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

By the early 1960s, Brazilian concrete poetry had gained a degree of international attention and helped give birth to an explosion of concrete poetry that involved such figures as John Cage, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Jackson Mac Low, Maurizio Nannucci, Dieter Roth, Daniel Spoerri and Emmett Williams. In 1965, an exhibition of concrete poetry, including some Brazilians, was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London [see A.i.A., Jan.-Feb. `66] and in 1967, the Fluxus-affiliated Something Else Press published An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, in which the Noigandres group figures large. Despite this initial wave of interest, Brazilian visual poetry never gained a foothold in the U.S. art world. No doubt, its hybrid identity as poetry and art made it hard to place, and the issue of translation was also a problem. Another factor was the 1964 military coup in Brazil, which inaugurated nearly two decades of political oppression.

Politics had a presence in a number of works on view in Austin, though sometimes a little deciphering was required. Paulo Miranda's silkscreen print takes the French flag and superimposes over it, in flowery script, the words "La Vie en," with "La Vie" over the blue band and "En" over the white one. Since the right-hand red band is empty, the work slyly invites the viewer to substitute for the "rose" (pink) that would normally complete the phrase, the word "rouge" (red), with its associations of Communism and anger. (Miranda actually submitted his design to a festival sponsored by the French Communist Party, but it was rejected.) In a collage by Falves Silva there are allusions to Brazil's landless farmers' movement and a famous Robin Hood-like figure from the northeast of the country. In Pignatori's concrete poem "Beba Coca Cola" from 1957, the Portuguese version of the famous soft-drink slogan "Drink Coca Cola" is submitted to subversive permutations and anagramatical transformations. The white-on-red composition has been accurately described by Haroldo de Campos as "a kind of anti-advertisement. Against the reification of the mind through slogans, demystifying of the `artificial paradise' promised by mass-persuasion techniques. Cloaca is made out of the same letters as Coca-Cola."

In the late `60s, a schism of sorts developed in the concrete poetry movement as some participants, and younger figures, turned to increasingly nonverbal, nontextual expression. Wisely adopting a nonpartisan curatorial approach, Vater included adherents of various points of views. A chief proponent of"process poetry," as the nontextual mode of Brazilian visual poetry is often called, is Wlademir Dias Pino, who was represented by extracts from a visual encyclopedia he has been compiling since 1974. Combining images from old engravings with more contemporary motifs, pages of Dias Pino's colorful, multilayered compendium were displayed in a floor-to-ceiling column. The process poet Alvaro de Sa, who makes schematic, comic-striplike drawings, cites semiotics as a focus of his work. Another off-shoot of concrete poetry was the "mimeographic generation," here represented by the front-page layouts of Glauco Mattoso, who from 1977 to 1981 self-published the Jornal Dobrabil (Foldable Newspaper), a poetic, typographically nutty parody of Brazilian newspapers.