Abstract

History (1968) by Antonio Dias consists of a small transparent plastic package labeled with the title in red, which holds a handful of earth, debris, and dust collected from the streets of Paris in May 1968. Its historical referent is fairly straightforward. As for its art historical referents, we might also begin with Paris, or, more precisely, with Marcel Duchamp’s 50 cc of Paris Air (1919), a glass ampoule supposedly containing what its title claims. But Dias was no Frenchman: the fact that he emerged as an artist amid the agitation of mid-1960s Rio de Janeiro—indeed, that his earlier neofigurative work was taken by none other than Hélio Oiticica as a watershed in the Brazilian avant-garde—also brings to mind the precedent of Hélio Oiticica’s own glass Bólides, transparent, readymade containers filled with various kinds of pigments, earth included. If 50 cc of Paris Air is staked on the ironic jest of packaging—and thus immobilizing—a certain hic et nunc, the Bólides, as art historian Irene Small has compellingly argued, dialogue with the readymade by putting different gradations of matter and stages of industrialization in flux.1 I will return to some of these points in due time, as my aim in this article is not to interpret History for its own sake, but rather to set up a broader comparison between diverging conceptions of object and environment in the neo-avant–gardist milieus Dias engaged with in Brazil and in Europe. More specifically, I expect to foreground how the object was differently mobilized as the catalyst of environmental manifestations in both situations: in Brazil, where Oiticica still envisaged it as an avant-gardist attempt to reclaim the ethos of anti-art and mobilized it so as to assault social constraints; and in Italy, where Dias had to navigate the transition to a post-avant-gardist situation in which the reality of commodity fetishism seemed increasingly inescapable. Last, I will suggest that while Dias failed to resolve the opposition within the lexicon of environmental art and ultimately parted ways with it, this very failure nevertheless prompted him to rethink the potential criticality of painting as he staged a return to the medium.