Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: Jacqueline E. Barnitz. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available from UMI.

This study takes up the phrase ‘the skin of all’ as a means to explore the tension between the singular and the collective, and between union and estrangement. I examine aesthetic, symbolic, and theoretical attempts at unification amidst various forms of difference and the political imperatives and implications attached to this aim. The goal is to analyze how such attempts were related to the development of artistic institutions and discourses as well as to broader sociopolitical conditions within and beyond Brazil’s dictatorship era (1964-1985). This dissertation reflects on the reemergence of the discourse of antropofagia throughout the sixties and seventies in Brazil, a concept first developed in the 1920s as an explicit rejection of the privileged position of European culture and the assertion of a unified Brazilian national identity forged from its colonial histories and the co-presence of indigenous, African, and European identities. I emphasize that antropofagia has functioned as a counterhegemonic proposition reliant on the appropriation of marginal racial positions and their integration into a larger national framework, while still acknowledging the productive potentials that antropofagia’s collapsing of boundaries facilitates. My project challenges simplified narratives of harmonic exchange, embracing contradiction and the tensions of privilege, access, and power. Examining primary sources, contemporaneous writings and present-day scholarship, this project interrogates the mythos, life, and after-life of Pape and Oiticica’s performance and participatory works and analyzes these alongside both artist’s media-based practices. Analyzing the broader aims and implications of Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticica’s engagement with Black and indigenous cultures, I unpack the ways their works irresolutely engage with race in the Brazilian context and how a primitivistic essentialism has been central to these works and their reception.

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