Goulart’s experimental artistic practice took shape through artist publications, mail art, performances, videos, and mixed-media installations. His work discussed communication and identity issues, based on his personal experience. He critically addressed the sociocultural context, whether through body actions, performative presentations, or the organization of collective events and cable TV programs. The migrant experience and a homosexual subjectivity, as well as some associated phenomena such as marginalization and exoticization, are constants in his trajectory; a trajectory developed precisely at the moment of the rise of multiculturalism, both in the Netherlands and in the international arena.
In this article, we will review Goulart’s artistic critique of the ideology of multiculturalism. Before beginning, however, it seems necessary to briefly introduce what this concept of multiculturalist ideology entails. In the Cold War period the world moved inexorably toward globalization. Different spheres, such as geopolitics, technology, business, and even culture, extended beyond the borders of nation states to form a vast web of transnational relations that embraced the globe. This led to the increasingly accelerated exchange of capital, people, objects, and ideas. Many societies became, in practice, multicultural.
The origins of this intermingling process can, stricto sensu, be traced back to the early colonial period.[2] However, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, the rapid pace of change invites us to speak of a new situation with specific characteristics. The world became smaller. Distances and times were shortened due to enormous technical and technological developments and increasing flows in the context of neoliberalism.[3] At the same time, one of the peculiarities of the multiculturalist period that we are trying to outline here is the social self-awareness of its own pluralistic character in terms of knowledge, beliefs, and ways of life. As Bhikhu Parekh has explained, however, a multicultural society does not necessarily have a multiculturalist ideology.[4] It can, for example, obliterate difference, aiming for monoculturalism in its norm; this is how metropolitan societies were in previous centuries. Multiculturalist ideology is therefore to be found where it is possible to observe a response to coexistence and intercultural exchange that puts the management of identities and differences at the center. That is what was happening in the Europe of the period between the 1970s and 1990s, which was heading toward the Maastricht Treaty (1992). With this treaty, migration flows went from being a national issue to being part of the shared agenda of the countries in the European Union.
Furthermore, as a society approaches multiculturalism, its ideological response may vary between the poles of conservatism and progressivism. Awareness of cultural differences may result in an attempt at homogenization through policies of forced assimilation. Or it may result in an attempt to find a fair and respectful inclusion. The approach to multiculturalism can even lead to identity policies based on respect, tolerance, and acceptance of otherness. It might even happen the rare case of establishing intercultural equality on the basis of the recognition of power imbalances and (neo-)colonial history, even promoting restitution at economic and cultural levels. Whatever the case, the management of diversity is underpinned by what we call here “multiculturalist ideology,” regardless its political orientation.
In the following pages, we will examine the trajectory of the artist Claudio Goulart in parallel with the sociopolitical and cultural context of multiculturalism; a context that, following Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, could be defined as follows: “The spatial divisions of the three Worlds (First, Second, and Third) have been scrambled so that we continually find the First World in the Third, the Third in the First, and the Second almost nowhere at all.”[5] Goulart, coming from Brazil, a so-called Third World country, arrived in the heart of Europe, where the social position of migrants was being discussed. In the Netherlands, while integration policies were designed for immigrants, their differences were emphasized and the “right of blood” law was maintained, making it difficult to obtain papers and nationality. In the cultural field, while the artistic production of migrant agents was publicly supported to a certain extent, their institutionalization was subsumed by the deterritorialized character of their figures.
Today we can see this difficult balance between integration and rejection in the figure of Goulart, an artist who is virtually unknown in the Netherlands, although he had a long career there. His absence from his country of origin has also made him unknown there—he has remained in a no-man’s-land. We will then look at how politics and art are intertwined in his projects, revealing this artist’s particular stance in a context in which the position of minorities and immigrants was being reconsidered.
Most of Goulart’s artworks navigated the flow of deterritorializations and reterritorializations brought about by his departure from Brazil. This is evident in Passport (1979), a small artist’s publication he produced three years after his arrival in Amsterdam. The pages of that booklet showed compositions made with rubber stamps. Artists’ stamps were a common way of working in the transnational mail art networks in which Goulart took part. But, in that booklet, the stamps actually corresponded with the form of a passport, this official document in which customs officers stamp the status of persons when they cross a border, in order to control their movements.
Among other motifs, Goulart’s Passport included a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (fig. 1). It operated as a generic symbol of humanity, according to Western cultural tradition. A fingerprint was superimposed on the face of this human figure as a symbol of personal identity. The artist, with a particular way of working that is characterized by a direct symbolism, confronts us with the tension between the individual and the collective. However, the fingerprint appears obliterated, crossed out with two red strokes. Is the artist suggesting that Western universalism, embodied both in culture (e.g., in the Vitruvian Man) and in politics (e.g., in passports and migration controls) erases certain individual identities?
Goulart’s Passport should be understood as an artistic production made in a personal situation of migration. Elsewhere in this artwork, there are other stamps whose direct symbolism reflects mobility—a bird, a horseman jumping over an undulating horizon perhaps representing the ocean the artist had crossed. The false passport also features an all-seeing Eye of Providence, formed by a crown of laurels and two crossed rifles. The mobility portrayed here seems to have been forced, imposed by ideological and repressive causes, such as those linked to the dictatorship in Brazil.
Figure 1. Claudio Goulart, Passport, 1979, artist book with colored rubber stamps on paper, 14.5 × 9.5 cm. Courtesy of Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos.
