Artists / Artistas
Intersigne III, 1993. Computer chips and binding, 11 x 9 in. Placas de computadora y encuadernación, 28 x 23 cm.
Arte clasificada, 2009. Advertisement in newspaper. Anuncio en página de periódico
Arte clasificada, decade of the 1980s. Advertisement in newspaper Anuncio en página de periódico.
30
international network, and he exhibited quite regularly abroad, besides establishing contacts with members of groups like the Gutai and Fluxus groups, whose poetics exerted an evident influence on his work. In Brazil, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of Sao Paulo, directed by Walter Zanini between 1963 and 1978, became a fundamental reference point for Bruscky and for several other artists, and different Mail Art exhibitions were organized despite the surveillance of the regime, very diffident with regard to a production which was so intangible, and which in fact often succeeded in evading censorship. In those years, other initiatives had to be interrupted: the poetic and inventive advertisements that Bruscky had been creating since 1977 in collaboration with artist Daniel Santiago for publication in different newspapers in Recife and other Brazilian cities, for instance, had to be suspended because the newspapers themselves refused to continue publishing them. The advertisement featuring a hose to ‘put out’ words (“use what you wish and put out what you are not interested in”) or of an Auroral Composition (“The Bruscky- Santiago team proposes the exhibition of a colourful, artificial, tropical aurora produced by the excitement of the atoms of atmospheric components at an altitude of 100 kilometers...”) could not fail to attract the distrustful gaze of the dictatorial regime. As of the 1990s, Bruscky expanded his production of small objects or visual poems, with a special focus on a significant series of artists’ books, in many cases simple boxes resembling books, adorned with phrases consisting of ironic and caustic plays on words. In 2004, Bruscky was invited to participate in the 26th Sao Paulo Biennial, featuring a collection of works − his studio − which was transported from Recife and re-constructed in the Biennial’s pavilion. Through this relocation, the German curator, Alfons Hug, ratified the importance of the artist’s archive, highlighting, by the way, the apparent contradiction in an oeuvre that, in spite of what critics consider an ontological immateriality, demands to be appreciated in its physicality. The way in which Bruscky’s mail artworks (but not ‘merely’ mail artworks) and those of his countless international correspondents occupied every bit of space in the artist’s studio rendered the network of relationships, exchange, controversies and fights established since the days in Recife and along several decades tangible, ultimately proving Bruscky’s persistence and the relevance of his work during this period which was so decisive in the recent history of the country.