Dissident Bodies

Between 1979 and 1984 São Paulo was the centre of a veritable boom in xerographic experimentation. The ardent turn to the photocopier on the part of many São Paulo-based artists was the culmination of a neo-avant-garde scene that had crystallised there since the beginning of the 1970s, during the most brutal years of the military dictatorship. Working individually, they coalesced in their appropriation of technologies of mass print media to create, in the midst of censorship and repression, dispersive and democratic works. However, these artists singularly harnessed the photocopier to simultaneously attack the parameters of canonical art and the oppressive measures of the regime that facilitated access to this very technology. This article materialises a significant and largely overlooked chapter of the conceptual turn in Brazil. It also maps a vital transition, from artists using xerography solely for its pluralising capability, to developing xerography as a visual language in its own right – reorientating the machine's function, and altering how viewers would approach these haptic works.

Keywords: Mari Rodríguez Binnie; xerography; xerografia; copyart; Latin American conceptualism; neo-avant-garde; São Paulo; Brazilian military dictatorship; Hudinilson Jr; León Ferrari

Graph

Hudinilson Jr, Pinto não pode, 1981, photocopy, stamp ink and collage on paper, 34.5 × 21 cm, courtesy of the artist's estate and Galeria Jaqueline Martins

Zona de tensão (Zone of Tension, 1981), by the late São Paulo artist Hudinilson Junior, is blunt in its political criticism. This xerographic work clearly features an inked impression of a penis spanning diagonally across the paper, its dappled texture a result of the artist repeatedly enlarging and copying the original image. The words 'PINTO NÃO PODE' ('COCKS NOT ALLOWED'), stamped in capital letters on the bottom right, at the time succinctly confronted the military regime's systematic suppression of queerness and its visibility within the artworld as well as on the streets. Thirty-six years later, with demonstrations taking place at cultural institutions in São Paulo and other major cities prompted by the closing down in 2017 of 'Queermuseu' ('Queer Museum'), the largest exhibition to date of queer art in Brazil, new copies of this work have emerged.[1] A sign of protest, it is being freely circulated among the hundreds of people protesting against a growing string of instances of artistic censorship that since the removal from office of president Dilma Rousseff in 2016 have become increasingly common.

Zona de tensão is located within Hudinilson's rich corpus of performative actions with the photocopier. Between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s Hudinilson experimented continuously with this relatively new technology, and the majority of the works he produced with it are iconic: they dwell on, venerate and preserve his young, lithe body. And he was prolific, the works he produced and constantly gave away and mailed to friends near and far continuing today to trickle out of personal and institutional archives in São Paulo and beyond.

PHOTO (COLOR): Hudinilson Jr, 'Narcisse' Exercício de Me Ver, 1983, photocopy, 23.5 × 32.5 cm, courtesy of the artist's estate and Galeria Jaqueline Martins

PHOTO (COLOR): Hudinilson Jr, Untitled, 1982, collage of photocopies on paper, 75 × 112 cm, courtesy of the artist's estate and Galeria Jaqueline Martins

For years, Hudinilson explored the visual possibilities of exposing his bare body to the photocopier's glass, mining the machine's gritty rendering of skin and hair when placed at extremely close range. The images could be figurative studies, such as his extensive series Exercisio de me ver (Exercise in Seeing Myself) dating from 1980 to 1983. In one work, his hands rest on his abdomen as the glass rubs against and distorts his skin. Another suggestively displays his naked torso, coyly framing the image to show his pubic hair and, just below, the base of his penis. Hudinilson also photocopied collaged grids of his photocopies, grafting glimpses of hair and flesh into sensuous topographies. While varying in their approach to creating haptic images, all these works nonetheless converge to render copy paper as skin. Furthermore, they insist not only on the familiarity of ordinary copier paper, but also on its changing appearance, as the toner rapidly ages and discoloures, as well as on its pliancy, the paper often being folded and sent to friends, or sometimes acting as the envelope, the image sheathing itself.

Because of the renewed political relevance of Hudinilson's xerographic works – as Brazil once again becomes mired in extremist right-wing politics – their contextual origins bear reflection. Moreover, in order to analyse their poetic intervention it is necessary to historicise the artistic scene in São Paulo in which Hudinilson was immersed. This endeavour calls attention to the beginnings of a welcome historiographical sea change, as scholarly efforts are beginning to render visible the myriad materialities of the conceptual turn in Latin America, which include the vibrant experimentation with xerography in Brazil during the 1970s and early 1980s. At this time artists harnessed a relatively newly available mass print technology for both its democratic affordability and for its power to replicate and easily disseminate subversive expressions, and as a conceptual manoeuvre, the thrust of xerographic experimentation hinged equally on its potential for both artistic and political critique. It is of little surprise that Hudinilson's prolific cerographic oeuvre has, in the last three years, risen to become one of the most recognisable examples of this practice. His photocopies have been exhibited nationally and internationally, and several have recently been purchased by New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires – an almost cruel turn of events as Hudinilson died in 2013 of complications from long-term alcohol abuse, penniless and notoriously bitter about the lack of recognition for his work.[2]

