Áudio-Visual: The Slide as Medium in Brazilian Art

Abstract

“Áudio-Visual: The Slide as Medium in Brazilian Art” examines the emergence of slide projection as a medium of artistic, pedagogical, critical, and curatorial experimentation in Brazil between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s. As a guiding thread, I center on the polyvalent work of the Brazilian art critic Frederico Morais, who developed a practice of slide projection that he termed the "audio-visual" (áudio-visual), setting the stage for the subsequent rise of slide and film-based works in the Brazilian art circuit. I argue that the “audio-visual” reshapes our understanding of three transnational developments in this period: the advent of the projected image in art; the historiographic exploration of the role of the slide lecture in the discipline of art history; and finally, the parallel uses of slide projection in educational practices as disparate as Freirean pedagogy and military and police training. Across these fields of action, artists and pedagogues experimented with the conventions of the comparative slide lecture in order to rethink the political underpinnings of the epistemology of comparison.

I theorize this restructuring of slide projection through three interrelated principles: the “interval,” the “live image,” and the “enclosure.” Each of these operations constitutes an attempt to negotiate power, with potentially emancipatory as well as repressive ramifications that continue to be unraveled in contemporary media practices. Consequently, I argue for the ongoing significance of the conventions of slide projection in the contemporary moment. In particular, I call for the reexamination of the media of art history as the means by which the discipline was not only erected in European and American metropolises, but also circulated and reconfigured throughout the world.