David Byrne Journal

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10.13.06:

I am planning a public bike forum/arts and entertainment event in the spring with the help of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. I imagine a meeting of ordinary people, biking advocates and city reps from the Dept. of Transportation, Parks, police and urban planning. Interspersed with this dream of reaching a compromise and progress on making the city more livable will be bike-related entertainment — to be announced when confirmed. I dream that civic work, improvement and action can be mixed with art and entertainment — that culture and politics can mix and be fun. Well, we’ll see.

As a result, the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives invited me to a meeting organized by Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer about transportation, held at Columbia University. I wasn’t able to stay for the whole thing, but was excited to meet Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá (Colombia) who revolutionized the transportation and parks in that city.

He created a new bus mass transit system, bike lanes, pedestrian streets — all of which had the effect of relieving congestion, boosting the economy and making Bogotá and its surroundings a better place to live. (Some inspirational credit should go to the Brazilian city of Curitiba, a town that made these kinds of changes some years ago and serves as an example. Unfortunately, Curitiba is, to me, a pretty boring town, but these changes have made it more livable for the residents.)

Here’s an excerpt from a piece Peñalosa wrote called “The Politics of Happiness”:

One common measure of the cleanliness of a mountain stream is to look for trout. If you find the trout, the habitat is healthy. It’s the same way with children in a city. Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.

When I was elected mayor of Bogotá and got to city hall, I was handed a transportation study that said the most important thing the city could do was to build an elevated highway at a cost of $600 million. Instead, we installed a bus system that carries 700,000 people a day at a cost of $300 million. We created hundreds of pedestrian-only streets, parks, plazas, and bike paths, planted trees, and got rid of cluttering commercial signs. We constructed the longest pedestrian-only street in the world. [more than 20km!] It may seem crazy, because this street goes through some of the poorest neighborhoods in Bogotá, and many of the surrounding streets aren’t even paved. But we chose not to improve the streets for the sake of cars, but instead to have wonderful spaces for pedestrians. All this pedestrian infrastructure shows respect for human dignity. We’re telling people, “You are important — not because you’re rich or because you have a Ph.D., but because you are human.” If people are treated as special, as sacred even, they behave that way. This creates a different kind of society.

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The Transportation Alternatives people arranged that we all meet on the west side greenway — very near where I live — at 7:30 in the morning. Peñalosa and the TA folks — then we’d all ride up together to Columbia University (116th Street) as a symbolic gesture. Moby and actor Matthew Modine were supposed to join as well, but they were no-shows. (To be fair, maybe they had never committed and their inclusion was just a publicist’s hopeful rumor.)

At Columbia I was introduced to some of the political players — taxi and limousine commission dept., dept. of transportation, borough president’s office, etc. It’s another world. Then there were short speeches from some of those — Iris Weinshall from Dept. of Transportation said some wonderful things. If those hopes and promises are fulfilled it would be wonderful for NY.

Peñalosa showed slides of Bogotá and talked about what he did.

Here are some quotes (paraphrased):

“If a bike lane isn’t safe for an 8 year old child, it isn’t a bike lane.”

“A place without sidewalks privileges the automobile, and therefore the richer people in cars have more rights; this is undemocratic.”

(Peñalosa tended to link equality with democracy — an idea that is anathema to many in the U.S. I am simplifying here.)

“Upper-income people have always had access to nature and recreation. They go to country houses, golf clubs, restaurants, hunting preserves. What do the poor, especially in the Third World, have as an alternative to television? All poor people have are public spaces, so this is not a luxury. They are the minimum a democratic society can provide to begin to compensate for the inequalities that exist in society.

“Since we took these steps, we’ve seen a reduction in crime and a change in attitude toward the city.”