The re-emergence of Hudinilson's work, in exhibitions and as a potent image of protest, prompts us to return to the archives to consider how artists in São Paulo distinctly exploited the conceptual, visual and material possibilities of the photocopy. But the works' reappearance demands a methodological intervention as well. Through repetition, xerography collapsed the origin–copy binary. Thus, to take in these works as they circulate anew is not to experience the afterlives, say, of Hudinilson's ephemeral encounters with the photocopier; we are encountering, instead, the works as they continue to unfold.

A Scene Emerges

In 1970s Brazil, São Paulo stood apart in terms of commercial and private access to mass printing technologies such as offset lithography, heliographic printing, thermal printing and photocopying. Beginning in 1968, the military regime under General Artur da Costa e Silva aggressively pushed for free-market policies to attract foreign investment, ushering in a period of exceptional economic growth. During this so-called economic 'Brazilian Miracle', São Paulo – the country's largest city and its financial centre – patently manifested the symbiosis between growing international commerce and the desire for rapid and efficient methods for circulating information. The Xerox-914 – the world's first automated photocopier, which also crucially required standard, not thermal, paper – arrived in Brazil in 1966, and by the beginning of the 1970s had already become the norm in offices across São Paulo. It was, however, a rare commodity across the rest of Brazil; indeed, just as with the connotations implied by the term 'Brazilian Miracle', the photocopier remained rare throughout the rest of South America in the mid-1980s.

The ardent turn – starting in 1979 with the 'Gerox' exhibition at Espaço Max Pochon – to the photocopier on the part of multiple São Paulo-based artists was the culmination of a neo avant-garde scene that had been crystallising in the city since the beginning of the decade.[3] Working initially individually, artists coalesced in their appropriation of technologies of mass print media. By mining the formal, material, conceptual, as well as participatory possibilities of these technologies, they produced works in multiples that were to be handled, passed on and circulated inside and beyond exhibition spaces. The urgency for such tactics stemmed from the charged social landscape of the time: the country was in the grip of a military dictatorship that persecuted, arrested, tortured or even assassinated those it deemed to be 'subversive'. Amid censorship and repression, these artists' deliberate use of systems of print communication to create dispersive and democratic works – works that were cheap to produce in large quantities and contingent on circulating from person to person, thereby activating intimate physical encounters beyond codified spaces for the viewing of art – was as much a political critique as it was a lifeline.

The marginality of offset, thermal and heliographic printing in São Paulo's codified artworld afforded these artists creative freedom as well as independence from the constraints of institutional and market tastes. Moreover, photocopying – which they termed 'xerografia', or xerography – required no technical training, a matrix, or even a studio space. Artists could constitute an anti-institutional stance by producing small-scale, intimate and itinerant works. In his essay for the exhibition 'Arte Xerox Brasil' in 1984, Hudinilson Junior reflected on the technology's appeal, considering reasons beyond its ease and affordability:

here we can raise other hypotheses that would justify what has been called the 'boom of [X]erox art'... the Brazilian market is the third in the world in potential sales and distribution of reprographic equipment... perhaps precisely due to the excessive use of the bureaucratic apparatus of the State. But we also resort to that typical way that Brazilians, especially artists who live here, 'make lemonade', when forced to dodge acts of repression and censorship enforced in the country in recent years.[4]

That xerography acquired such currency within São Paulo's artistic community after 1979 evidences the urgency with which artists harnessed the photocopier to simultaneously attack both the parameters of canonical art and the oppressive measures of the regime that facilitated access to this very technology.

It bears noting that for much of the 1970s xerography in São Paulo was in large part an ancillary support for artists' conceptual propositions. This was readily evident in 1979 with the first exhibition in Brazil entirely devoted to this technology, 'Gerox – Xerografias dos Artistas' at Espaço Max Pochon.[5] The exhibited works were all unframed and directly affixed to the wall; and in lieu of a catalogue with reproductions, visitors could purchase, for a modest price, their own portfolio of 'originals' – that is, a portfolio holding a photocopy of each exhibited photocopy work. The Portuguese language is nimbler in addressing the plural nature of these works: the ones affixed to the wall, and those enclosed in the portfolio, were equally designated as 'exemplares' ('issue' or 'copy'), with no qualitative, hierarchical distinction between the two. The term 'Gerox' was coined by Spanish artist Julio Plaza, who had been based in São Paulo since 1973: a combination of 'gravura' (print or etching) and 'xerox', it, as well as the exhibition, exemplified how artists in São Paulo approached xerography. Reproducing drawings, collages and photographs, they revelled in the technology's pluralising capability, the Argentine artist León Ferrari, active since his exile to São Paulo in 1976, signing and numbering his xerographic works as editions of infinity using the ∞ symbol, slyly subverting the value ascribed to traditional print runs.[6]

