".....I encountered Ferreira Gullar’s writing in the mid 1990s. I had become familiar with the work of Neo-concrete artists Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark—then utterly unknown in American academia—so it was Gullar’s writings in support of those artists and his criticism of the period that I first tackled. With the Neoconcrete cohort, Gullar penned the famous “Neoconcrete Manifesto” of 1959, which was published as a pamphlet and in the revolutionary Suplemento Dominical Jornal do Brasil, for which Gullar served as visual-arts editor. But by then Gullar was an established poet too, author of A luta corporal (1954) and O formigueiro (1955)—which helped define experimental poetry in Brazil.
"A native of São Luís, Maranhão, on the northeast coast of Brazil, Gullar moved to Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the 1950s. There, he met towering critic Mário Pedrosa, with whom Gullar sustained a productive dialogue that radically transformed Concrete art and poetry in Brazil. It was partly Pedrosa who provided Gullar with the tools to question the Concrete doxa—which in art and poetry had become an exemplary model of aesthetic production. Under the aegis of phenomenology, Gullar sought to rethink Concretism by privileging experience and expression instead of a priori conceptualization and theoretical interpretation. His attentive reading of Clark’s work contributed to this antiobjectivist and antifunctionalist understanding of geometric abstraction but also led him to forcefully question the ontology of the art object. By focusing on the beyond-the-frame that Clark’s work postulated, Gullar reflected on a crisis of mediums that he articulated through the concept of the nonobject (1959). The nonobject was the result of the exhaustion of representation as a function of art, but it signaled, too, the limits and conventions of painting and sculpture. In work that did away with the frame and the base, Gullar identified a new sense of meaning, a new mode of participatory interaction, a new rapport with the space of everyday life. He explored this dissolution of mediums in a series of spatial poems in which he inscribed single words upon wooden structures that revealed and concealed the words via the manipulation of the structures. In Lembra, (1959) for example, which consists of the Portuguese word for “remember” in the center of a white, wooden, square panel that is covered by a small blue cube, the meaning of the word is echoed in its concealment...
"In 1961, Gullar became increasingly concerned with popular art and politics. A member of the Communist Party, he lived in exile for most of the 1970s. Upon his return in 1977 he resumed his activities as poet, critic, writer, and journalist. One of the region’s most important poets, honored as such by multiple awards and accolades, Gullar, in his criticism, also made a pivotal contribution to theories of modern art—an achievement with which we have just begun to cope."
Kaira M. Cabañas, associate professor in global modern and contemporary art at the University of Florida, published another article in the same periodical focusing on Gullar.
"... I never had any reason to reach out to Ferreira Gullar until 2010, when I was preparing the exhibition “Specters of Artaud” for the Reina Sofía. In my research interview with him, we reviewed some well-trodden history: his Concrete poetry of the 1950s and his authorship of the 1959 “Neoconcrete Manifesto” that marked his and his cohort’s break with the rationality of Concrete poetry and visual art. Around the turn of the decade, he also penned a series of newspaper articles titled “Stages of Contemporary Art,” a programmatic and particular vision of art’s progression that culminated in the Brazilian Neoconcrete movement. At the time, I was interested in Surrealism, a movement omitted from his “Stages,” and more specifically in his exposure to the work of dissident Surrealist Antonin Artaud. When prompted about Artaud, Gullar revealed his more complex poetic origins and varied investments. He was indeed familiar with Artaud’s poetry, the book on Van Gogh, as well as the scathing To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1948). Gullar even made mimeographed copies of some poems to distribute to his friends when he first discovered Artaud in the 1950s. Gullar was deeply influenced by what he described as Artaud’s “question of the body,” a complexity Gullar explored by disintegrating verbal syntax to the point of imploding it in the concluding poems of his seminal A luta corporal (The Body’s Struggle, 1954). ....
"...[M]y interest in Gullar’s exposure to Artaud was more than literary, it was also psychiatric. Like his mentor Mário Pedrosa, Gullar publicly supported the work of Dr. Nise da Silveira, who had opened a painting studio for her patients in the Rio neighborhood of Engenho de Dentro in 1946 (although Gullar did not know her at that time). In 1996, he published Nise da Silveira: Uma psiquiatra rebelde, which included an interview with Silveira in which he asks about her use of Artaud’s definition of madness...He also wrote on patients’ work, as when he contributed alongside Pedrosa to Silveira’s “Os inumeráveis estados do ser” exhibition catalogue in 1987. Given this history, it is perhaps somewhat paradoxical that in the face of psychiatric reform and deinstitutionalization in Brazil, Gullar—as if in mirrored inversion to Artaud—publically affirmed the necessity of hospitalized psychiatric care, pointing out the ways in which the absence of such sustained care affected families with limited resources and also openly criticizing psychiatrists like Silveira. Gullar himself had two schizophrenic sons. But when it came to art produced in so-called normal or schizophrenic circumstances, Gullar repeatedly spoke to how artistic talent existed independently of such conditions. On this subject, and for the generosity he displayed, I reserve my final lines for him: 'I have never mistaken madness for artistic talent, ...and I have always refused to see Artaud’s works .... as the fruits of madness.'"
We conclude with two pictures of Gullar.
Characters all.
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