In 1974, Ernesto Geisel took the presidency of Brazil. He was the fourth leader of the military dictatorship that had begun in 1964. Geisel’s government set in motion a “slow, gradual, and safe” opening of the regime, managing to put an end to some repressive apparatus, even with the resistance of the dictatorship’s hard-liners.[6] The new president tried to not govern by force alone, as had been done until then with the Atos Institucionais (Institutional Acts) and the establishment of systems of violent repression.[7] He considered it better to steer the country toward policies of institutionalization and the “redemocratization” of the regime.[8] That is, it was not a matter of improving the social situation, but of practicing a controlled opening in order to maintain the status quo. So far, Brazil’s political aperture had been a sort of a mirage and, in addition, the economic situation had deteriorated. The 1960s witnessed the Brazilian “economic miracle,” but now poor management was swelling the national debt. The 1973 oil crisis triggered an inflationary drift, which would become more complicated as the decade progressed into the 1980s, Brazil’s “lost decade.”[9] Nevertheless, in society and culture, a climate of relative openness produced the first flourishing of social movements. Racial, gender, and sexuality claims began to take shape in a still incipient manner. The first vindicative organizations were formed in the late 1970s, initially in large cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.[10] However, from Porto Alegre, Goulart’s hometown, it was easier to feel the oppression and the economic crisis than those first outbreaks of social justice, which were still very marginal.
Thus, Goulart’s departure from Brazil was marked by the dictatorial context. As a homosexual with a left-wing political position who came from a medium-sized city in the countryside, he maintained a critical stance in opposition to the political and cultural environment of the dictatorship. Although in Porto Alegre there were certain initiatives for the renewal of arts, the most relevant practices were of a traditional nature, and Goulart was interested in the newest experimental trends.[11] In 1979, he summarized the local situation in a letter to Ulises Carrión, written during a short stay in his hometown:
Porto Alegre is truly a province and there is nothing more to say. Besides the country being very confused—there are many strikes—social and political tensions are very high and life has become incredibly expensive. The precarious way the people continue to live—the old story. Things seem superficial. Now everyone is talking, but it has basically gotten worse (in my opinion). Manipulation is the word that sums it up. […] There are [in Porto Alegre] two spaces that should be trusted. N.O. and 542. The rest is painfully commercial and reactionary. But there are young people interested in doing new things. Culturally, I feel in the far West.[12]
Fleeing from this “precarious” and “reactionary” context, Goulart decided to travel outside his home country in 1976 and he ended up settling in the Netherlands, as we have already mentioned. There were quite a few artists from Latin America in Amsterdam, such as the Colombians Miguel Ángel Cárdenas and Raúl Marroquín, who arrived in 1962 and 1971, respectively. The Mexican Carrión did the same in 1972. The aforementioned Flavio Pons, who would become Goulart’s intimate and artistic partner, arrived in Amsterdam in 1975. Goulart wove a network of collaborations with these and other artists, whether in relation to art or political and sexual affinities. Among others, artists were attracted by the economic prosperity, the social freedoms, and the support for art production.[13] In contrast to the “far West” atmosphere of Porto Alegre, Amsterdam was a “magic center,” known for the freedoms practiced there, which were unthinkable elsewhere. A decade earlier, in the 1960s, the creative demands of social movements such as the Provos had encouraged and established a trend toward social progress. Critical thinking and attitudes had found their way into Dutch policies and institutions. Amsterdam possessed an internationally recognized libertarian aura.[14]
The welfare and economic development in the Netherlands, however, produced a steady flow of migrants that was beginning to have political consequences. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Netherlands was a country of emigrants. However, the tables were turned by the 1960s. After the postwar reconstruction, prosperity led to the need for a workforce, and the migration flow was reversed. “Guest workers” were received for this purpose, first from European countries such as Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, or Yugoslavia, and later from southern Mediterranean countries such as Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, or Algeria. There was a peak in immigration in the early 1970s, and then the situation stagnated with the 1973 oil crisis, although the sum of the lesser number of new immigrants and those who had stayed behind was still considerable.[15] The very concept of the “guest worker” sets the tone for Dutch immigration policies in the late 1960s. It was understood that immigrants came to work temporarily and then returned to their countries of origin. But this was not always the case. Around 1974, a bureaucratic distinction was made between “temporary” and “long-standing” immigrants in an attempt to control immigration flows. There was even a much-criticized return bonus, popularly known by the disdainful name of “rot-op-premie” (something similar to “piss-off bonus”), for those who had been working two or three years in the Netherlands and wanted to return to their homeland. In the 1970s the “fiction of the temporary stay” of migrants was still operating, but this model conflicted with the sociocultural and labor realities.[16]
In the transition to the 1980s the concept of “ethnic minorities” emerged to account for the significant migrant populations that, legally or illegally, had settled in the Netherlands. At the time of the international spread of multiculturalist ideology, these minorities were generally characterized by their precarious economic situation and their sociocultural differences in terms of language, religion, and customs. In many cases these differences resulted in marginalization, and Policies aimed at the integration of Ethnic Minorities (EMP) were developed to address the situation. The EMPs acted on three main fronts: the promotion of spaces for the development of immigrant minorities’ identity and culture; the education for linguistic integration and intercultural inclusiveness; and the legislation to improve the rights and opportunities of migrant communities.[17] In a sense, a shift toward social recognition of multiculturalism was taking place.