PHOTO (COLOR): Rafael França, Untitled, c 1979, four photocopies, 21 × 29.7 cm each, courtesy of Hugo França and Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, photo: Renato Parada

Prior to 'Gerox', xerography had made an appearance in São Paulo as the leading support for numerous mail artworks in the seminal exhibitions 'Prospectiva 74' (1974) and 'Poéticas Visuais' (1977) at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea of the Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP), both shows aimed at taking the pulse of art experimentation in Brazil and internationally, and which decisively affirmed a transnational turn to print experimentation with mass media technologies.[7] Notably, 'Poéticas Visuais' placed a photocopier in the exhibition gallery for public use. As museum's director Walter Zanini proclaimed in his presentation essay, 'the public will be able to obtain xerox copies of the majority of the documents exhibited, thereby also making it... a portable exhibition'.[8] Nevertheless, MAC USP was marginal financially, geographically and symbolically within the artworld of São Paulo. It did not enjoy the same patronage as other institutions in the city, such as the São Paulo Biennial and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, and local critics resisted its increasingly experimental programming. Yet this lack of understanding ultimately proved to be vital: if conservative critics could not understand the practices exhibited at MAC USP, then less so the regime's monitors. It is also worth noting that MAC USP is located in the Ibirapuera Park, miles away from the university's campus, which means it is removed from the routine profiling and raids of academic activities on the part of the military police. And so, even though MAC USP was a vibrant hotbed of experimentation thanks to its marginal positioning, its espousal of conceptual propositions, and of newly available technologies such as the photocopier, would not be echoed by other institutions until years later.

While a marginal event, 'Gerox' nonetheless proved to be a watershed exhibition, heralding an intense period of experimentation with this technology within the city. In fact, more than thirty exhibitions dedicated to xerography were organised in São Paulo between 1979 and 1984, in alternative spaces, commercial galleries and museums.[9] It was a veritable boom unparalleled in the Americas. Yet it was the exhibition 'Xerografia', which opened in May 1980 at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, that marked the technology's definitive entry into the institutional sphere.

In 1980 the Pinacoteca was under the new leadership of Fernando Magalhães. An art critic, Magalhães had been a vocal advocate of conceptual practices and experimentation with new technologies, and at the gallery he quickly initiated a programme akin to that of MAC USP, designating a new space solely for temporary exhibitions of emerging practices in print, film, video and performance, which 'Xerografia' would inaugurate on 15 May 1980. Organised by León Ferrari, 'Xerografia' featured works by forty artists, the vast majority of whom were based in São Paulo.[10] The exhibition was notable for its reflexive engagement with the practice it was showcasing: on the day it opened at the Pinacoteca, 'Xerografia' opened simultaneously in two other locations, at the Núcleu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de Paraíba, in the north-eastern city of João Pessoa, and at the Casa das Artes Plásticas, in the city of Piracicaba.[11] Moreover, the exhibition featured another radical proposition: a few months previously, Magalhães had secured a Xerox 3107 (a model made exclusively in Brazil, popularly known as a brasileirinha, or 'the little Brazilian') for the exhibition's participating artists to experiment freely with. Many eagerly took him up on the offer: in a letter from 1981 to Xerox Brasil soliciting additional supplies, Magalhães relates how, between June 1980 and February 1981, the artists had made approximately 110,000 copies on the machine.[12] A registrar's report for the exhibition elucidates the considerable diversity of approaches to the photocopy that artists developed during this period.[13] Whereas artists such as Carmela Gross and Hudinilson Junior put together several large-format photocopies to create sizeable wall-mounted installations,[14] others, such as León Ferrari and Regina Silveira, treated the photocopier as a printmaking device, hanging individual copies separately and within a frame.

Nowhere was this diversity made more evident than in a related public debate hosted by the Pinacoteca on 12 June 1980. The panellists for 'Xerografia como reprodução e como linguagem artística' ('Xerography as Reproduction and as Artistic Language') included Magalhães, art historians Aracy Amaral and Lisbeth Rebolo Gonçalves, and the artists León Ferrari, Roberto Sandoval, Maurício Fridman, Rafael França and Marcelo Nitsche, among others.[15] Even among the artists themselves, opinions varied greatly as to what the photocopier represented. A spirited discussion ensued as to whether the machine was simply a replicating device, a printmaking technique that could be manipulated, or an extension of photography – even video – in the near simultaneity it achieved between process and image. Ultimately, however, the conversation centred on the potential of xerographic works to activate new audiences.[16] This sentiment was characteristic of the critical discourse around xerography during this period. Many situated the thrust of xerography as a means for artistic and social critique in its very accessibility. After initially resisting the advent of photocopier technology in art, for example, by the early 1980s the critic Frederico Morais had become a champion of xerography precisely on the grounds of its accessibility, stating:

For the artist, xerography, for its low cost and operational facilities, allows a streamlining of artistic practice and its message, which is really something interesting and positive. Much more than other means that allow technical reproducibility, be it traditional printmaking, be it video-art; xerography dynamically inserts itself in contemporary life because of its large capacity for circulation, serving as an effective instrument of democratisation, not only of production but of consumption itself, since the number of copies is unlimited.[17]

In other words, critical discourse tended to dwell on the ramifications of this technology. Then again, one detects a sense of unease with the works themselves – with their presence as material objects, and with how their ties to printmaking and photography in fact underpin their conceptual thrust. Art historian Annateresa Fabris described this resistance when she undertook a stocktake of the critical reviews of 'Gerox' and the 1981 exhibition 'Heliografia', a show of thermal and heliographic prints at the Pinacoteca that featured many of the same artists included in 'Gerox' and 'Xerografia', writing:

The pursuit of artistic values implicit in the [critics'] considerations – which are often condescending – given to the works in 'GEROX' and 'Heliografia' shows that works with new media are not analysed in their own terms. That is, in terms of the nature and functional possibilities of art and of experimentation with communication, in terms of the process that activates an osmosis between the medium and the artist, in terms of the search for another grammar and syntax, in terms of the denial of meaning and representation in favour of mental processes, in terms of technical and operational procedures that are the basis of photo-reproductive systems.[18]

Without a doubt, critical writing on such works – then and even now – often casts their distinctive poetics aside. Yet it would be myopic to simply attribute the intensity of experimentation with xerography solely to its accessibility. What if the search for that new 'grammar and syntax' flourished precisely because these technologies held the capacity to unfold alternate conceptual, aesthetic and affective spaces?

'Que imagem é esta? Como se vê?'

By 1978 Rafael França and Mario Ramiro, then students at the new School of Arts and Communications at USP, and their friend Hudinilson Junior, a student in the newly founded studio programme of the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, had been consistently experimenting with offset and photocopying to create artists' books, postcards and other small-format works for circulation. This was an ebullient period for the young artists, as they set about experimenting with myriad conceptual practices in their efforts to clandestinely critique Brazil's fraught socio-political context. The following year, the three began performing interventions as the collective 3NÓS3 – perhaps the most notable of which was placing hoods on several of São Paulo's landmark sculptures to publicly decry the regime's persecution and torture of political dissidents. Yet França, Ramiro and Hudinilson always maintained an individual, albeit collaborative practice. And it was their serendipitous encounter, in 1978, with a then new photocopier in the office of the Literature Department at USP that would merge together their interests in the engaging mass print media and with the body – their individual bodies, but also that of the spectator. Two department assistants, however, exclusively operated the photocopier, which was meant for reproducing theses, academic papers and meeting minutes.[19] After months of cajoling, the assistants relented, giving França, Ramiro and Hudinilson unsupervised access to the machine.

It was a momentous step, for it meant they no longer had to limit themselves to making copies of collages or flat surfaces. It also meant they could devote much more time to exploring the machine's possibilities: turning a blind eye to the artists' activities, the assistants effectively made it so that, in Ramiro's words, 'the cost of copies was wholly subsidised'.[20] In secretive, after-hours sessions they could now experiment with depth and, notably, with using their own bodies:

The novelty of copying our own bodies, beginning with our hands simply placed on the screen, brought to mind a sort of immemorial gesture, like that of pre-historic man stamping the imprint of his hand on the wall of a cave. Right at the start, we were thus all induced to carry out experiments with xeroxed bodies, transforming the copying machine into a sort of fixed camera.[21]

This approach to the photocopier would be transformative for these artists and novel to the São Paulo art scene. In performatively engaging with the machine, França, Hudinilson and Ramiro reorientated a tool designed for the faithful mechanical reproduction of text, making it image what lay beyond it: spatial depth, ephemerality and flesh. Once these artists began to linger on xerography as a visual language in its own right by distinctly incorporating the body, this technology became truly generative. Yes, making a photocopy was a physical act, something that was particularly evident when things went awry – most of us are all too familiar with jammed papers, bleeding toners, fingerprints on the glass, the blinding flash from lifting the cover prematurely – yet when these artists pressed their bodies onto the glass, they were not only reorientating the machine's function, they were also altering how the viewer would approach these works.

