Beyond Brazil: remembering Guy Brett through his own eyes

The British art critic Guy Brett has become a standard reference in Brazil through his writing on and friendship with artists such as Sergio Camargo, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Mira Schendel during the 1960s and later with Cildo Meireles, Antonio Manuel, Lygia Pape, Jac Leirner, Waltercio Caldas and so many others. While these artists have come, to a large extent, to define how contemporary art is understood nationally, Guy’s contribution helped weave their creative outputs within a larger art historical narrative, helping inscribe them, even if still only partially, within the hegemonic and institutional canons. Yet, it would be limiting to consider Guy’s relevance through this single, albeit important, perspective. This article, not so much an essay but a series of annotated quotes, seeks to shed light on Guy’s own intellectual trajectory, focusing on the particular way he came to articulate, through his writing and curation, the art that he was interested in. What actually interested him ranged from the singular subjective experience with the art object to its wider relation with the world. When referring to that which bridged such diverse approaches to art, Guy often invoked the idea of cosmic energies, field forces, sometimes in a literal sense such as in the case of electromagnetic force in the work of the Greek artist Takis, at other times more metaphorically. Such invocations whether referring to ancient cosmologies, millennial knowledges or scientific thought, never attempted to determine or impose his own perspective upon others or imply any sense of superiority of one type of art over another. In Guy’s own understanding, the universal seemed antithetical to the way it is usually prescribed within the history of modernism. Indeed, Guy never had a problem with modernism itself but with the narrow constraints with which it has been considered. His criticism was directed primarily towards how modernism has been historicised and instrumentalised within the institutional structures of art.