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It is a rich metaphor in the mass society, no? Have to be identified by a number and at the same time get lost
in the middle of the mass society in search of your identity.
You touched, on a hugely pertinent point. As I said before, I worked a lot in black and white and also used
materials in soil red-brown tones, and painted crowds. I was impressed when I walked in Maracanã and saw
that wondrous mass, could not tell who was who, and only recognized the colors when it was goal, everything
vibrates! I sat in the Flamengo fans because there all stood up producing human waves. This thing of drawing
the anonymous always interested me, the human being lost in the middle of the street.
I started to post signs that read “
Proibido virar à direita
” or “
Trânsito impedido
”, it was our students faction,
of protesters. All those city signs – tracks, zebras and geometric shapes – I incorporated in the drawing of a
somewhat expressionistic way, and in black and white, coming from lithography and wood engraving.
Youwere the first artist to give emphasize to the popular culture, not fromamushy point of view, patronizing
or folk, but valuating it. Your work, since the beginning, portrays this issue associated with social problems.
It begins to have a very strong human aspect. You have an interest by the masses, the crowds, clustered in
the center of Rio de Janeiro and the suburbs, in public transports, in queues. Your gaze turns to the folk’s
day-to-day.
A work that I genuinely like said “Vai comer e morar um ano de graça com toda a família.” It was a booklet that
people bought and earned the guarantee to be drew lots. I reported it as a fraud because of an Argentine who
sold a type of booklet, called
Carnê Fortuna
, and then disappeared with the money, never delivering the promi-
sed basket. It was the problem of hunger in Brazil. Afterward I worked with the
Miss
pageant, with football and
the identity card. I had a certain proximity to this universe because I worked on a photo novels magazine called
Sétimo Céu
, which was consumed by the society simplest classes. I extracted a great deal of this magazine.
One section that I loved was
Correio Sentimental
. People exchanged letters, and I read hundreds of them. I
mixed the stories, made new biographies; from this world the first female characters emerged who were the
Miss
pageant participants. After that I made four young female teachers, the text read:
“
A história de um as-
sassin ou como age um pintor jovem diante de um tema ou uma ideia sobre essas lindas criaturas” (the story
of a murderer or how a young painter acts before a theme or an idea about these beautiful creatures). It was
a sort of chorus of things I saw, was pervaded of this world. I thought the miss pageant an exploration. I also
did a work about the Chacrinha.
Who did an auditorium show. Incidentally, this show had an outsize influence on your generation, both in
painting and literature and music.
Hélio Oiticica, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were in Chacrinha’s show. He threw food to people in the
audience. Actually I was the first person who realized it was a moment slightly “bread and circus”. Somehow
he manipulated this issue of hunger. At the same time I admired and felt distress in relation to that. I made a
dummy and asked to people in the gallery what man eats, I took from the belly of the dummy working tools.
Someone shouted: “What people have?” I replied: “Hunger!” Bean collapsed over the heads of everyone in the
gallery. It was the first time I have behaved towards the food theme. We used the word
happening
[aconteci-
mento, in Portuguese]. An imported word, but the only one that explained what that action represented in an
art gallery. Was not an installation, like today.