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Oct. 17--Until this month, the Bronx Museum of the Arts consisted of a grim little box that was once a grim little synagogue. It took 18 long years and a modest $19 million, but the museum now has a more confident, joyous presence on the Grand Concourse, a corrugated facade of glass and painted aluminum designed by the firm Arquitectonica.
The new wing doesn't vastly increase the gallery space or inaugurate an era of luxury. The lobby is spacious and sunny, but the cracked concrete floor and single unisex bathroom testify to a cramped budget.
Still, the institution's fresh, open face on the street also bespeaks a rejuvenated South Bronx. A neighborhood whose name was once shorthand for urban pathology is now tranquil enough for a museum to compete with all the Manhattan juggernauts. Appropriately, its first show is about art that aspires to social change.
"Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture" is an ambitious and entertaining exhibit, worthy of any world-class museum. The centerpiece is Helio Oiticica's whole-room installation, actually a fusion of two 40-year-old works, "The Eden Plan" and "Tropicalia."
Viewers remove their shoes and step barefoot through a sensory itinerary of sand, foam rubber, straw, water, piled books and shredded packing material. Each substance is enclosed in a separate curtained cubicle. At a time when conservators everywhere are roping off works that were meant to be interactive, this is a rare chance to wade right into art the way its creator intended.
Lygia Pape's "Roda dos Prazeres" ("Wheel of Delights") occupies the floor of another gallery. Bowls of dyed water sit in a circle that viewers are invited to join and squirt doses of color onto their tongues with eyedroppers. The point is to have a multisensual experience, to literalize the idea of artistic taste.
Oiticica's "Tropicalia" lent its title to a song by Caetano Veloso and soon came to describe a loose net of artistic expressions encompassing music, poetry, theater, film and architecture, as well as visual arts. Tropicalia lasted just over a year and a half, from the art exhibit "New Brazilian Objectivity" in April 1967, until December 1968, when Veloso and his frequent collaborator Gilberto Gil were arrested and later went into exile. But it was enormously influential.
Because it had so many components, and its cast of characters was so vast, Tropicalia was far from monolithic, and though it was fueled by anger at the military regime, its politics were complicated and contradictory. The orthodox left felt the movement tainted itself with pop culture and Anglo-American influences. The psychedelic rock group Os Mutantes (The Mutants) even made some very weird TV commercials for Shell Oil.
In their eagerness to summon the atmosphere of ferment, the curators gloss over the history, which is confusingly sketched by fragmented videos. Of course, the desire for hard information runs counter to the freewheeling spirit of Tropicalia.
Oiticica declared himself opposed to "things, arguments, facts [and] against everything that could be summed up as cultural, political, ethical and social conformity." So why should a museum's text panels undermine his desire for unmediated immersion?
Because a generation later and a continent away, the vagaries of oppression in Brazil are not common knowledge. The word "Lute" ("Fight"), which runs through the art like a mantra, does not explain itself. The literary music and text-rich art would have benefited from translation, too.
So the viewer is left to ponder the parallels between the Brazilian '60s and the currents that coursed through San Francisco, Prague and Paris. Despite the loose ends, the show and the museum share an irresistible optimism that in this neighborhood was once in such short supply.
TROPICaLIA: A REVOLUTION IN BRAZILIAN CULTURE. At the Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse, the Bronx; 718-681-6000 or bronxmuseum.org.
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Copyright (c) 2006, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.
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