Receita de Arte Brasileira (Recipe for Brazilian Art)

My Testimony

In June 1977, Cooperativa Geral para Assuntos da Arte (General Cooperative for Art Affairs) the fictitious name of the Mauricio Fridman + Gabriel Borba collective, summoned persons to express their views on the importance, the format and the content of a recurrent subject at the time, "brazilian art".

The call, which promised to redistribute to participants copies of the material received, resulted in 13 responses. The set was put in Cooperativa stationary envelopes and ended up being more widely distributed than was originally promised. Each one of the resulting responses was published on Folha de São Paulo -high circulation newspaper-  in the Visual Art Supplement

Curators Erin Aldana and Erin Sullivan pleaded a copy of the Rceita de Arte Brasileira (Recipe for Brazilian Art) to participate in the exhibition Copy Art in Brazil, 1970-1990 at the end of 2017 and at the beginning of 2018, University Galleries, University of San Diego. One of the curators thought to only show one page or another due to texts being in Portuguese. I was consulted and wrote:

"Oh Erin.
Doesn't really makes sense showing just one or another of those things in Receita de Arte Brasileira.
Besides all it is an opportunity to discuss some of the artistic movements from the seventies such as fake associations; fake statements (some time real statments) pretending serious things as real life. The Receita... is one of this kind of things. Cooperativa Geral para Assuntos da Arte is a fake association with pompous name, mocking the real ones. If you really need to make people understand some of it, make small tags with short translation.
If you select and show only one of those statements you will be behaving as those we were mocking of.

Gabriel"

_{Gabriel Borba, 2018} 

_{(translation review José Manoel Borba)}