In a 1984 essay, Hudinilson posed a twofold question the translation of which betrays its apparent simplicity. A succinct observation, 'Xerography as language has now become the proposal/concern for these artists. What image is this?' is followed by a complex sentiment with a double meaning: 'Como se vê?', 'What does it look like?', but also, 'How do we look at it?' As we examine these later works, we should consider Hudinilson's complex question and elaborate upon it. How do we define these images? How do we experience them and what do they bear?

Xerography had already proven itself to be a potent manoeuvre for artistic and social critique in its poetics of repetition: not only did repetition collapse the ontology of original and copy demarcating the art object; the insistence inherent in repetition, to allow for circulation and dissemination, was a politically subversive act. Yet there was another, more vital aspect that these later works would flesh out from the poetics of repetition – one, in fact, encapsulated in Julio Plaza's neologism gerox, but which Plaza never directly addressed: that this term can also be read as the amalgamation of gerar ('to generate') and xerox. In the early 1980s xerography was indeed generative: it became a means by which to reproduce, on humble sheets of paper, insubordinate bodies anathema to the military regime.

Dissident Bodies

On the whole, São Paulo artists' xerographic works directly relied on embodied perception, asking people to physically handle, hold, fold or even crumple the objects. In their manipulation of the photocopier, França, Hudinilson and Ramiro created images that engaged in a haptic visuality, which harnessed the textural surfaces of flesh and hair pressed onto the machine's glass.[22] And while all xerographic works, because of their pedestrian support, activated a mode of spectatorship that hinged on familiarity rather than reverence, França, Hudinilson and Ramiro's works introduced a much more intimate encounter by asking the viewer to touch and handle their imaged bodies. Take, for example, Rafael França's untitled photocopy from 1979. A grid of masking tape, with its jagged edges and speckled, uneven texture, grounds the composition of two pairs of contorted, disembodied hands that materialise from the void. Over- and under-exposure render wrinkles and folds palpable. The image is grainy and textural, with gritty tonal contrasts, biotic creases and undulations. We are touched by an image in which the tips of the middle, ring and little fingers of the bottom right hand make contact with the glass. This is a simple yet significant gesture. In making direct, tactile contact with the machine, França reorientates the machine's function away from the expedient aesthetic of bureaucracy to an aesthetic of urgency: of imagery requiring physical immediacy, of perverting the technologies facilitated by the regime, and ultimately, of corrupting the precision and purported neutrality of mechanical duplication by forcing it to convey parts of individual bodies.

PHOTO (COLOR): Mário Ramiro, Narrativa em xerox, 1979, eight photocopies, 21 × 29.7 cm each, courtesy of the artist and Galeria Zipper

Mario Ramiro also explored an aesthetic of urgency and immediacy through haptic and visceral images. Two works from 1979, Prisioneiro 2 (Prisoner 2) and Linha-fagia (Line-phagy), employ the same motif: multiple panels reveal a sequence in which Ramiro, his hands and face so near that his nose presses against the glass, ingests or regurgitates a strip of white paper. In Prisioneiro 2, we witness Ramiro's hands peeking through seemingly rigid horizontal lines that encase the surface. Ramiro then divulges their fragility, violently devouring them into a pulpy mass of tendril-like ribbons. Linha-fagia, meanwhile, reverses the action: Ramiro first appears to frame his face, in profile, with his right hand, only to produce the white band from his mouth. The paper eventually overtakes the image. Yet in this reversal it gathers, like viscera; contrasting with the stark parallel lines of the first panel of Prisioneiro 2.

There are clear resonances between Prisioneiro 2, Linha-fagia and Lygia Clark's emblematic action Baba antropofágica (Anthropophagic Drool), staged in Paris in 1973. Here, participants knelt around another person lying supine on the floor. With eyes closed, those kneeling continuously pulled a string of cotton thread from a spool in their mouths, letting the thread fall on the reclining figure to eventually envelop their body. Purposefully messy and eliciting a certain level of revulsion, Baba antropofágica relied on the exchange of metaphorical viscera to establish an affective, intersubjective connection where, in Clark's words, 'word communication is too weak'.[23] Taken together, Prisioneiro 2 and Linha-fagia re-enact the premise of Clark's work, yet their execution situates them in Ramiro's distinct context: São Paulo, in 1979, the year marking the fifteenth anniversary of Brazil's first military coup. And whereas Baba antropofágica fostered collectivity through exchange, Ramiro's performative action is poignant in its solitude. Unreciprocated, his solitary ingestion and regurgitation of his own viscera is circular, Sisyphean. The images of his violent hunger and regurgitation are confining and claustrophobic, a forceful representation of the political climate that surrounds him, imploring the viewer's affective response.