For New York, Peñalosa recommended first imagining what a city could be, what would one wish for, what could be achieved in 100 or more years. As with the great Gothic cathedrals one has to imagine something that one will not see in one’s lifetime, but one’s children or grandchildren may experience it. This also frees one from quickly dismissing ideas as too idealistic or practically improbable. Of course, like dealing with global warming, it needs political will to accomplish, something that ebbs and flows, rises and falls. So looking at the bright side, if there is precious little of that will now, that doesn’t mean there will never be any.

Peñalosa asked that we imagine Broadway, the longest street in the United States, as a pedestrian street. He asked that we imagine reclaiming contact with the East River and dismantling the FDR drive.

As an interim measure, we might turn one long street, like Broadway or 5th Ave., into a pedestrian street just on Sunday afternoons. (The fact that NYC businesses don’t rely much on car access and on having massive parking lots out front like in the suburbs makes this all within the realm of possibility.)

Imagine 42nd Street could be a pedestrian street… it almost is now, with all the stalled traffic and jaywalking. Imagine it as a long plaza, with theaters, restaurants, trees in the middle of the street, seats, outdoor cafés…free wi-fi.

Kyp Malone of the great rock band TV on the Radio will perform Sunday, October 22 at the Arthur Nights festival at the Palace Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.

“Singing guitarist Kyp Malone [does] vocals redolent of Curtis Mayfield, Prince, and the Beach Boys(!)” — L.A. CityBeat

Other acts performing that night are Comets On Fire, Fiery Furnaces, The Sharp Ease, The Archie Bronson Outfit, Ocrilim feat. Mick Barr, The Nice Boys, SSM, The Colossal Yes (feat. Utrillo of Comets on Fire), the Chuck Dukowski Sextet, Effi Briest and C.B. Brand. Click here for Arthur Nights ticket info.

October 13, 2006
Art Review | ‘Tropicália’

When a Burst of Sunshine Swept Over Brazil’s Art World

By HOLLAND COTTER

A lot of the most radical art of the 1960’s and 70’s never made it into museums, or did so only in residue form, like swept-up confetti after a party. This was certainly true of art based on actions and interactions rather than on objects. A thing of beauty may be a joy forever, but a beautiful gesture? Did you see it? No? Too late. It’s gone.

“Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture,” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, is an absorbing if inevitably diffuse attempt to recapture such a fugitive art, one that flourished for a mere five years, from 1967 to 1972. Tropicália, or Tropicalism, wasn’t a style or a movement as much as an atmosphere, a rush of youthful, cosmopolitan, liberationist optimism that broke over Brazil like a sun shower and soaked into everything: art, music, fashion, film, theater, literature.

Almost instantly it gave rise to a crop of startling hybrids: American psychedelic rock cross-pollinating sambas, political resistance with the pleasure principle, Brazilian art with international art. The new growth was dense and enveloping: you looked at it, listened to it, tasted it, breathed in its perfume, lived in it.

Or you didn’t, in which case the whole phenomenon was puzzling at best, and threatening at worst. To the military authorities then in power it was a clear and present danger. They let the party go on for a while, then clamped down hard. By 1972 Tropicália was effectively over, leaving scraps of itself — photographs, films, recordings, manifestoes and fragile pieces of art — behind.

The show, organized by Carlos Basualdo, a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is largely made up of such scraps. In historical exhibitions this could be a serious liability. You would be getting only a fragmented view of a larger whole. But even at its peak Tropicália was a thing of many parts, some of which, like art and pop music, connected only obliquely. It brought global and Brazilian culture together in barely digested combinations. Politically it was oppositional without being ideological, or rather it embraced many ideologies.

The name Tropicália actually derived from art, specifically from a single work by Hélio Oiticica (1937-80), a leading figure of the Brazilian avant-garde. He was born into a family of leftist intellectuals in Rio de Janeiro and went to school there in the 1950’s with a group of remarkable contemporaries, among them Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, who are major presences in the Bronx show.

Although Mr. Oiticica’s main work at the time was utopian, Mondrian-inspired abstract painting, he also experimented with ephemeral materials and tactile forms. In 1964 he started attending a samba school in one of Rio’s favelas, or shantytowns, and his immersion in this performance-based popular art transformed his work.