However, these policies of inclusion have also been a source of criticism because of their emphasis on difference. In a review of the history of video art in the Netherlands, art critic Sebastián López—an Argentine who settled in Amsterdam in 1981—described the sociocultural moment in the early 1980s as follows:
Beatrix as Queen of the Netherlands, the Christian Democratic policy of breaking down the areas conquered in the battle of twenty years of democratization, and the slow decline of the “democratic movement” to enter the wide, wide field of new political and artistic negotiations. These are the years in which foreigners were identified as a new target (later labeled “allochtonen”), that is, those who had broken artistic standards and contributed to the birth and rise of a medium were now among the items being negotiated on the political agenda that would later use the term “multiculturalism.”[18]
By interweaving the social and artistic fields in his analysis, López pointed out how the shift toward inclusion policies was a double-edged sword. The legal figure of allochtonen, plural, or allochtoon, singular, was opposed to that of the “autochthonous.” The pursuit of integration was limited by the bloodline, separating people whose origins were rooted in the Netherlands from those with migrant ancestry.[19] Taking the video scene as an example of a more far-reaching phenomenon in Dutch society, López emphasized that the EMPs marked immigrant individuals and collectives; individuals and collectives that had contributed to the advancement of Dutch society, in general, and to the advancement of the experimental art field, in particular. The critic then characterized Dutch video art in the early 1980s in the following terms: “It was an art scene divided from the top, categorized by ethnic background and race.”[20]
The elaborate outline, described above, of the context in which Goulart’s deterritorializations and reterritorializations between Brazil and the Netherlands took place should now help the analysis of his artistic practice within the framework of multiculturalist ideology from a more precise perspective. It is now possible to look at his performative lecture The Image Maker (1983), for example, in a more informed way (fig. 2). This artistic lecture was given on two occasions. First in January 1983, in the artist-run space Plan B in Tokyo, Japan, where the artist was invited to present his work. Then, in March of that same year, at the De Muzeval theater in Emmen, the Netherlands.
Figure 2. Claudio Goulart, The Image Maker, 1983, performance with a fan shaped folder suitcase and various objects, 17 min 26 sec. Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (RCE), Mediakunst.net. Under License CC BY 3.0 NL.
In The Image Maker, Goulart appeared on stage in a white shirt printed with black letters, illuminated by a direct white spotlight. He placed a box on a small table in front of him and opened it for the audience, unfolding a fan-shaped file folder. From the compartments of the file folder he would take out objects, with which he would perform simple actions, underlined by a single word in English. The migrant experience was at the core of the proposal in every detail, from the portable box to the language used. English was a lingua franca, a generic way of communicating useful for migrants and, more specifically, traveling artists. The fragmentary use of the language entailed a simplified symbology, dependent on a subjectivity marked by translation. In the performative lecture, this prevalence of elements of displacement and mobility was also evident in the signification provided by the objects and actions: the latter functioned as symbols in a very direct and obvious manner, sometimes slightly diverted from their original meaning in order to ironize the process of translation in which information is often lost.
At the beginning of the performance, Goulart put on a pair of glasses, and said “Art”. Perhaps the artist’s point was that art is a lens through which to view the world? Then, he took out some colored balloons, which he inflated and released. With each balloon, he announced the color aloud: “Balloon, blue,” “Balloon, pink,” and so on. When he reached the red one, however, he did not release it, but pricked it with a pin, saying, “Red, bomb.” The artist then took from the file folder a long ribbon with the colors of the rainbow, which he put in front of his eyes like a blindfold. When the silent blindfolding process finished, he simply said, “Color.” Is the multiplication of colors a symbol of diversity? This was the case with the LGBT flag, which had spread internationally since it was created for San Francisco’s Gay Pride in 1978. However, the stretches of different-colored ribbon impeded the gaze, and the balloons flew away when deflated—all the balloons except for the red one, which was actively popped. Does this exception of the red balloon, which was not released but popped by the artist, have anything to do with the symbolism of the red color, usually associated with communism and left-wing ideology?
Goulart made use of simple symbols in common use, such as flags, maps, letters, colors, and several other communicative elements within the long sequence of actions deployed in The Image Maker. The performance, which is now preserved on video in the archive of the digital art and media platform LI-MA in Amsterdam, lasted about twenty minutes, so that a description of every detail may be too long for our purpose in this article. However, a couple of examples can be introduced that allow us to understand this artistic project as a series of subtle actions that simultaneously suggested situations of diversity and oppression. At one point in The Image Maker, the artist extended two black ribbons from the corners of the file folder, crossing them in front of himself to form a cross, which literally and figuratively crossed out his person. In doing so, Goulart exclaimed the name of the letter, “X.” Is it possible to draw a parallel between this crossing action and the crossing of the fingerprint present in the Passport described above, both suggesting the repression of individual subjectivity? Toward the end of the performance, Goulart put on a shirt, apparently white. He would then fire a toy gun, exclaiming, “Shot!” and turning around. The audience could see a target painted on the back of his shirt, while Goulart exclaimed the word “Target!” in a recursive way. It is worth recalling the words of Sebastián López when he described the sociocultural moment of the 1980s as “the years in which foreigners were identified as a new target” by the Policies for Ethnic Minorities. How does this depiction relate with Goulart’s actions of self-obliteration and self-targeting?