Graph: Documentation of Hudinilson Jr performing Exercício de me ver II, 1982, 46 × 29.5 cm, courtesy of the artist's estate and Galeria Jaqueline Martins

Hudinilson's work, particularly the aforementioned series Exercísio de me ver, also translates ephemeral performative actions into affective, haptic surfaces. Here it bears noting that throughout his career Hudinilson was intensely intrigued by the figure of Narcissus, relentlessly exploring the theme of his own image and reflection. During the 1970s and 1980s he would even insert the word Narcisse in his titles and habitually stamp the name on his xerographies. When we turn to documentary photographs of him performing Exercísio de me ver we essentially witness a sexual act with the machine, as, completely unrestrained, he interacts with it. Unsurprisingly, analyses of his oeuvre have pivoted entirely around the auto-erotic.[24] But are these xerographic extensions of his body merely solipsistic impressions?

PHOTO (COLOR): Hudinilson Jr, HEROS HART, 1980, photocopy with rubber stamp imprints, 21 × 29.7 cm, courtesy of the artist's estate and Arquivo Multimeios/Divisão de Acervo, Documentação e Conservação, photo: the author

Along with performing collective interventions as part of 3NÓS3, during this period Hudinilson devoted himself to creating subversively queer collages, often making them first in scrapbooks and then photocopying them. Narcisse-HerosHart, from 1980, is paradigmatic: it is a collection of illicit homoerotic images, clandestinely reproduced, then titled and 'signed' with rubber stamps. The now familiar 'Narcisse' is also stamped repeatedly in red ink on the top left corner. The work mocks the paraphernalia of bureaucracy – those ordinary forms, rubber stamps and photocopies – for the easy transmission of information, directives, power. As a final provocation, Hudinilson inks the head of his own penis and stamps it underneath the title.

Such works at the time directly confronted censorship and repression through images of queer 'perversion'. The dictatorship had always maintained animosity towards queer communities, but during the specific context of Brazil's abertura (opening) period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the regime entered its final phase and began implementing policies aimed at its eventual transition to democracy, Hudinilson's stance gained ever more urgency. Part of the government's programme was an official campaign to 'cleanse' public spaces of those deemed 'undesirable' – gays, lesbians, transvestites and prostitutes – by unleashing droves of military police into urban centres at night to crack down on bars and gatherings. Indeed, cleansing the public space of 'deviancy' became an integral component of a set of measures taken by the regime to make the country fit to enter the neoliberal world stage.[25]

The Movimento Arte-Pornô (Porn Art Movement, or MAP) was founded in 1980 as a direct response to the oppressive actions of the regime. Originally organised by Rio de Janeiro-based artists Eduardo Kac, Claufe Rodrigues, Leila Míccolis, Tanussi Cardoso, Denise and Cairo Assis Trindade, MAP was a loose collective of artists and poets. It staged public interventions that included nude demonstrations, and circulated self-published zines full of poems and texts that harnessed explicitly vulgar and sexual language, or what was termed 'libidinal grammar'. Art historian Fernanda Nogueira outlines the group's objective:

The Movement's interventionist programme was about blowing open the habitual, intimate, and fatal relationship with words and situations faced on a daily basis during those dictatorial decades... The idea was to take everything seen as abnormal, immoral, and censurable by the repressive regime, starting with stigmatised language and words (swearwords, blasphemies, and sexual slanders), and turn it on its head in order to provoke, performatically, a radical inversion of those values whilst inciting another form of sexuality and relationship with the body, indiscriminately stripped and cross-dressed to poke maximum fun at that (hetero)patriarchal, chauvinistic, but purportedly 'neutral' regime.[26]

MAP's provocative stance was soon gaining attention beyond Rio de Janeiro: later that year, several artists added their names to its manifesto, including Hudinilson. Zona de tensão, which would re-emerge in public protests three decades later, became the cover image for poet and fellow MAP member Glauco Mattoso's 1981 text, 'O que é poesia marginal' ('What Marginal Poetry Is').

'By multiplying it is possible to construct difference, to open ourselves to the unknown... In uniformed societies, the place of art is that of dispersion.'[27] So proclaimed the Argentine scholar Néstor García Canclini upon encountering León Ferrari's xerographic and heliographic work in 1982. Xerography in São Paulo was always about an insistence to disseminate, circulate and, ultimately, connect rhizomatically with others at the margins. França, Ramiro and Hudinilson multiplied their politically subversive bodies – and Hudinilson reproduced what allegedly could not be procreated: his queer body. He reoriented one of the more ubiquitous bureaucratic objects produced by a society that defines an upright citizen as productive and reproductive, normative and obedient. To contemplate his reflection is not to indulge in his supposed vanity, but to consider the poetic subversion posed by the multiplied image of a body unkempt, prostrate and queer.

