An unusual Bienal

Intense transformation marked the Bienal de São Paulo of 1981. The beginning of the Brazil’s political opening after years of military dictatorship is its most important characteristic, if we consider the relationship between art and life to be essential. This political dimension is of great interest to our reflection here, dedicated to the Bienal module entitled Arte incomum [Unusual Art], the first international exhibition of its kind in Brazil.¹ And what kind of genre would that be?

According to the show’s general curator, Walter Zanini, it was about a highly creative production, on the fringes of the official art system, created by psychiatric patients and by “individuals disconnected from the normal contexts of visuality”, who “know how to make a great liberating force flow from the logic of their unconscious worlds.”² This definition helps us to understand the genre in question, a derivation of what the artist Jean Dubuffet called art brut, or raw art, in 1945.³ Although this module was not only made up of works that belonged to the collections of psychiatric hospitals, most of the artists were people who had been interned in such institutions. For this reason, Arte incomum helps us to think about the relationship between art and madness and the social, cultural and political aspects that this dialogue would take on in Brazil from the end of the 1970s onwards, with repercussions right up to the present day.

The 1981 Bienal today

In 1979, the film-maker Helvécio Ratton released Em nome da razão [In the Name of Reason], a documentary that both depicts and denounces the horror to which the people interned at the Hospital Colônia de Barbacena in Minas Gerais were subjected.

In 1980, in the Colônia Juliano Moreira, a former psychiatric hospital in Rio de Janeiro, the psychoanalyst and photographer Hugo Denizart embarked on a research project that allowed him to record and denounce the violence and inhumane living conditions in that institution. Two films emerged from the project: O prisioneiro da passagem [The Prisoner of the Passage] (1982), about the artist Arthur Bispo do Rosário, and Região dos desejos [Region of Desires] (1983), about the women interned in the asylum.

These films reflect the reality of Brazilian psychiatry at the time and also reveal a certain relationship between art and madness in Brazil at a historical moment of great importance for the country and for the field of mental health. With the beginning of re-democratisation, after almost twenty years of nefarious military dictatorship, different actors and social movements, which were beginning to be represented at that time, were committed to deconstructing the logic of the asylum system and its understanding of madness. The Brazilian Psychiatric Reform was born.

A wide-ranging social movement, the reform must be understood as a set of changes aimed both at mental health care and at “the discursive relationships that have been established between psychiatry, other disciplines in health and the social field, and social institutions and movements.”⁴ This is a difficult task that we have yet to complete, despite the progress we have made so far.

One of the dimensions of the reform is the socio-cultural one, in which art is included, and which encompasses its main objective: to transform the social imaginary with regard to madness and abnormality, establishing other relationships between society and these conceptions.⁵ And, if we remember these films, it is because they allow us to emphasize the context of the country’s powerful transformations in the field of mental health and in the relationship between art and madness, a context in which the Arte incomum module of the XVI Bienal de São Paulo is inscribed. Although we can’t speak of a direct relationship between the event’s proposal and the events in the field of mental health, it’s also impossible to ignore the fact that, during this period, the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform began to take shape, with art as a major ally. So, what relationship is there to consider? 

In Brazil, since the 1920s and 1940s, with the important and innovative experiences of Osório Cesar, Flávio de Carvalho, Ulisses Pernambucano, Nise da Silveira and Mário Pedrosa, art and madness were already being articulated in clinical proposals, while patients’ productions were also valued as art. On the international scene, the first works on the subject, with their peculiarities and differences, were developed as early as the second half of the 19th century,⁶ sometimes in segregating and pathologising proposals, other times focused on the clinic within a psychiatric logic and, from the 1940s onwards, more strongly linked to aesthetic discussions, inaugurating terms such as art brut (‘raw art’) or outsider art. 

The Brazilian Psychiatric Reform has a specific character, in which the relevance of psychiatry and its discursive and treatment apparatuses are called into question. Therefore, it is not enough for the works of people suffering from psychiatric illness to be legitimized by the art system, leaving the norms that enclose them in categories such as ‘mentally ill’ and ‘mad artist’ intact. These categories must be questioned through the works. If raw art was intended to challenge the status quo of art and culture, to problematize the social agency of madness, it still perpetuates isolation and marginalization, since it leaves art clearly demarcated on one side and so-called ‘mad’ art on the other. And this has consequences. 

Psychoanalyst Tania Rivera⁷ warns that although raw art values the artistic production of people considered ‘insane’, it becomes a segregating category. This is because it reinforces and naturalizes the isolation of those artists, imposed by the asylum logic, since it conceives of creation as a spontaneous and autonomous expression, possible for these subjects precisely because they are cut off from culture and social life. And, in the name of a certain representation of the ‘madman’ as a naive and free genius, it disregards an entire existence also marked by psychic suffering. What remains untouched by the notion of raw art is the asylum logic itself, which abolishes the subject and its capacity for cultural exchange, something that is unthinkable today. 

