We are all still shaken by the fire that devastated the National Museum, but I open this column by celebrating the memory of one of the most important figures in our cultural heritage. Hot off the press is the book Walter Zanini: vanguardas, desmaterialização, tecnologias na arte.
Edited by UFMG professor Eduardo de Jesus, one of Brazil’s leading thinkers on media art, the book, published by WMF Martins Fontes, presents Professor Walter Zanini’s extensive research into the presence of technologies in artistic production since the late nineteenth century.
The research began in 1997 and was interrupted in 2005, when Professor Zanini accepted an invitation from Cristina Freire, professor and curator at MAC-USP, to organize a compilation of his critical and theoretical writings. Zanini’s condition for accepting was that all the material be reviewed and updated.
The effort behind this intellectual undertaking resulted in the indispensable Walter Zanini escrituras críticas, edited by Cristina Freire and published in 2013, the year of the professor’s death (read critic Angélica de Moraes’s profile of him here in seLecT magazine).
Professor Zanini’s name is associated not only with critical and theoretical work but also with the history of MAC-USP, which he directed from its opening in 1963 until 1978. His work at the museum’s helm transformed the institution into a true open laboratory for then-new art forms such as mail art and video art.
The book is divided into seven chapters and enriched by an exceptionally rigorous and precise introduction by Eduardo de Jesus; an additional text written by Zanini at the invitation of Diana Domingues, another pivotal artist and researcher in the history of art and technology, for one of her books (Arte no século 21, 2009); an intellectual biography of Professor Zanini; and several images.
The first chapter, “From Artisanal and Mechanical Art to Electronic Art,” is a thought-provoking study that examines the interfaces between art and technology in light of their relationship to transformations in nineteenth-century architecture and design. It is followed by “Kinetic Art,” “The Impulse toward the Immaterial,” “Aspects of the Contribution of Artists’ and Experimental Cinema,” a chapter entirely devoted to video, and another to video art in Brazil.
I would still need to discuss Professor Walter Zanini’s importance to the standing of mail art, performance, and installation art; his leadership of the São Paulo Biennial, which he curated twice (1981 and 1983); and so many other innovations this master of masters left us. But this Rádio USP column’s time does not allow it, and you will have to immerse yourselves in the delightful task of reading the book.
On the 17th, Itaú Cultural hosts a discussion and presentation of the book with its editor, Eduardo de Jesus.
Transcript of Giselle Beiguelman’s Ouvir Imagens column, broadcast every Monday at 8 a.m. on Rádio USP (93.7).
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