In May 1991 the conference “Cultural Identity: Fiction or Necessity” took place at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. It was attended by the British art critic Guy Brett, the British curator Clémentine Deliss, the London-based Pakistani artist Rasheed Araeen, the Belgian gallery owner Jan Mot, and the Argentine-Dutch art critic Sebastián López, among others. There, Claudio Goulart gave another of his performative lectures, as we will see below.[21]
In her introduction, Ine Gevers, organizer of the conference, pointed to the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (1989) as a seminal moment for the discussion on cultural identity in the international art field. Held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, it was a controversial exhibition in which works by contemporary Western artists were exhibited in an allegedly non-hierarchical manner alongside works by artists from non-Western territories, previously unknown to the mainstream art circuits.[22] On the heels of Magiciens de la Terre, the North Holland Cultural Council produced “Het Klimaat,” a series of art exhibitions and events in the Netherlands. The Dutch curator pointed out:
The organizers [of “Het Klimaat”] had a positive attitude to Magiciens… and to a certain extent took that exhibition as a model, particularly in the way in which the work of both Western and non-Western artists was presented free of any cultural or political context. […] Preconceptions were too implicitly anchored in the basic concept, and the consequences of the various institutions being able to choose foreign artists freely in order to promote themselves had not been adequately foreseen.[23]
Based on this critique, Gevers had conceived the Maastricht conference as a space in which to present questioning perspectives on cultural identity in the Netherlands. She understood that
the Netherlands has no tradition of an intellectual discourse on “Otherness,” but only a practically-based debate on questions such as cultural identity, oppression of “the Other,” and veiled forms of racism and imperialism. Whenever cultural identity is an issue, it is taken for granted that it only refers to groups which are called, significantly, “allochtonen” (foreigners). The issue is not seen as applicable to ourselves. Thus, articulating cultural difference in this way implies ideologically a continuation of racialist theories, rather than a questioning of them.[24]
The curator highlighted the concealment of cultural identity processes within Western societies. Cultural identity was usually associated with “the Other”; that is to say, with the so-called ethnic minorities, to whom integration policies have been directed since the late 1970s. Such minorities were to be included into the metropolitan space, which was seen as neutral. Under globalization, however, this “Other” was no longer an abstract and distant entity, but a regular presence, located in the very heart of a Western world that was far from being unbiased.
“Third World has moved West (or North, depending on where the dividing line falls) and has expanded so as to include even the remote parts of the First World,” wrote Trinh T. Minh-ha in 1989, continuing, “What is at stake is not only the hegemony of Western cultures, but also their identities as unified cultures.”[25] Trinh’s depiction of the mixing of worlds relates to later academic concepts from critical theory, such as “glocalization,” within the framework of theories of globalization and postmodernity.[26] But such discourses would not clarify the conflicting space of cultural identities in the context of the promotion of multiculturalism. The congress “Cultural Identity: Fiction or Necessity” sought to shed light on this unstable terrain. And, through the performative lecture Postcards on the Road (1991), Goulart was in charge of giving substance to these issues from the point of view of art (fig. 3).
Figure 3. Claudio Goulart, Postcards on the Road, 1991, multimedia lecture / performance with a video camera, two monitors, a record player, a sound installation, a fan shaped folder suitcase and various objects, various dimensions. Page extracted from the dossier Claudio Goulart: Selected Works. A Documentation, made by the artist himself in 2003. Courtesy of Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos.
Postcards on the Road can be understood as an advanced version of The Image Maker (1983), because both functioned through a similar performance. Once again, the artist took objects out of a fan-shaped file folder and then showed them to the public, activating their meaning and symbolism. Now, at the moment of the “multi-” (multiculturalism, multiethnicity, multicentricity, multilateralism, multinationalism and multinational corporations, multitasking, multidisciplinary skills, multilingualism, and so on), his rhetoric had become multimedia. The performance was supported by a closed-circuit video, through which Goulart showed details of the materials he extracted from the file folder and other audiovisual content. He also enriched his presentation with music by playing vinyl records loudly. In this way, figures from popular culture, such as Grace Jones, Astor Piazzolla, Carmen Miranda, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, or Madonna, became examples of this fluidity of identity that the artist wanted to depict.
It all began with Goulart himself. He introduced himself as Brazilian, but especially as a gaúcho. Gaúchos are the inhabitants of the Pampas, a cross-border territory shared by Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. The artist indicated:
Generally the first association made with cultural identity is to a country, more precisely the state. But culture cannot be accommodated within state borders and people are on the move. A comment on this was the Passport I made in 1979. I thought it opportune to mention it as we saw the growing nationalist trend through the eighties and now with the changes in East Europe, and as we get closer to Europe 1992.[27]
As we can see in the quote, Goulart was attentive to the sociopolitical situation, not only in the Netherlands but also in Europe. The art critic Sebastián López, in his lecture at the same conference, also presented his views in contrast to the political horizon of 1992. The latter raised some open questions in this respect: “Who is now invoking identity, and to what purpose? What kind of discourses are now being created in Europe when confronted with the possibility that in 1992 we are all to be one, together and forever?”[28] The migrant status of López and Goulart led them to address identity issues at a time when the 500th anniversary of the so-called discovery of America was to be celebrated and the European agenda was heading toward the Maastricht Treaty (1992). This treaty, in fact, would introduce the notion of European citizenship, among other issues, for the cohesion of member countries. The European Economic Community (EEC) now became the more integrated European Community (EC), seeking common policies in economy, foreign affairs, security, and jurisprudence. Immigration, for example, became a “matter of common interest.”[29]
What could be the role of art in this moment of sociopolitical and cultural change? In Postcards on the Road, Goulart noted that the artist’s task was to experiment with media, “from painting to television,” and, by working in this way, artists could “not only preserve cultural identity but also help redefine it.”[30] Nevertheless, quoting Ulises Carrión, he criticized the fact that contemporary artists were not adequately connecting with the spirit of the times. “Artists are failing to act upon the mainstreams of cultural life,” said Goulart, suggesting that, like the rest of society, they operated without dissolving the distinction between “serious Art”—for museums—and the “more popular contemporary forms” for mass media and cultural industries.[31] After these comments, Goulart showed to the audience the video clip of Madonna’s “Justify my Love,” commenting on it as if it was an experimental performance, as well as some other works by the French artist and publicist Jean Paul Goude, such as his advertisements for Citroën with Grace Jones or his designs and scenographies for the parade of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. These products of mass culture showing diversity appeared to be as much, if not more, shapers of identities as the products of the self-proclaimed high culture.