Forty years on from the exhibition, the artist and therapist Lula Wanderley, a thinker and key player in the relationship between art and madness in our country, in his text “Incomuns somos todos” [We are all unusual]⁸ also problematizes the idea of ‘unusual art’. However, he considers that the module prepared us for the events that marked the fields of mental health and art in the 1990s, citing artists such as Lygia Clark and Arthur Bispo do Rosário. Wanderley says, however, that there is no longer any point in talking about raw, unusual or ‘crazy’ art, referring to Bispo do Rosário, who didn’t take part in the 1981 show, but who in 2012 became the guiding artist of the 30th Bienal de São Paulo, The Imminence of Poetics, and who in 2023 returned for the event’s 35th edition, entitled choreographies of the impossible,⁹ alongside Aurora Cursino dos Santos and Ubirajara Ferreira Braga, artists who had been interned at Juquery Hospital. Bispo do Rosário is art and his introduction to this universe took place through a very complex trajectory, involving the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform, Denizart’s film and changes in artistic conception proposed by contemporary art, elements that brought to the closed world of the asylum, in the example of Bispo do Rosário, the open mind of art critic Frederico Morais and so many other artists who, at the time, contributed to challenging the logic of the psychiatric asylum. 

In its clinical-political proposal, the reform questioned, and we hope it still resists and continues to question, the social, cultural and political foundations that underpin our ways of living in the world. And this doesn’t just affect those diagnosed with a mental disorder: it involves everyone. Bispo do Rosário bears witness to this, to how a work that is born out of an intricate, singular and paradoxical relationship with madness¹⁰ – and which is not therefore a ‘mad’ or pathological work, the result of mere unreason – changes what is understood by art and madness and, consequently, can change our understanding of ourselves, our ways of being in the world and the culture of exclusion imposed on bodies and existences that do not fit within what is so-called ‘normal’. 

¹ Walter Zanini. “Introdução”, in XVI Bienal de São Paulo. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1981, p. 20. Exhibition catalog.

² Walter Zanini. “A Bienal e os artistas incomuns” in Arte incomum. VI Bienal de São Paulo. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1981, p. 7. Exhibition catalog.

³ According to Dubuffet, the expression should exclusively characterize the group of works he has brought together. For this reason, it seems to us, he also refuses, as recorded in a letter to the Bienal, to allow the expression to be used by the exhibition, in addition to the fact that he sees a contradiction in it, as discussed by Josette Balsa in the show’s catalog: “How can we place cultural art, resulting from a historical process of formation, alongside a non-art, represented by works far removed from tradition, from codified teaching, which do not allow for the critical game of comparison?” Cf. Josette Balsa. “A arte é um antidestino”, in Arte incomum. VI Bienal de São Paulo. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1981, p. 48. Exhibition catalog.

⁴ Pedro Gabriel Delgado. As razões da tutela: psiquiatria, justiça e cidadania do louco no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: SDE/Ensp, 1995, p. 42.

⁵ Paulo Amarante apud Flavia Corpas. O manejo das oficinas terapêuticas no cuidado em saúde mental. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto de Psiquiatria da UFRJ. 2004, p. 30. Master’s degree dissertation.

⁶ For a critical approach to the topic, cf. Hal Foster. Tierra de nadie: sobre la acogida del arte de los enfermos mentales. La Colección Prinzhorn: trazos sobre el bloc mágico. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2001.

⁷ Tania Rivera. “Contra a arte bruta”, in Revista Latinoamericana de Psicopatologia Fundamental. São Paulo, 25(4), pp. 757-779, Dec 2022.

⁸ Lula Wanderley. “Incomum somos todos” in Paulo Miyada (org). Bienal de São Paulo desde 1951. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2021, pp. 191-200.

⁹ In this edition of the Bienal, Bispo do Rosário’s work was exhibited in the same space as a work by Rosana Paulino, whose poetics deal with gender, social and ethnic issues. It seems to us that this choice of setting enhances other readings, which include the artist’s blackness.

¹⁰ Cf. Flavia Corpas. Arthur Bispo do Rosário: do claustro infinito à instalação de um nome. Rio de Janeiro: Departamento de Psicologia – PUC-Rio, 2014. Doctoral thesis.

About the author

Flavia Corpas is a psychoanalyst, independent visual arts curator, holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from PUC-Rio, teaches the free Art and Psychoanalysis course at MAM-SP, is the editor of Arthur Bispo do Rosário: arte além da loucura [Arthur Bispo do Rosário: art beyond madness] by art critic Frederico Morais and is co-founder of P_A_F – Grupo de Pesquisa em Psicanálise, Arte e Feminismo [the Psychoanalysis, Art and Feminism Research Group].