Mixing the Mystical and the Political : Work of 3 Brazilian Artists at USC’s Fisher Gallery Ranges From Cow Bones to Computers

Juxtaposing cow bones and coins, snakes and computer technology, and shamanism and Christianity, installations by three contemporary Brazilian artists at USC’s Fisher Gallery explore two distinct realms.

“The work is mystical, and it relates to the environment and nature, and the human body and invisible energies and spiritual ideas,” says Susan M. Anderson, who curated the exhibit while taking a little time off from her regular job as curator of exhibitions at the Laguna Art Museum. “But it’s also about social and political issues.”

Among them: cultural and economic imperialism and environmental exploitation, common themes in contemporary Brazilian art, which has had scant exposure on the West Coast, Anderson said. “Body to Earth: Three Artists From Brazil,” at USC through Feb. 20, features work by Cildo Meireles, Tunga and Mario Cravo Neto. Anderson said that though they are among their country’s most prominent contemporary artists, only Neto has exhibited here; his photographs have been shown in San Francisco and Los Angeles galleries. All three have exhibited on the East Coast, in Europe and elsewhere.

Anderson said she thinks “the most exciting work being done anywhere today is installation” and that Brazilian installation is no exception. She lived in Brazil from 1979 to 1983 and five years later, after graduating from USC’s museum studies program, went back on the first of two research trips for “Body and Earth.” She was exhibitions coordinator at Fisher before taking her job in Laguna.

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As she writes in the exhibit catalogue, the ‘50s was a time of growing industrialization and urbanization in Brazil and brought forth a “cultural explosion” which resulted in such advances as the modern architecture of Brasilia and the bossa nova jazz form.

In the visual arts, the conceptually based Neo-Concrete movement emerged with an approach articulated by artist Helio Oiticica who, Anderson writes, considered art a “revolt against every form of oppression: aesthetic, metaphysical, intellectual and social.” Anderson said the manifesto, along with the movement’s attention to nature and human concerns, clearly has influenced Meireles, Tunga and Neto.

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Meireles, 44, first produced politically charged work in the 1970s during the height of Brazil’s oppressive military regime and often addresses what Anderson calls the “clash between official and unofficial culture,” between the Catholic Church and/or the government and the country’s indigenous peoples.

His dimly lit installation “Missao/Missoes (How to Build Cathedrals)” alludes to such tensions, said Anderson, who likens it both to “the sacred space of the Church” and “the ritual spaces of indigenous cultures.” A room unto itself enclosed by black curtains, its “ceiling” is composed of about 2,000 eerily illuminated cow bones suspended above a “floor” of 600,000 pennies from which rises a thin column of communion wafers.

Reconstructing the piece at the gallery (it originally was created in 1987), Meireles said it has a general theme, that it is as a “mathematical equation” involving oppressive “spiritual” powers--that is, any organized religion--and destructive “material” forces, meaning any government, and the individual forever caught in between.

Tunga, 40, who like Meireles lives in Rio de Janeiro, often adopts the persona of a scientist and uses snakes in “Viperine Vanguard” to examine issues of “environmental and cultural exploitation and the limits of knowledge and language,” Anderson said.

The installation consists of a clear Plexiglas pen, next to a computer that constantly and noisily spits out data on a printer. The pen houses snake skins (live snakes were used during the opening reception for the exhibit, in a performance of sorts).

“Mimicking the customary Western scientific mode of examination from a safe vantage point,” Anderson writes in her catalogue, “we are invited to witness ‘the other’: the capturing and ordering of elemental Brazil.”

With “Scars of Our Inheritance 3,” Anderson says, Neto has created a “synthesis” of the various racial groups--Afro-Brazilian, Baroque Portuguese and indigenous peoples--from his home town of Sao Salvador de Bahia, the capital of Bahia, Brazil’s poorest state.

A series of 160 striking photographs taken since the early ‘80s of family and friends from each group is projected on two walls of the installation (some evoke the “magic of tribal shamans,” according to Anderson), while a photograph of a statue of a bloodied Jesus is projected on a third.

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Neto, 45, said the image of Jesus is a metaphor, but would not elaborate beyond citing a quote from psychologist Ernest Becker that also is projected on the wall: “The heaviest crosses are internal and men make them so that, thus skeletally supported, they can bear the burden of their flesh. Under the sign of this inner cross, a certain inner distance is achieved from the infantile desire to be and have everything.”

Noting that some Brazilian art is “much more cerebral,” Anderson predicted that “Body to Earth” will elicit visceral reactions. “It’s emotionally charged work and there’s something sublime about it,” she said. “Sublime (can mean) an emotion of awe that can be uplifting, but it also has an element of terror.”

* “Body to Earth: Three Artists From Brazil” continues through Feb. 20 at USC’s Fisher Gallery, 823 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles. Hours: noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays. Free. (213) 740-4561.