In concrete language: Brazil's thriving visual poetry tradition was the focus of a recent exhibition in Austin. Along with concrete poems, the show included videos, sound pieces and an installation

Art in America, May, 2002 by Raphael Rubinstein

Over the last decade or so, we in the U.S. have been learning more and more about the impressive achievements of post-World War II Brazilian art. Names that few would have recognized in the 1980s--Helio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel--are now common currency among critics and curators, while a younger generation of Brazilian artists such as Adriana Varejao, Ernesto Neto and Tunga have found favor among galleries and collectors. Despite this Amazonian influx, which is part of the ongoing internationalization of contemporary art, there are still substantial gaps in our knowledge of Brazil's 20th-century artistic record. One of the most significant of these is the innovative concrete poetry that has flourished there since the early 1950s. Employing eccentric typography and a playfully deconstructive approach to language, Brazilian concrete poetry is intensely visual, a vigorous hybrid of literature and art that avails itself of many other mediums besides the printed page.

Happily, a step toward filling in this blind spot was made recently in an extensive exhibition on the subject at the Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin, Tex. (The only previous U.S. exhibition of Brazilian concrete poetry that I'm aware of was in 1989, when the University of Florida in Gainesville mounted a show of examples from the Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry.) Participants in "Brazilian Visual Poetry," as the Austin show was titled, ranged from pioneers of concrete poetry such as the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos to practitioners of the collage-based "process poetry" that arose in the late 1960s to young language-oriented Brazilian artists. The exhibition was organized by Regina Vater, a Brazilian-born, Austin-based artist who did an impressive job of assembling contributions by some 50 artists, as well as creating an installation work of her own that enriched and illuminated the show.

The works on view utilized a striking variety of mediums: there were typographical compositions, of course, but also drawings, collages, artist's books, photographs, sculptures, videos and sound pieces. Given the museum's limited space (at present it occupies the ground floor of a modestly sized building in downtown Austin, but will soon be expanding), this made for a crowded show. Still, there was room for a few larger-scale works, most spectacularly, an approximately 11-by-22-foot mural version of Augusto de Campo's 1975 concrete poem "O Pulsar" (The Pulsar). The brief Portuguese text (which can be translated as "wherever you are in Mars or Eldorado open the window and see the pulsar nearly mute embrace of light years that no sun warms and the dark echo forgets") is presented in uppercase, Art-Deco, white-on-black letters with every "E" replaced by a five-pointed star and every "O" by a large dot. In addition, the words are widely spaced-out and set to form a flaglike rectangle. With its decorative substitutions, the poem challenges viewers to work out its code. The process of decoding is not very difficult (at least for Portuguese speakers), but it inevitably involves you in the play of symbols, letters and empty spaces, and, along the way, in the celestial experience that de Campo seeks to convey. Among the work's subtleties is the way that some stars and dots seem to float off by themselves, a result of the fact that the poem's ur text includes the one-letter Portuguese words e (and) and o (the).

Accompanying the Pulsar mural was a video version of the poem in which the symbol-studded words pulsed on the screen one after another to a chiming vocalization by famed Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso. As well as offering a hypnotic listening and viewing experience, this conjunction of concrete poem, video and musical setting highlighted two unusual qualities of Brazil's visual poetry. First, it was a good example of the willingness of poet-artists such as Augusto de Campo to adapt their texts in various mediums. (A poem that might have originally appeared on the page of a book can be re-created in mural form, as an animated video, as a laser hologram-an unusual medium de Campo has explored--or on a Web site.) Second, the Pulsar video signaled the close relations between the concrete poets and the stars of Brazil's sophisticated popular-music scene. A few examples: in 1991, Veloso recorded an excerpt from a long poetic text by Haroldo de Campos; Augusto de Campos has collaborated with singer Tom Ze; Arnaldo Antunes, another participant in this show, was a member of the Brazilian rock band Os Titas.

It's hard to imagine such collaborations as the Veloso-de Campos projects occurring in the United States, where concrete poetry, when it is thought about at all, is marginal even in the realms of literature and art. In Brazil, however, concrete poetry has a much more central place in the culture. It first appeared in the mid 1950s, when the de Campos brothers, along with Decio Pignatari and a Swiss-Bolivian poet named Eugen Gomringer (they called themselves the Noigandres group, after a mysterious Provencal word that had been noted by Ezra Pound), began advocating a more visual approach to poetry through poems and manifestos. Their early work had affinities with other contemporaneous instances of "concrete" expression, including the musique concrete of Pierre Boulez, the art concrete of Max Bill and literary work of artist Oyvind Fahlstrom, but it was also closely connected to Brazilian cultural history, in particular to modernist Brazilian writers and artists of the 1920s.