The performative lecture continued by revealing to the audience some collections of postcards. Goulart made compositions with them. A postcard of the Empire State Building served to crown Bruegel’s Tower of Babel. With another postcard, he questioned the appearance of the Royal Pavilion of King George IV in Brighton, wondering if it came from Arabia, India, or Disneyland. He then compared the Eiffel Tower with the very similar-looking Tokyo Tower. The artist had briefly encountered the Japanese case a few years earlier on a trip to present his work, as mentioned above. This country was a perfect example for this performative lecture on cultural identity, because of its paradoxes and the hybridism of its identity in flux. Being an “Eastern” nation, Japan had become part of the “West.” While showing a series of Japanese postcards, Goulart commented:
When I was in Tokyo, in 1982, almost all models in advertisements for selling sophisticated articles were Westerners. In 1985, on another trip, I noticed that Japanese models started to be used. Recently, I saw in the Economist a Japanese car ad featuring a Japanese male model with the well-known Shinjuku skyscrapers in the background. Economical power reassures Cultural Identity.[32]
Moving between collective and individual identities, Goulart analyzed the contradictions created by the superimposition of Western culture and way of life. Then the artist realized that he sometimes included himself when talking about the West. This might seem strange, he said, “from a person coming out the Third World,” and went on to pose the question: “But where shall I look for my Cultural Identity?”[33] Showing pairs of postcards, he directly challenged the audience by questioning whether his personal identity came from the Alhambra in Granada or African dance; from the Paris Opera or the Amazon theatre in Manaus; from the pyramids of Egypt or the Mexican ones. Despite his doubts, Goulart claimed to understand the world as one, while trying to be open to change and allowing himself to be influenced by the recognition of different cultural forms, which were thus incorporated into his own identity.
At the conference “Cultural Identity: Fiction or Necessity,” Goulart denounced the narrow-mindedness of Western culture, which could only embrace difference by integrating and homogenizing it. Against this attitude, he argued that cultural identities are constantly expanding and readjusting in a flux that should not only be respected but also encouraged through the arts. Thus, if cultural identities are based on a constant flow of exchanges, it does not seem possible that there is a single, central, and universal culture and “other” external and subaltern cultures. Goulart repeatedly showed examples of cultural hybridism to expose the deceptive game of Western superiority in the face of “otherness.” This tricky game took shape with the expansion of the multiculturalist ideology, whether through the policies for the integration of ethnic minorities into society in general or, more specifically, through the inclusion of “other” artists in the field of art. Goulart’s performative lecture attempted to show what Trinh T. Minh-ha so eloquently described when she wrote: “The Master (i.e., Western man) is bound to recognize that His Culture is not as homogeneous, as monolithic as He believed it to be. He discovers, with much reluctance, He is just an other among others.”[34]
As Goulart’s discourse raised this conceptual openness to questions of diversity and identity, his artistic practice also evolved, absorbing new formats, such as multimedia installations and audiovisual environments, and new technological resources such as video and television. The artist kept giving shape to his ideas for a critique of the multiculturalist ideology through the intermingling of media and the appropriation of materials from mass culture. His personal situation—once again, a migrant artist from Latin America who settled in Europe, a homosexual, interested in mass culture as well as the most up-to-date and experimental culture—led Goulart to insist on issues of intercultural exchange within his projects. Step by step, he articulated an ever deeper and more complex discourse on multiculturalism. Fascinated by popular culture, he perceived in it a substratum, not always unconscious, of Western prejudices and domination over other territories and peoples. In this way, he challenged some of the concepts on which the representation of otherness was based, such as primitivism or underdevelopment, and proposed new ways of thinking through art to understand interculturality, linked to the recognition of power differences, colonization, extractivism, and exoticization.
Tarzan of Tarzans (1992), for example, was a simple but effective project. It was a 74-minute single-channel video that compiled fragments of Tarzan films. It juxtaposed materials from different eras, generating a narrative about Western imaginaries of the wild and the exotic. The accumulation of prejudices was revealed through the compilation and display of an archive of this icon of popular culture. As everyone knows, the Tarzan footage depicted the imaginary of a white, heterosexual male who managed to survive in the jungle. Beyond the apparently innocent entertainment, however, the unreal construction of the character was accompanied by a whole range of prejudices against both the natural environment and its inhabitants.
