PAULO BRUSCKY - Limpos e Desinfetados / Cleans and Desinfecteds
Medium: Postal Art | Dimensions: 8,5 x 11,5 cm | Year: 1987

 

ARTWORK FORMAL DESCRIPTION

Black and white postcard. On the front of the card, an image of two middle-aged men with transverse bands on their chests with the words: clean and disinfected. On the back, the sender's information and Portuguese and English words.

 

FOR REFLECTION

Although Paulo Bruscky's work addresses the Military Dictatorship in Brazil, for the period of its creation, in the current context, it becomes a perfect allegory with the arrangement of the figures and the words Clean and Disinfected, which are a kind of vital reminder for our survival.

These are the slogans of 2020:

CLEANING refers to the act of removing impurities, dirt. It is synonymous with hygiene, sanity, wholesomeness, purification.

DISINFECTION is a deeper cleaning; to eliminate the germs that cause infection, it is sterilization.

Hence, it is the topic of the present moment, as the contagion of the coronavirus occurs through "contact with contaminated surfaces and objects (...) and also with sick people" (TOLEDO, 2020). According to Dr. Bruna Sabagh from Fiocruz, "The recommendation is that people do not leave home; to stay in social isolation. But in case of extreme necessity, the person must, when arriving from the street, take off their shoes and clean them in a spare place at home, wash their hands with soap and water, change their clothes and wash them immediately, and then take a shower" (TOLEDO, 2020).

 

TECHNIQUE - POSTAL ART

American artist Ray Johnson is considered the first artist of mail (or "postal") art, whose experiments began in 1943. Postal art - like Dadaism, Surrealism, and Russian Constructivism - has its roots in Italian Futurism (1910-20), "which strengthened the thought for a new way of perceiving art, which sought to escape from pre-established means". Artists of the 1960s absorbed that thought out of the need they felt to bring the population closer to the work of art. Thus: "Arte Correio (Mail Art) emerged at a time when communication, despite the multiplicity of media, has become more difficult, while official art is, more and more, compromised by the speculation of the capitalist market, fleeing from an entire reality to benefit a few: bourgeois, art dealers, critics, and most of the galleries that exploit artists insatiably," Bruscky wrote in an original text from 1976, reprinted countless times and available on Canal Contemporâneo. "In Mail Art, art resumes its main functions: information, protest, and denunciation." (STRECKER, 2017).