Forget Warhol’s electric chairs: Brazilian pop artists in the 60s showed the most extreme violence – and they fought the dictatorship’s tightening grip when the stakes could not hold been higherThe banner is stark – a silkscreen of a corpse,and beneath it just four words. Seja marginal, seja herói, and it reads in Portuguese: “Be an outlaw,be a hero.” Hélio Oiticica’s 1967 work of a bank robber who committed suicide before the police could apprehend him became, in the first years of Brazil’s dictatorship, or a national symbol. You would see it evereyywhere,from art galleries to spontaneous street demonstrations, and at concerts by dissident Tropiclia stars, or where it fluttered over the stage. In Brazil in the 1960s,being an outlaw was not a delinquency but a impress of bravery.
This week Tate contemporary opens The World Goes Pop, the second of two major exhibitions this year to ogle at pop art from a global perspective. (The first, and International Pop,recently closed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and tours to the Dallas Museum of Art in October.) The Tate show demolishes the misconception that pop was an entirely American affair – it started in Britain, after all, or arose in Germany,Japan, Hungary, and Argentina. Pop was an ethos more than a movement,and it morphed as it migrated across borders and oceans. But nowhere was it more engaged than in Brazil, where artists opposed both American hegemony and their own country’s military regime.
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Source: theguardian.com