In 1979, an amalgamation of museums in the northern Brazilian city of Recife seemed to crystallize the vision of that country’s most famous anthropologist. Bundling up the Museum of Anthropology, the Joaquim Nabuco Institute for Social Research, the Pernambuco Museum of Popular Art and the Museum of Sugar (one of the region’s key exports), the brand-new Museum of Northeast Man appeared to embody Gilberto Freyre’s beliefs all under one roof: That Brazilians, despite their widely divergent heritage, ethnicity and socio-economic status, functioned holistically, as one.
A nice idea, to be sure, and one Freyre institutionalized, under his theory of democracia racial, which put forth the idea that Brazil, through the interbreeding of its immigrant, indigenous, Portuguese-colonial and slave populations, had achieved racial unity where virtually all other colonial nations had failed (his 1933 book on the subject, The Masters and the Slaves, is seen as a landmark socio-ethnographic text, though as his Wikipedia entry mildly puts it, “it is not without its critics”).
In practice, it’s a little more complicated than that, and that’s where Jonathas De Andrade comes in. At the Power Plant, the artist — born in 1983 and raised in Recife amid its apparent harmonies (Freyre was also a local) — offers three pieces, each of them a variation on the theme. De Andrade enlists locals for his work, and gets right up close: They’re less subjects than participants, and their complicity in his practice gives his rebuke to Freyre’s theory the ammunition it needs.
In the main gallery space, dozens of posters — hanging on walls or from the ceiling, all at varying heights and angles — appearing as promotional material for the friendly, all-for-one world view that the museum purports to uphold.
In each, De Andrade has used a portrait of a local — these are actual northeast men, culled from a newspaper ad photo call. The project is a direct critique of Freyre’s idealism: The ads specified moreno — strong-backed labourers, masculine stereotypes, and, in the codes of Brazil’s socio-ethnic complexity, often the descendants of slaves.
With the piece, De Andrade uses narrowcast fetishization as a weapon against one of the country’s dominant social mythmakers. It feels like empowerment — are these men, on the low rungs of society due at least in part to their heritage, finally being given a voice? — but it’s not. De Andrade amplifies one cliché to reveal another, however idealistic — rolling the whole of an entire region’s social and economic drivers into a single package is bright-eyed naiveté at its apex — as exclusive, simplistic and equally destructive.
The artist taking up the cause of the common man is the superficial theme here, and his enlisting of locals recalls the politically driven social practice of such artists as Francis Alys, whose major exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario runs until April 2.
Like Alys, De Andrade is less activist than canny absurdist, using deceptive hyperbole to make his point. O Peixe, a film made for the recent Sao Paolo Bienal, puts on view a bizarre, apparently ancient ritual: Over its near 20 minutes, De Andrade zooms in and out on a succession of fishermen, cradling their catch as though comforting a squalling infant. A large, flat, flounder-like creature, its mouth gaping in the open air, is caressed like a beloved pet as the fisherman alternately fondles its gills or touches his lips to its scaly back until, finally, the creature expires.
It’s shot in an intensely voyeuristic style, equal parts National Geographic educational film and lurid peep show. De Andrade presents it as the observance of an ancient ritual of gratitude from predator to prey; it’s anything but. It’s an elaborate fiction, aimed at the extraordinary gullibility of generations of patronizing high-colonialism — and probably Freyre, too — hungry for a view of the exotic. In a final, satisfying twist, the fisherman are real, performing a cultural fiction for a rapt audience, and the joke is less De Andrade’s than theirs, played on us.
The last piece, another video, was made in response to the Recife’s edict, pre-World Cup, to ban horse carts from the city centre, immediately stripping the city’s poorest residents of their livelihoods (in yet another counterpoint to Freyre’s rosy notions of equity, the poor still use animals to transport goods from one favela to the next).
So De Andrade, a successful artist, applied to the city for a permit to have a horse-cart race in the centre of town for a film he was making — a partial truth, but for the local film commission, close enough.
On race day, the city’s cart-drivers took to the streets as they had done for decades, acting out for the cameras what they could no longer do as fact (here in Canada, First Nations people have been down this road too often themselves, but that’s another story). It helps tie up De Andrade’s point about the institutionalization of culture with a tidy bow: If maintaining culture requires performing it for an audience as a fiction, then the only thing preserved is a hierarchy, and a rough one at that. What would Freyre say about that?
Jonathas D’Andrade: Of Fishes, Horses, and Man continues at the Power Plant to May 14.
Jonathas D’Andrade: Of Fishes, Horses, and Man continues at the Power Plant to May 14.
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