Paulo Bruscky

Paulo Bruscky: Poesia Viva explores the poetic grounding of the oeuvre of Brazilian conceptual artist Paulo Bruscky (born 1949). Bruscky, long considered a pioneer in mail art and Xerox art, has always stated that "poeisis" is at the core of his extremely diverse practice. A rebel poet of sorts, he has continuously sought to question the status quo through his art—a thoroughly political aspiration during years of military dictatorship. Through a unique selection of Bruscky’s works, carefully chosen by editor Antonio Sergio Bessa and the artist, this volume shows the poetic basis of Bruscky’s longstanding interests in the metalinguistic and the performative, and explores Bruscky’s artistic debt to concrete poetry, and more specifically to the experimental work of the Brazilian Poema/Processo movement and the Poesia Práxis group. Paulo Bruscky: Poesia Viva investigates the poetic process and sensibility across five decades of Bruscky’s work.

Poiesis Bruscky surveys the five-decade career of Brazilian conceptual artist Paulo Bruscky (born 1949). In the 1960s, and throughout the ensuing decades of Brazil’s military rule, Bruscky used mail art, collage, artist’s books, visual poetry and newspaper interventions to launch his often humorous critiques of the country’s dictatorship. He is famed for his courageous, political performance works (which have often placed him in direct conflict with the law or military authorities), as well as sculpture, sound art and street art; Bruscky also exchanged correspondence with members of the Fluxus group, assembling one of the largest Fluxus collections in Latin America. In this volume, a sort of album version of the artist monograph that is well suited to the artist’s fondness for printed media, Bruscky’s work is oriented for readers through commentary from writer and critic Adolfo Montejo Navas.