“Displacements of Creative Activity in Brazilian Visual Arts” presented by de Andrade

The reception of Marcel Duchamp ideas concerning the displacement of the role played by the spectator in the creation of art – that is, as an active component with the responsibility to create himself the work of art – reflected first in Brazil in the sixties on Hélio Oiticica art production. Although this reception in the work of Oiticica essayed to mix spectator and artist as producers of art, the artist was still the major responsible for his politic and poetic conception of art; by him the artist was actually charged to give the required environment to create Art. In the nineties Eduardo Kac developed this tradition with the sources of Electronic Art and the connection made possible with the popularization of Internet; in his ideas the work of art became a sort of communication between the world wide public and the artist’s production. The result itself of this communication was the work of art. Since a few years, but following the same tradition, the young part Brazilian Influenza Group is trying to increase the possibilities of interaction trough the Web Art and its programming tools. Trough the ideas of Hélio Oiticica, Eduardo Kac and the Influenza Group, the work of art as a sort of communicative production is a strong reality in Brazilian art world. In our presentation we are going to explore the collaborative/communicative skills and its tradition immediately before the Era of Internet still our days in the Brazilian Visual Arts context.