Aesthetics and Politics: Community-Based Art in Brazil

This dissertation analyzes large-scale and multifaceted artworks created in 2008 by the Dutch artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn (Haas & Hahn), the French street artist JR, and the Brazilian mixed-media artist Vik Muniz. Each of these artists were drawn specifically to Brazil’s second largest city, Rio de Janeiro, and decided to create large-scale works of art in informal housing settlements known as favelas with the help of local community members. In August 2008, photographs of women’s faces and eyes from Rio de Janeiro’s oldest favela, Morro da Providência, were enlarged and pasted on building façades and rooftops in the community, creating a hillside of women staring out at Brazil’s Marvelous City. Two months later, Haas & Hahn completed a nine-month-long project entitled Rio Cruzeiro, which resulted in a 2,000 square meter mural of Japanese-style carp fighting the current of a roaring river rushing down the hillside in the favela of Vila Cruzeiro. Around this same time, Vik Muniz constructed seven large-scale assemblages on the ground from discarded materials with the help of catadores (pickers of recyclable materials) from the Jardim Gramacho landfill and neighboring favela, which he photographed and entitled Pictures of Garbage. Although the works by Haas & Hahn, JR, and Muniz I study are often understood within existing frameworks for community-based art, I argue that this framework does not fully account for what these works are trying to achieve in both political and aesthetic terms. Specifically, I argue that in the community-based artworks by Haas & Hahn, JR, and Muniz in Rio de Janeiro, we see an investment in the aesthetic and political potential of commitments not usually associated with socially engaged art in Brazil, such as to completedness, unity, intentional meaning, and beauty. At the same time, the works of Haas & Hahn, JR, and Muniz include in varying degrees an element of viewer experience, ultimately defining who participates in the work and who sees the work, as they toe the line between formalism and spectatorship. Some of the strategies seen in the community-based artworks of Haas & Hahn, JR, and Muniz can be traced to the Concrete and Neo-Concrete art movements in Brazil from the 1950s and 1960s. By situating these artworks, which have been created in marginalized working-class communities in Rio de Janeiro, in dialogue with the work of Brazilian Neoconcretists in the early 1960s, such as Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape, I reveal how they constitute a deep and continued connection between Brazilian art and the favela. Artworks by Haas & Hahn, JR, and Vik Muniz have incorporated aspects of the art-making process employed by Clark, Oiticica, and Pape; however, this process yields works of art that metaphorically represent the city in which they were created. I conclude that community-based art’s aesthetic shift from viewer experience to visual representation in Brazil is not a departure from the social and political issues of the city, but rather a continuation of aesthetic dialogue aimed at promoting social change in Rio de Janeiro.