Another good example of the course that Goulart’s practice took in the 1990s is the multimedia installation Om de tuin Leiden. Voyage pittoresque au pays inconnu. A ilha dos inocentes (1992) (fig. 4). Here the artist proposed a symbolic reconstruction of the lost paradise, arranged in three chapels of the Oude Kerk, the oldest church in Amsterdam. One hundred suitcases painted in gold were placed on the floor. Twelve lined monitors showed images of colonial expeditions and film clips on themes of exoticization and the wilderness, like in Tarzan of Tarzans. Among the suitcases were some strange palm trees, made from the fan-shaped file folders that we already know from the previous performative lectures of the artist. The file folders were elevated on stands and filled with rolled photocopies of images from colonial history. Photocopying and video editing were means to manipulate the images and imaginaries imposed on non-Western territories, usually seen by the metropolises as a sort of savage reservoir of resources and wealth. In some notes about this project, Goulart explained that “those images suggest the relativity of actual and historical images made from other cultures,” and continued his critique of the universalist fallacy of Western-centrism by stating: “The mixture of fantasy, exoticism, and facts disturbs our perception of the subject being represented.”[35] Through this installation artwork, Goulart intended to highlight how the representations of otherness blurred the consequences of coloniality and, even more, how in the framework of Western multiculturalism these representations “are often reflections of our prejudices and desires.”[36]
Figure 4. Claudio Goulart, Om de tuin Leiden. Voyage pittoresque au pays inconnu. A ilha dos inocentes, 1992, installation with twelve monitors, a video player, videotapes, photographs, color and black and white photocopies, fan shaped folder suitcases and various objects, various dimensions. Page extracted from the dossier Claudio Goulart: Selected Works. A Documentation, made by the artist himself in 2003. Courtesy of Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos.
A migrant subjectivity such as Goulart’s, formed in the causes and consequences of a journey from the supposed periphery—Porto Alegre, Brazil, Latin America—to the supposed center—Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Europe—was keen to produce a work like that of this artist’s, deeply focused on questions of identity and interculturality. To be seen on the basis of difference impels the recognition of the multiculturalist ideology, embedded in coloniality and its operational modes. However, this migrant subjectivity, although personal, is at the same time collective. Goulart was well aware of that, and for this reason he also understood his artistic practice as a shared activity for a shared activism. In addition to individual works such as those mentioned above, he stood out as the organizer of collective activities around video and cable television (C-TV) in the 1980s and 1990s; collective activities in which his areas of interest were broadened by the approaches of nearby artists working in similar ways.
Among other examples, Goulart organized the C-TV program Kanaal Zero (1991–1994) for the Amsterdam-based video institutions Montevideo and Time Based Arts (fig. 5).[37] This project explored the possibilities of media communication done by artists, which, as we have seen, was one of the artist’s concerns in those years. Kanaal Zero was based on an ethical and aesthetic approach rooted in experimentation, appropriation, and remixing. It brought together programs and art projects created specifically for the C-TV channel with other materials from mainstream media and, more importantly, from other alternative media such as Deep Dish TV, the satellite TV arm of the New York-based Paper Tiger Television project. While there is not space here to describe in detail the many programs that were broadcasted during the more than three years of the alternative channel, it may be helpful to list some of the artists and collaborators who formed the network around Kanaal Zero. Among those invited to show their work were migrants and people on the move, such as the Australian of Polish ancestry Jeffrey Shaw, the British-Palestinian Mona Hatoum, or the aforementioned Ulises Carrión and Flavio Pons. There were other artists from Europe, such as the Dutch Lydia Schouten or the German Ulrike Rosenbach, who critically worked on counterculture, media criticism, feminism, or AIDS issues. These figures left their interests and perspectives reflected in the contents, which, although almost unknown today, are a material to be recovered, available for further research in the archives of the digital art and media platform LI-MA in Amsterdam.[38]
Figure 5. Claudio Goulart, Postcards for Kanaal Zero, 1991–1994, postcard printed on paper, 10 × 16 cm. Courtesy of Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos.
To conclude this article, it is appropriate to add one last case study among the projects developed by Goulart: Vale quanto pesa / It’s Worth its Weight (1993) (fig. 6). This installation was created for the exhibition In Fusion: New European Art (1993), organized by the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, but which toured the United Kingdom, also being presented in Brighton and Cardiff. To what did the expression “new European art” mentioned in the title refer? The answer becomes clear when looking at the list of participants. They were the Algerian-French Mahjoub Ben Bella, the Uruguayan-Swedish Carlos Capelán, the Lebanese-Dutch Benni Efrat, the Iranian-French Chohreh Feyzdjou, the Chinese-German Ying Liang, the Argentine-French Lea Lublin, the Senegalese-French As M’Bengue, the Antillean-Dutch Felix de Rooy, the Armenian-German Ohannes Tapyuli, and the Brazilian-Dutch Pons and Goulart. That is, all migrant artists who came from non-European territories, but from the Global South, and who were established in Europe. The occasion was propitious for Goulart’s critique: In what instrumentalizing sense could it be said that migrants and racialized people were producing the “new European art”?
Inside the catalogue, the preface written by the promoters began as follows: “This exhibition brings together eleven artists who live and work in Europe but whose cultural roots are elsewhere in the world.” The allochthonous character of the participating artists was assured, to later say that the purpose of the exhibition was none other than “affirming the diversity of Europe’s cultures.”[39] What kind of covert ideology was used here, whose main objective was to illustrate European diversity through the work of artists who had experienced migration, rather than to attend to their own practices and identities?
Goulart, as a migrant experimental artist whose trajectory remained in the margins of an increasingly market-oriented art system, accepted to participate in the exhibition. Although it could be said that he did so reluctantly, judging by the contents he presented. In the exhibition spaces, he assembled Vale quanto pesa / It’s Worth its Weight, an installation composed by thirty-five golden suitcases. Some of them were placed on the floor, like the pews of a church. They bore images of the colonial violence of the Spanish conquistadores against the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Other suitcases were piled up, forming an altar on which a fan-shaped file folder formed a kind of floral offering altarpiece, made with photos of rolled roses.[40] As usual in the artist’s work, the symbolic meaning of this installation was direct. The golden suitcases pointed to the contemporary mobility of images and people, and the accompanying elements signaled the relationship of this accelerated mobility with the long history of colonial violence and extractivism. Neither the imaginaries nor the belief systems of the West could be detached from this process of domination.
