by Jon Lackman | 14 December 2007 | Modern
The latest issue (n. 73) of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas is devoted to Brazil. Editor Nicolau Sevcenko writes that “Brazil is changing at a very fast pace … One of the best resources to face these turbulent new times and challenge their entropic trends is represented by the newly-expanded field of cultural interaction … The four authors [published in this issue] are by now widely acclaimed in Brazil, although still hardly known in the U.S.A. … [they] strive to assess the most significant threads of change that have occurred in Brazilian culture within the last fifty years …”
In “Scaling Down the Monumental: How Public Art Came to Inspire Community Action in Rio de Janeiro,” Paulo Knauss writes:
The craze of erecting statues became a tradition immediately in the context of the construction of the Nation-State, after Brazil’s independence in 1822 … monumental public sculpture was constructed according to a visually-elaborated narrative and complemented by a peculiar ritualization that promoted the secular cult of the nation … [it] helped mobilize an effective base capable of forging social ties that helped to build the discipline of civic pride and was capable of promoting the symbolic institution of society and defining the nation as a central subject in history.
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, this tradition of civic sculpture in Brazil lost relevance with the renovation of political order, the affirmation of democracy, and the recognition of social diversity … One can say that the role of urban images was being redefined in such a way that public art came to demarcate city territories and affirm identities, local government, and community powers. At that point, public art could be identified with the valorization of the diversity of urban experiences.
