Movimento de Arte Pornô (1980–84): Poetry, Performance, and Pansexuality

Author

Tie Jojima, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Art History

Advisor

Anna Indych-López

Committee Members

Siona Wilson

Claire Bishop

Mila Burns

Ana Maria Maia

Subject Categories

Contemporary Art | Fine Arts | Interdisciplinary Arts and Media | Poetry | Queer Studies | Theory and Criticism

Keywords

Brazilian Art, Performance, Poetry, Art and Pornography, Abertura

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the Movimento de Arte Pornô (Porn Art movement), a networked group of Brazilian visual artists and poets who embraced pornography in their aesthetic practices from 1980 to 1984, during the Abertura, a transitional process from dictatorship to democracy. Seeking to uproot the conservative values that had shaped Brazilian society under the dictatorship, the group proposed a provocative—pansexual—cultural project with performances and interventions in the public sphere, visual works, and DIY porn art publications. Centering the body as a major source of artistic enunciation and the ultimate site for its fruition, the movement embraced porn as a tool of subject production and identity formation through pleasure. In this dissertation I argue that the artists from the Porn Art movement embraced porn to assert it as an important mode for sexual minorities to mobilize as an agent of their own representation and pleasure, creating diverse pornographies with hybrid media and inviting viewers to cultivate multiple subjectivities.

Chapter 1 places the movement in dialogue with the historical Brazilian avant-garde, most notably the “cannibalist” movement of Antropofagia. This chapter highlights how both groups embraced societal taboos rooted in the body—cannibalism and pornography—to stimulate new formal experimentation. In this chapter I compare these two movements to argue that if Antropofagia embraced the image of the cannibal to construct national identity through the metaphorical digestion of cultures, the Porn Art movement turned to the production of subjects who are shaped by images and embodied experiences. Chapter 2 examines the Porn Art interventions of Gang, a subgroup of artists who articulated the movement as a whole and organized publications and performances in Rio de Janeiro. I argue that Gang’s artworks subverted the traditional experience of pornography, from the private and individual to the public and collective realm, converting pornographic affect (e.g., sexual arousal) into shared experiences, such as collective laughter and the vocalization of bawdy words, that might transform the public sphere. Chapter 3 focuses on the production of women artists participating in the movement: Leila Míccolis, Teresa Jardim, Sandra Terra, Denise Trindade, and Cynthia Dorneles. These artists embraced sexuality and the body as fundamental themes in their artistic and poetic practices, asserting themselves as desiring subjects and criticizing social structures that repress women. In this chapter I argue that these women artists subverted the masculinist and heteronormative conventions of the genre by asserting their voices as sexual subjects and agents of production and claiming their right to pleasure. Chapter 4 focuses on the Xerox artworks by Hudinilson Jr. and Eduardo Kac, as well as the Porn Art network facilitated by this technology. In this chapter I argue that, for these artists, the Xerox machine functioned as an allegory of pornography. By considering porn as an apparatus that followed specific codes of representation, these artists tampered with the Xerox machine to evidence the artificiality of pornography and the role of reproductive technology in the creation of subjects.

Recommended Citation

Jojima, Tie, "Movimento de Arte Pornô (1980–84): Poetry, Performance, and Pansexuality" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6040