antonio dias

Every great work of art presents itself as a problem, not a solution. The work of Antonio Dias is no exception, and it has to be confronted. Confronted first, that is, as knowledge, neither religious nor scientific, but artistic. And that is precisely what contemporary art so often flees from today. Dias, on the other hand, faces it, wrangles with it, and stands before us, without any condescension.

This exhibition, which opens in September 2018 at Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, presents a brief sampling of Antonio Dias’ artistic production since 1968. His early works, from 1964 to 67, are therefore absent, having recently been seen in the exhibition Entre construção e apropriação – Antonio Dias, Geraldo de Barros e Rubens Gerchman nos anos 60 (Between Construction and Appropriation—Antonio Dias, Geraldo de Barros and Rubens Gerchman in the 1960s), curated by João Bandeira at SESC Pinheiros, also in São Paulo. 

Here, now, from Black Mirror (1968)and Arid (1969) down to recent works from 2013, the poetic potency and developments of his art can be fully grasped. It’s a collection that, however summarized, reveals the transformations Dias’ investigations underwent, and though it takes painting as its center of gravity, those transformations played out also in various other fields, including sculpture, objects, installations, videos (films), video-installations and even an LP: Record: The Space Between, 1972. This dispersion in no way detracts from the artist’s thought, because at each and every turn there is a formidable unity of method. Dias is a reflective artist, the kind who thinks hard before acting, rather than flailing about to see what works. Here, in Black Mirror, we have a radical stance on the object of art alongside Arid, a pioneering experiment in the interaction between painting and language in conceptual art. However, here is neither the place nor the time for me to discourse at length on the work of an artist I have been writing about since 1973.  

Crucial, however, is the presence of a piece being exhibited in Brazil for the first time. Ta Tze Bao, 1972. [i] The Ta Tze Bao presented at the Federal University of Paraíba’s Center for Contemporary Art in 1978 is an interesting but somewhat dry version, created for a university publication, nothing like this version, which is visually much richer and more generous, yet no less radical.

In Tazibao, the artist once again wrestles with the problem of art and politics in a manner that is, for those who can appreciate it, intelligent and privileged. As always in his work, this piece is accessible only through reflection. You have to think about what you’re seeing—that’s the counterpart the viewer owes to the artist’s effort. Tazibao were “big-character" wall posters used as a form of protest in China, especially in the early 20th Century. In 1966, they started to feature as an expression of far-left dissidence within the    Communist Party of China in the fight against the “revisionists”. It was the beginning of the so-called Cultural Revolution. It was under this context that the word Tazibao (or Dazibao) reached the West. Nobody really knew what was going on in China. For educated middle-class westerners like us, it seemed a tremendous transformation was in course that obliged the intellectual to roll up his sleeves. Hence the various Maoist organizations that arose in dissidence to the Soviets and even the Trotskyists. Tazibao was the Cultural Revolution’s eloquent graphic rallying cry.

Antonio adopted the word Tazibao as the title for his works on the Watergate scandal. I believe everyone will have heard of it: it was the sequence of events that culminated in President Nixon’s resignation in order to avoid impeachment during his re-election campaign. Watergate was triggered on Saturday, June 17, 1972, when five men with links to the Republican Party were arrested while breaking into and attempting to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The role the free press plays in a democracy was one of the lasting lessons learned from the scandal. Two reporters from The Washington Post investigated the break-in and the story was picked up by other leading newspapers in the US and abroad, becoming front-page news. Tazibao were the mouthpiece of the radical left par excellence. Whether they were free or not is another matter, but their goal was to oust the “revisionists”, those who did not share the thinking of Chairman Mao. For Antonio Dias, it was Watergate.

In this, the artist produced a work that was doubly intelligent and radical. We shall see why. First, in the best pop tradition, it harnessed the readymade in a manner Dias never  had before, appropriating the front pages of two newspapers—The New York Times and Corriere della Sera—exactly as they appeared in a given week in November 1972. So far, so normal. Andy Warhol had done that ten years earlier with the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, in A boy for Meg, 1962. In the first Tazibao series, we see the artist's careful surgical interventions, precisely masking in red the columns of an article as they appeared in newsprint. There’s the intelligence. But here, in the work as yet unseen in Brazil, Dias goes much farther plastically. Here, he rides out against conceptual art, bathing the whole page, and its breadth again, in red. He then maps the columns of the target story and replicates their precise shapes in cut-out cloth, steeped in red paint, and hangs them under their respective pages from The New York Times and Corriere della Sera.  Those cutouts show the whole area of Uncovering the Cover-Up. The balancing of the redwash above and the snippets below is not gratuitous, but holds very clearly on the political relation between the importance of a story and the front page of a newspaper. In the days of the social media that might seem rather old-hat, but it is not; not yet: our days are marked by the electronic Tazibao that impress their urgencies upon us. As such, Antonio Dias’ paper Tazibao could not be more current.    

Seu marido (Your Husband) will shudder to show that not everything in this exhibition is red and postery. There’s space for humor and irony too, as there always is in the work of this  major artist.

Rio de Janeiro, May 25, 2018.

Post Scriptum: Antonio Dias died on August 1 2018, when this text was already written. Contemporary art has lost one its leading lights, and I, one of my very best friends.

Rio de Janeiro, August 12, 2018.