Figure 6. Claudio Goulart, Vale quanto pesa / It’s Worth its Weight, 1993, installation with thirty-five suitcases painted gold, photographs, color and black and white photocopies, paper construction on fan shaped folder suitcases and a gold lacquered wall, various dimenions. Page extracted from the dossier Claudio Goulart: Selected Works. A Documentation, made by the artist himself in 2003. Courtesy of Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos.
If the installation was already straightforward, Goulart could not miss the opportunity to register his particular position even more clearly in his text for the exhibition catalogue. There, he outlined how the creation of disparaging and exoticizing imaginaries had modified the image of the Americas and other colonized lands:
Back to historical images, it is relevant to point out how Europeans failed to comprehend the New World, and how the West still appropriates the “exotic” to fulfill its needs for fantasy and adventure—and to perpetuate a certain relationship. Furthermore, many questions involving visual representation reflect (and cause and reflect again) deeper problems within a culture. The fear of the unknown is not only a problem of Western Culture: when attempting to depict the new, often we find ourselves doing nothing more than mirroring our own prejudices and desires.[41]
As can be seen, here he recovered previously suggested ideas, bringing them together in an increasingly ordered discourse developed after years of insistence on the critique of multiculturalist ideology. However, it is also worth noting how Goulart now included otherness into his critical discourse. In the quote above, he claimed that xenophobia was not just a Western problem. This complex turn, with traces of self-criticism, reveals the rigor with which the artist carried out his analyses from artistic research. The gesture can be read in three different ways. On the one hand, as an act of humility, indicating that no one is oblivious to the problems that their own “prejudices and desires” can cause. On the other hand, as a kind of discursive self-censorship, which ultimately holds him back from making a radical, naked critique of the European and Western empire of multiculturalism. And finally, this gesture can also be read as a desire to render the problem as objective as possible, thereby demonstrating the artist’s awareness that the intercultural question was not dichotomous, but responded to a whole gradient of power differentials. Even among so-called ethnic minorities and racialized collectives, as well as among Euro-white elites themselves— both in Europe and in other territories outside its fortress borders—the impact of multiculturalist ideology produced a wide range of experiences.
It is no longer possible to ask the artist about his specific approach, as he died of AIDS in 2005. Nevertheless, it is fair to acknowledge how his work continues to serve as a basis for opening up rich discussions on multi- and interculturality. Aware of the context in which his artworks were circulating, Goulart attempted to bring back to the European-Western contexts their own monstrous image, usually obscured by imaginaries that divert the attention from the substratum of colonial domination of the world on which the so-called welfare society is based. Coloniality, dressed up as inclusion policies under the terms of multiculturalist ideology, continued to exploit individuals and peoples from across the seas, even in metropolitan spaces. He himself became an example of this instrumentalization by being placed under the label of “new European art.” By elegantly asserting his position, Goulart at the same time included himself and refused to be included as other of these “new Europeans.” It is worth asking again, as at the beginning of this article: Was Claudio Goulart a Brazilian artist, a Dutch artist, both, or neither?
Pablo Santa Olalla is an independent researcher in art history. His work focuses on the so-called “Conceptual Art” from the 1960s to the present, and more generally analyzes the relationship between art, politics and technology from a thorough interest in transnational circulations. In 2022-2023 he completed a postdoctoral fellowship as an integrated researcher at the Instituto de História da Arte of the Universidade de Lisboa. He holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the Universitat de Barcelona and has worked in and out of academia in various positions related to curating, cultural management and contemporary art archives. His most recent publications include the chapter ‘Ideología tecnocrática. Fobias y filias en la relación crítica entre arte, política y tecnología” (Technocratic Ideology. Phobias and philias in the critical relationship between art, politics and technology), in the edited volume Revolver el tiempo. Conceptos críticos, mutaciones históricas y estéticas entre la guerra fría y la contrarrevolución neoliberal (Bellaterra, 2023); and the monograph Del arte conceptual… ¿al arte del objeto? Conceptualismos en el eje Latinoamérica-España durante la Guerra Fría (From Conceptual Art… to Art of the Object? Conceptualisms in the Latin America-Spain axis during the Cold War) (Editorial CSIC, 2024), to be published in the coming months.
[1] Soares da Rosa, “Claudio Goulart: o arquivo como memória,” 254.
[2] In this sense, decolonial theory, and Latin American theory in particular, is key to understanding how modernity is rooted in coloniality, and they cannot be seen as separate processes. See, for example, Mignolo, Local Histories / Global Designs.
[3] Perhaps the author who has best theorized this relationship between development and speed, with a specific declination towards the apparatus of war, is Paul Virilio. See, for example, Virilio, Speed and Politics.
[4] Parekh, Repensando el multiculturalismo, 20–21.
[5] Hardt and Negri, Empire, xiii.
[6] Fico, História do Brasil contemporâneo, 95.
[7] Fico, História do Brasil contemporâneo, 63–75.
[8] To fully understand the concept of “redemocratization,” we must take into account a particularity of the Brazilian dictatorship: after the coup d’état, a system of forced bipartisanship was established between the Aliança Renovadora Nacional (ARENA)—the regime’s party—and the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (MDB)—an opposition party that was allowed as long as it did not come close to real power. Of course, this facade of democracy would always lean toward the party of the regime, with minimal advances until the return to democracy in 1985. Fico, História do Brasil contemporâneo, 57, 89–90.
[9] Fico, História do Brasil contemporâneo, 109–111.
[10] Macrae, A construção da igualdade-política e identidade homossexual no Brasil da “abertura”, 93–105.