He turned his attention from making gallery-bound objects to environments for viewer participation, plain and practical in design but with certain “Brazilian” elements added. The result was an exoticized, sensorily stimulating, walk-in version of modernist abstraction. When he exhibited the first of these ramshackle, funky constructions publicly in 1967, he titled it “Tropicália.”

A reproduction of that piece, complete with live plants and parrots, enclosures modeled on favela architecture, and a single television blasting away, is the centerpiece of the Bronx show, where it melds into a second Oiticica piece, “The Eden Plan” (1968-89), equipped with a wading pool, “nests” of dried leaves and a tent with piped-in music.

Mr. Oiticica was explicit about the music to be played: songs by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, two of the country’s hottest young music stars. The dreamboaty Mr. Veloso was especially popular. In 1968, in a bow to Mr. Oiticica, he titled an album “Tropicália,” and in the process he gave the name to an intense moment of Brazilian pop culture.

Many people associate Tropicália exclusively with the music, which combined bossa nova, Euro-American pop and traditional Brazilian material, woven around anti-establishment lyrics. It’s fabulous stuff, and you can get a concentrated dose of it in a series of video clips playing in the Bronx Museum’s handsome new architectural extension.

Among the clips are shots of Mr. Gil and Mr. Veloso singing to enraptured crowds, and tropicalist fellow travelers like the former bossa nova stylist Gal Costa, dressed like Little Richard and sounding like Janis Joplin, and the band Os Mutantes. Nearby is a selection of Flower Powerish album covers and a lavish display of Tropicália fashions. Made of fabrics printed with tropical flowers, birds and vibrant abstract patterns, the clothes perfectly embody the marriage of Op, Pop and Braziliana that Mr. Oiticica envisioned.

These are remnants of a classic 1960’s scene. And as in everything 1960’s, tensions buzzed away under the surface. Despite or because of its popularity, Tropicália drew fire from both ends of the political spectrum. To the left its commercial success was deeply suspect and its espousal of hedonism — “Joy, Joy” was the title of one of Mr. Veloso’s hit songs — as a mode of subversion, regressive. Mr. Oiticica shared these concerns.

For the right the matter was simpler. Tropicália was part of an international revolutionary impulse, and it had to go. In 1969 Mr. Gil and Mr. Veloso played some gigs at a nightclub where there was a banner, designed by Mr. Oiticica, with the words “Be an outlaw; Be a hero.” Soon after, they were jailed and then went into exile. Mr. Oiticica also left. Tropicália was over.

Or at least it was subdued. Mr. Oiticica, who moved to New York, continued to think and write about it. He was, and remains, its real theoretician. Mr. Veloso, an international celebrity, has tended to smooth over Tropicália’s sharper edges while keeping its spirit alive. Mr. Gil, the current minister of culture in Brazil, periodically invokes it as a political model while remaining ambiguous about how its politics were defined.

They were defined of course by ambiguity, a refusal of dogmatism that, ideally, opened the path for a carnivalesque collective activism, one that has parallels in certain “interventionist” political art today. The show addresses the question of Tropicália’s continuing influence by including work by several young artists made in response to it.

A stick-on mural of classic tropicalist images orchestrated by the Brazilian-born artist Assume Vivid Astro Focus generates a celebratory energy. But pieces by two young artists based in Brazil, Rodrigo Araujo and Marcos Reis Peixoto, who goes by the name Marepe, allude to continuing social inequities that Tropicalism never addressed.

In the end it is Mr. Oiticica’s work that seems, particularly in a museum context, most radical and most alive. For one thing, it is there but not there: almost everything under his name in the show is a reproduction of an original either fragile beyond use or gone. For another, his is truly an art of gestures, not frozen in time, but repeated and translated differently by each visitor who walks into his “Tropicália” environment and makes it his or her own. If we engage with his art, it is something; if we do not, it is nothing. Its creation is our responsibility.