Insertions into Historiographic Circuits

Abstract

This article establishes the context for the original publication of Ronaldo Brito's pioneering 1975 essay, “Neo-concretism Apex and Rupture of the Brazilian Constructive Project” in the third and last issue of the Rio de Janeiro-based art journal Malasartes. It argues that Brito's text was a concerted effort to intervene within the determining logic of what the author and others termed “the circuit,” that is, the conjunction of protagonists, operations, and effects that produce and reproduce “the art world.” In this sense, Brito's essay was nothing less than a discursive rejoinder to the provocation of Cildo Meireles's seminal conceptual work Insertions Into Ideological Circuits (1970–75), likewise published in Malasartes. Brito not only provided the first political and structural analysis of the Neo-concrete movement as a localized response to a transnational field of constructive practices, he advanced a model of critical art history that realigned theoretical production with ideological critique.