[11] In Porto Alegre, artists such as Iberê Camargo, Francisco Stockinger, and Marcelo Grassmann had produced a first rupture in the 1960s. They rejected the academic tradition, moving toward a post-avant-garde experimentation. However, their practices were still done with means such as painting, drawing, or engraving. In the early 1970s these figures dominated the local scene. Updates toward conceptualism and experimentation only sporadically appeared, by the hand of agents such as Regina Silveira and Julio Plaza. See Santa Olalla, “Conceptualismos en el espacio sud-atlántico,” 117–124. Toward the end of the 1970s it was already possible to find more consistent experimental proposals, such as the Espaço N.O. (Nervo Óptico), in which artists like Vera Chaves Barcellos, Cris Vigiano, or Ana Torrano, among others, experimented with performances, public art, installations and environments, mail art, and conceptualisms of different kinds. See Chaves Barcellos, Espaço N.O. 1979–1982: eventos e artistas atuantes.
[12] Goulart apud Soares da Rosa, “Claudio Goulart: o arquivo como memória”, 21–23. Translation by the author.
[13] Between 1949 and 1987, the Beeldende Kunstenaarsregeling (BKR), a program for artists that offered temporary legal residence in exchange for their artistic production, was operating in the Netherlands. In 2020, an exhibition program and catalogue were produced, tracing the history and showing a part of the collections acquired by the state thanks to the BKR. See Kutvenhoven, Een monument voor de BKR. The BKR program ended with discussions about the “artistic quality” of the productions that had been supported. See López, “Identity: Reality or Fiction?,” 22.
[14] It should not be forgotten that major international crises have also had an impact on the Netherlands. For example, the oil embargo imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) during the first oil crisis in 1973 had a direct impact on the Dutch economy. However, the situation was far removed from that of countries considered to be “under development,” such as Brazil. While the Netherlands suffered the crisis as a metropolitan territory—that is, it participated in the international arena from a privileged position, with transnational companies such as the Shell oil company acting in an extractivist manner in subaltern territories—in Latin America the various economic and political crises were played out together with the colonial difference. For a general analysis of the situation in the Netherlands in those years, see the catalogue of the exhibition Amsterdam, the Magic Center (2018), at the Stedelijk Museum, for which there was an interesting compilation of texts commenting on the sociopolitical and cultural moment of Amsterdam in the 1960s. Accessed May 23, 2023.
[15] Zorlu, “Migration and Immigrants,” 5. See also Penninx, “Postwar immigration and integration policies in the Netherlands,” 80.
[16] Penninx, “Postwar immigration and integration policies in the Netherlands,” 83–84.
[17] Ibid., 84–86.
[18] López, “Video Exposures: Between television and the exhibition space,” 122.
[19] The term allochtoon has fallen into disuse, but although it has been replaced by persoon met migratieachtergrond (person of immigrant origin), the underlying definition has not changed. “Wat verstaat het CBS onder een allochtoon?,” Central Bureau voor de Statistiek, accessed May 23, 2023. Also López, “Identity: Reality or Fiction?,” 140–142.
[20] López, “Video Exposures: Between television and the exhibition space,” 122.
[21] All the conference papers were collected in the journal Third Text, which published a special issue (no. 8, Spring 1992) on the occasion of the event.
[22] This exhibition, criticized for the Western-hegemonic and aestheticizing perspective on non-Western artists treated as “primitive,” initiated a long series of international exhibitions on otherness, multiculturalism, and the globalization of the art system. Among others, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain (Hayward Gallery, London, 1989), The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (The New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 1990), Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (Center for African Art, New York, 1991), Documenta 9 (Kassel, 1992), or Cocido y Crudo (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1994). See Guasch, El arte último del siglo XX, 557–579. A resource in English may be Foster, Art since 1900, 617–621.
[23] Gevers, “Cultural Identity: Fiction or Necessity,” 10.
[24] Ibid., 9.
[25] Trinh, Woman, Native, Other, 98–99.
[26] Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture.
[27] Goulart, “Postcards on the Road,” 71.
[28] López, “Identity: Reality or Fiction?,” 25.
[29] “Document 11992M/TXT – Treaty on European Union,” EUR-Lex, accessed May 23, 2023.
[30] Goulart, “Postcards on the Road,” 72.
[31] Ibid., 74.
[32] Ibid., 79–80.
[33] Ibid., 80.
[34] Trinh, Woman, Native, Other, 98–99.
[35] Goulart, Claudio Goulart: Selected Works, n.p.
[36] Goulart, “Claudio Goulart,” 22.
[37] Goulart, Claudio Goulart: Selected Works, n.p.
[38] It must be said that there is no mention of Kanaal Zero in LI-MA’s online catalogue, apart from a special program on Ulises Carrión, the most studied figure among the Latin American artists based in Amsterdam mentioned in this article. See https://li-ma.nl/. However, most of the original tapes are preserved there, and have yet to be investigated. The author of this text has also been able to access part of the contents of Kanaal Zero thanks to the Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where a large amount of material from Goulart’s personal archive has been preserved, including some tapes with significant fragments of Kanaal Zero that the artist kept.
[39] Hughes, “Foreword,” 5.
[40] Goulart, Claudio Goulart: Selected Works, n.p.
[41] Goulart, “Claudio Goulart,” 22.
Santa Olalla, Pablo. “Claudio Goulart and His Artistic Critique of the Ideology of Multiculturalism.” Stedelijk Studies Journal 14 (2024). https://doi.org/10.54533/. This contribution is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.
