Art and Activism in Times of the Military Dictatorship: the work of Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio and Cildo Meireles
Name: RONEY JESUS RIBEIRO
Publication date: 27/06/2025
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ALMERINDA DA SILVA LOPES | Presidente |
| EVERTON DE OLIVEIRA MORAES | Examinador Interno |
| LÍVIA DE AZEVEDO SILVEIRA RANGEL | Examinador Externo |
| PEDRO ERNESTO FAGUNDES | Examinador Interno |
| RENATA GOMES CARDOSO | Examinador Externo |
Summary: This thesis aims to study the relationship between art and activism during Brazil's military dictatorship, emphasizing the politically engaged work of Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles during the so-called "years of lead" (1968-1974), in opposition to censorship and state repression. This is a qualitative research project, both theoretically and methodologically, based on the analysis of documentary sources such as articles, periodicals, catalogs, interviews, newspapers, and books on social and political history as well as contemporary art history. Additionally, selected artworks by the studied artists were analyzed both for their poetic and semantic meanings and from the perspective of the sociopolitical context in which they were produced. The chosen time frame begins when Manuel, Barrio, and Meireles entered the Brazilian art scene, participating in solo and group exhibitions, and extends to the late 1970s, a period during which they adopted increasingly politicized artistic practices that transcended the institutional space of art. These practices proposed actions, situations, insertions, and objects designed to disturb perception, language, and public order. In various ways, these artists challenged the boundaries between art and life, artwork and political action. Cildo Meireles, through his series Insertions into Ideological Circuits (1970), such as the Coca Cola bottles and stamped banknotes, appropriated mass circulation systems to disseminate critical messages against the regime, exploring the subversive potential of conceptual art. Artur Barrio, with works like Bloody Bundles (1970), created extreme sensory experiences that referenced the brutality of repression, shifting art into the realms of the body, blood, and street. Antonio Manuel, with performances such as The Body is the Work (1970), destabilized the boundaries between subject and object, museum and street, proposing the artist’s body as a site of resistance. Through strategies such as ephemerality, clandestinity, semiotic ambiguity, and the appropriation of non-artistic circuits, these artists constructed a poetics of insurgency, reconfiguring the role of the artist as a political agent. These works not only resist singular interpretations or institutional neutralization but also highlight the power of art as a form of symbolic guerrilla warfare, capable of opening fissures in the authoritarian fabric of society.