Different versions of this article were presented at the 'Exhibiting and Narrating Latin American/Latino Art' seminar hosted by the Getty Foundation at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires in May 2014 and at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts in March 2016. I would like to thank the organisers for inviting me to participate in these events, and also for the valuable feedback I received on these occasions, especially from Andrea Giunta, George Flaherty, Ondine Chavoya, Brynn Hatton, Catherine Howe and Kailani Polzak.

1 Alleging that the exhibition 'pervert[ed] the notions of the family', Brazil's Christian evangelical far right called for and succeeded in closing down 'Queermuseu' at Porto Alegre's Santander Cultural on 10 September 2017, and the exhibition's curator, Gaudêncio Fidelis, was called to appear before Brazil's Federal Senate on the charges of 'Mistreatment of Children and Teenagers'. Also in September, members of the far right staged protests against São Paulo's Museu de Arte Moderna in response to the nude performance of Brazilian artist Wagner Schwartz, and the following month the museum's administration moved to enforce, for the first time in its seventy-year history, a minimum age restriction on gallery entry on the occasion of the exhibition 'Histórias da sexualidade' ('Histories of Sexuality'). After much opposition, the museum reversed its decision and opted for a warning notice at the entrance to the gallery. On 7 November far right protesters in São Paulo blocked the entrance to a conference co-organised by the theorist Judith Butler, burning her in effigy for 'perverting' family values. See Elisa Wouk Almino, 'Curator Called Before Senate Hearing as Brazil's Right-Wing Groups Target the Arts', Hyperallergic, 20 November 2017, https://hyperallergic.com/412532/brazil-art-culture-crackdown/, accessed 21 November 2017. See also 'Artistas protestam no Masp contra proibição de menores em exposição sobre sexualidade', O Globo, 20 October 2017, https://g1.globo.com/sao-paulo/noticia/artistas-protestam-no-masp-contra-proibicao-da-entrada-de-menores-em-exposicao-sobre-sexualidade.ghtml, accessed 21 November 2017, and Scott Jaschick, 'Judith Butler on Being Attacked in Brazil', Inside Higher Ed, accessed 13 November 2017, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/13/judith-butler-discusses-being-burned-effigy-and-protested-brazil, accessed 22 November 2017. 2 Márion Strecker wrote a poignant and unshrinking obituary for him: 'Artista bom é artista morto' ('A Good Artist is a Dead Artist'), seLecT, 2 July 2014, http://www.select.art.br/artista-bom-e-artista-morto/, accessed 26 November 2017. 3 Many artists in São Paulo participated in this radical turn to print media, but the following names engaged in a sustained and focused experimentation with it: Argentines Antonio Lizárraga and León Ferrari, Gabriel Borba, Donato Ferrari, Alex Flemming, Mauricio Fridman, Carmela Gross, Mário Ishikawa, Nelson Leirner, Artur Matuck, Marcello Nitsche, the Spaniard Julio Plaza, Ubirajara Ribeiro, Gerty Saruê and Regina Silveira, as well as then art students Rafael França, Hudinilson Jr, Tadeu Jungle and Walter Silveira. 4 Hudinilson Jr, ed, Arte Xerox Brasil: Caderno Arte Xerox, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, 1984, np, Biblioteca da Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, item PE10355. Hudinilson in fact uses the Brazilian idiom 'jogo da cintura', literally 'sway of the waist', whose meaning most closely resembles 'when life gives you lemons, make lemonade'. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the present author. 5 The exhibiting artists in 'Gerox' were José Roberto Aguilar, Alex Flemming, Anna Carretta, Antonio Lizárraga, Carmela Gross, Gabriel Borba, Genilson Soares, Gerty Saruê, Julio Plaza, León Ferrari, Marcello Nitsche, Mary Dritschel, Mauricio Fridman, Mira Schendel, Nelson Leirner, Rafael França and Regina Silveira. 6 In 1980 Ferrari wrote, 'The first exhibition [was] "GEROX", a word invented by Julio. Afterwards we numbered them as infinites. I wanted to retain the relation with printmaking, signing them and numbering them with a pencil. To make an unlimited edition, we used the infinity symbol.' León Ferrari, 'Depoimento: o problema da xerografia nos anos 70 em São Paulo', 27 May 1980, Arquivo Multimeios, Centro Cultural São Paulo, São Paulo, item 0671AP/TP0062. 7 The vast majority of the works shown in these two exhibitions were collages, postcards, artists' books and collaborative magazines, all of which were reproduced using offset printing or photocopying. 