Tropicália

Yesterday I at last got around to the Barbican for the exhibition Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture. It finishes May 21st so time was running out for me (and you if you fancy going).

My interest in Tropicália goes back to about 1997 when my wider explorations of psychedelia were increasingly going global and I heard the first hints that there was a Brazilian psych scene. This subsequently crystallized into 2 band names as avenues of further pursuit – The Mutants and Caetano Velaso – it would be many more months before The Mutants reverted to their original language moniker Os Mutantes, and I realised that Caetano Velaso was a man not a band. Getting any records was another issue, eventually in the World Music section of Tower Records, Piccadilly Circus I hit paydirt with the Os Mutantes album Mutantes E Seus Cometas No Pais Do Baurets (this was of course in a more primitive internet age). The cover looked promising and I was excited to get the thing home. But I thought the first track was terrible and I felt my heart sink in that way which is all too familiar to the brave record buyer who strikes out into unknown territory. After that track however it picked up and I loved it and introduced it to my friends with all the attendant thrill of a new discovery.

Keith knew a Brazilian guy called Joao and hit him up for some Brazilian tunes. Joao was pretty dismissive of Os Mutantes and various other names I’d passed through Keith – bad seventies rock was I think his interpretation of these artists, “like Phil Collins” may also have been mentioned. Still a pretty good comp tape of MPB (Musica Popular Brasileira) stuff ended up coming my way – and had to satisfy me for now. In fact that MPB tape got me through a cold winter working in the vaults of the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive.

As time passed by I eventually hit my other targets – the Velaso albums, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, more Mutantes, Tom Ze (still after that Nara Leao album mind). I came to realise the genius of Rogerio Duprat (and kudos to el/Cherry Red for re-releasing A Banda Tropicálista do Duprat). I discovered that this music was the audio wing of a Brazilian pop art movement, Tropicália – WOW I thought, how groovy! Especially when I discovered it connected up with revolutionary politics, youth movements, artists in London exile etc. etc.

So, when I found out that the Barbican was going to host an exhibition of this stuff I was thrilled. But, BOY – what a let down! For a start there really wasn’t that much to see – the gallery felt kind of empty. And what was there just didn’t seem to amount to much. It was largely ‘conceptual art’ – which I actually don’t have a problem with (all art is conceptual art, the idea that pretty pictures are good art is a concept – anyway I digress) but I think that conceptual art only really works when in presented in an engaging context. I tend to think of conceptual art like Magick, it’s about altering reality through an alteration in consciousness. For this to function requires, I believe (and to borrow from Tim Leary), an appropriate attention to ‘set and setting’. Without that the spell won’t work, things wont change and everyone goes home disappointed.

I mean the first element of this you face as a problem in the gallery context is the admission charge. Before you’ve experienced a thing, a powerful message is being placed in your mind – you are moving into a space where access is determined by the action of a financial transaction. Therefore it is limited to those who can afford it and choose to use their cash in this way. An expectation of return on one’s investment is fostered, a ‘show me’ attitude – we are placed passively as audience. We choose to use our cash in this way because wee are cultured people, we will now spend a period of time in the gallery commensurate with our expenditure (oh, 8 quid by the way, best part of a tenner in other words. Each). Now all this blathering is just to indicate that immediately I don’t think that we’re being presented with the best ‘set and setting’ for our experience on the other side of the admissions desk. I’ve always buzzed much more off gallery spaces like the Whitechapel (1) or Serpentine where you can wander freely straight into the temple.

I know that there are costs associated with doing anything that someone has to pay – but given that, shouldn’t we incorporate the terms of entry into the artwork itself – be open about the process already occurring. Perhaps entry should be afforded in Brazilian Reais only, with a bureau de change located elsewhere in the building – or entry could only be afforded by singing E Proibido Proibir as one passes over payment – or entry could require placing 4 £2 coins into a Tropicálismo slot machine/one art bandit (Oticica’s phrase “Be an outlaw, be a hero” springs to mind) and everyone wins and receives their entry ticket – or… Well you get the general idea.

Putting aside the whole paying for entry issue (and I did anyway, I just wandered in and no one stopped me), the whole set and setting thing inside wasn’t right either. There was no Magick, none of that pagan energy this kind of art demands – instead it’s just your bog standard white cube approach, like some square modernist chapel or summat. Some of the art was ‘interactive’ - in a wonderfully perverse set up – the ‘original art’ was in cases protected from us, while reproductions illustrating the concept were available to handle and engage with. These concepts appeared to have artefacts chaining them to the past, the weight of a former moment preventing them from being free, from truly entering the now – failed invocations.

The best stuff was: the album covers (and why wasn’t there more Rogério Duarte in the exhibition?); the video of Tropicália musicians in their prime (although the projected stuff looked like second generation vhs taped off-air and the sound was shit – didn’t anyone think that being able to hear the music might be important? – and why wasn’t the whole gallery filled with the pounding sounds of Tropicália?); and the women’s dresses, but there was only about six of them.

So buy the albums, listen to the music and dream up your own sixties pop art vision of Sao Paulo and Rio – it isn’t here. I looked.


(1) I’m aware that this exhibition is largely a reconstruction of Hélio Oticica’s 1967 exhibition at the Whitechapel – but I can’t really comment on that – different ‘set & setting’ – different experience.