Carrión, Warja Lavater, Paul Zelevansky, Phil Dadson, Rod Summers, Maurizio Nannucci, Klaus Groh, Bern Porter, Wolf Vostell, Kevin Osborn, Juliao Sarmento, Paula Claire, Angela Pahler, Peter Kusterman, Leavenworth Jackson, Richard Kostelanetz, Elaine Langerman, Lawrence Weiner, George Maciunas, Jean Brown, and Judith A. Hoffberg.

Edited by Judith A. Hoffberg
Publisher Umbrella Editions, Santa Monica, CA, 1999
ISBN 0963504223, 9780963504227
164 pages

WorldCat

PDF (58 MB)