8 Walter Zanini in Walter Zanini and Julio Plaza, eds, Poéticas visuais, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 1977, np 9 See 'Cronologia' in Hudinilson Jr, ed, Arte Xerox Brasil, op cit, np The participating artists in 'Xerografia' were Alberto Cedrón, Alex Flemming, Amelia Toledo, Ana Cristina, R P Almeida, Anésia Pacheco e Chaves, Anna Carreta, Antonio Lizárraga, Bené Fonteles, Bernardo Krasnianski, Carlos Clémen, Carmela Gross, Doraci Goulart, Genilson Soares, Gerty Saruê, Hudinilson Jr, Iara Simonetti, José Olimpio Pinheiro, José Roberto Aguilar, José Wagner Garcia, Julio Plaza, León Ferrari, Leonhard Frank Duch, Lucio Kume, Marcello Nitsche, Marco do Valle, M Frei, Maria Luiza, Sabboia Saddi, Mário Ishikawa, Martin Kovensky, Mary Dritschel, Mauricio Fridman, Michele Bril, Odair Magalhães, Paulo Bruscky, Rafael França, Regina Silveira, Roberto Kepler, Ruth Gusmão, Vera Chaves Barcellos and Walter Silveira. The agreement for participation in the exhibition stipulated that every artist was to provide three copies of each work, one for each venue. See 'Xerografia. Convite e condições de participação', 16 April 1980, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, item B.03.03.0001/Xerografia. 'Fábio Magalhães to Xerox Brasil', 13 February 1981, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, item B.54.01.0091/Xerografia 'Recibo de obras', Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 1980, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, item B.03.03.0001/Xerografia The registrar's report indicates that, in addition to sets of photocopies, both artists provided diagrams of their installations. 'Xerografia como reprodução e como linguagem artística: debate', 12 June 1980, Arquivo Multimeios, Centro Cultural São Paulo, item 0671AP/TR1088-TR1089 Amaral, for one, praised such efforts to renew artistic language yet voiced concern for what she saw to be xerography's elliptical poetics: 'I get a bit apprehensive about this way of applying oneself, a bit too intensely, onto an endeavor – I do not see [in] it, even from the point of view of content itself, a social preoccupation.' Magalhães was more receptive, seeing in xerography's affordability the promise of reaching wider audiences and an engagement with 'a greater collectivity'. León Ferrari echoed Magalhães's anticipation: '[xerox] can be a new form, a new technique, new images, an anti-art... But we have yet to be able to uncover the audience for xerox, at the price level of xerox. I will believe that when we can find this audience... ' Ibid, p 13, p 15, pp 17–18. Frederico Morais, 'Contra a arte afluente: o corpo é o motor da "obra"', Revista de Cultura Vozes, vol 1, no 64, January/February 1970, pp 45–59; Frederico Morais, 'A heliografia como processo artístico', O Globo, 1 May 1981 Annateresa Fabris, Antonio Lizárraga: uma poética da radicalidade, EdUSP, São Paulo, 2000, p 36 Mario Ramiro, 'As xerografias de Rafael França: o renascimento das linhas de força', in Helouise Costa, ed, Sem medo da vertigem: Rafael França, Marca D'Agua, São Paulo, 1997, p 37 Ibid, p 36 Ibid 'Haptic visuality' is borrowed from Laura Marks in order to address the sensuous formal and textual qualities of these images, as well as the notion of a visceral and mimetic relationship between a viewer and an image. See Laura U Marks, The Skin of the Film, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2000. Lygia Clark cited in Guy Brett, 'Lygia Clark: In Search of the Body', Art in America, July 1994, p 62 In 2014 the Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo organised the exhibition 'Hudinilson Junior: Em torno de Narciso'; see http://www.mac.usp.br/mac/expos/2014/hudinilson/home.htm, accessed 18 September 2019. Erin Aldana briefly touches upon Hudinilson's xerographic works through the theme of Narcissus in her study of the collective he formed with Mario Ramiro and Rafael França, 3Nós3, 'Interventions into Urban and Art Historical Spaces: The Work of the Artist Group 3Nos3 in Context, 1979–1982', doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2008. See Suely Rolnik, 'The Geopolitics of Pimping', Transversal Texts, Journal of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, October 2006, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/rolnik/en, accessed 10 October 2017. See also Fernanda Marcondes Nogueira, 'The Porn-Art Movement in Brazil: "Fictional Genealogies" of Southern Pornographies', in Alianças de corpos vulneráveis: feminismos, ativismo bicha e cultura visual = Alliances of vulnerable bodies: feminisms, queer activisim and visual culture, Edições SESC/Associação Cultural Videobrasil, São Paulo, 2016, p 18. Nogueira, 'Porn-Art Movement in Brazil', op cit, pp 28–29 'Rubber stamps, Letraset, photocopy – the most prosaic elements and techniques can engender the unexpected. They reveal a truth of the contemporary world that is concealed to those who are apocalyptic: that there is no fatally dark destiny in serialization. By multiplying it is possible to build difference, to open ourselves to the unknown... In uniformed societies, the place of art is dispersion.' Néstor García Canclini, 'El arte se hace en fotocopias', Unomásuno, 8 April 1982, p 16.

By Mari Rodríguez Binnie

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