Underlying Clara Ianni’s latest exhibition is a sharp, overlapping network of powerful actors at the center of twentieth-century American art history: New York’s Museum of Modern Art, its former chairman ( and former US Vice President) Nelson Rockefeller, The Walt Disney Company, the United States government and the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo. Titled “Education at Night” and on view at Brooklyn’s Amant through September 4, the show revisits 1940s-era cultural programs aimed at encouraging US investment and thwarting Nazi influence in Latin America. The Sao Paulo-based artist pursues the murky glow of these initiatives, reshaping propaganda into new visions haunted by extractive economies and colonial entanglements.
DISNEY IS VERY FAMOUS for my generation. We have been consuming those movies for a long time. Hello friends (1942), along with several other animations from the 1940s, were commissioned through loans supported by the US government to introduce Latin America to American audiences and to create an image of modernization alongside an image of popular culture, of a landscape with infinite nature. the “resources” and, therefore, of the political relations between nations that may derive from this representation.
Written and animated for children, these films served as pedagogical instruments, shaping the conditions of perception of what can and cannot be perceived. Alongside the use of military force, culture and pedagogy were key to establishing power relations on the continent. It is interesting to consider the reception in Brazil today of cultural production from the US, its importance, how it interferes with our understanding of ourselves as Brazilians, as well as our understanding of “America.” Disney’s recent purchase of Marvel is politically relevant not only to young people, but increasingly to adults, who are over-invested in superhero movies that reduce politics to a simple binary of good and evil. What is happening in Brazil today – the rise of the right wing – is also based on a narrative of good versus evil. In more politicized circles, you can hear criticism of those films in terms of their globalizing influence. But in general, Brazilians see the US as a model of freedom. That fiction is well exported.
Nelson Rockefeller, in addition to being the head of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs – developing industrial and cultural relations between the US and Latin America – was a major collector of modern art, as well as a trustee for a time of long and the first president of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, helped found. He donated and loaned a number of works to the inaugural 1949 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, cut-out images of which appear in my 2017 video From Figurative to Abstraction. It shares its title with that exhibition, which envisioned abstract art as a universal cultural product.
In Brazil, we are always connected to an economic system exported from hegemonic centers, to dynamics that come from outside, to “wrong” ideas. The work is in dialogue with this. What are the distortions and contingencies that emerged through a dependency report? As a condition of this (to use an old term) periphery of capitalism, we are often importing language. We have to adapt and we have to interpret. We are related to that language regime. The exhibition is commenting on this.
Although there are archival materials in the exhibition (journals, photographs, documents from the American and Brazilian governments, Rockefeller’s correspondence) and appropriated in my work, they function as critical propositions, diversions. They refer to historical processes, but I don’t think of the videos as documentaries.
The animated title sequences you see Opening (Films made by the Office of Inter-American Affairs 1941–1949), 2022, were produced by film studios with State Department funding, then shown in US classrooms. Educational films were produced by reusing corporate footage, then re-edited for pedagogical purposes. My gesture was to disassemble them and reassemble them again, but in a different direction. The geography of the night, a video commissioned by Amant, interweaves a story of space debris from an American communications company that crashed in southern Brazil this year with clips from these classroom films. It reflects on the idea of geography, the way we relate to things in time and space. IN Education at night, I use a projector and a set of wooden blocks intended as math teaching aids to play with the connection between the “abstract” and the “concrete”.
The exhibition addresses what is already present, how we can rearrange the existing to produce new conditions of perception, new questions and ultimately new ways of feeling and understanding. The idea of starting something from nothing is an illusion. There is nothing. Things are made of other things, of bodies, of material that is stored, discarded, transformed. There is a modern idea – the tabula rasa ideology – which proposes: “There is nothing here, so let’s build a civilization”. But things are not like that at all. There are many things coming your way.
– As told by Lucas Matheson
