Experimental Education: An Incomplete Snapshot From Domingos to the

Not only that of only Domingos but also, MAM’s rich institutional history was inescapable. A lot had been said, felt, and battled within and without the museum’s walls. Ongoing financial troubles, critiques of administration and debates about institutional direction post the 1978 fire were all publically played out in newspapers of the time. From the vantage point of an experimental mix of art and education institutional histories seem to oscillate between priority and afterthought, myth and frustration. There is much to recover.

Emerging in a very different socio-cultural and economic context, the Nucleus grappled with these oscillations. Serpa and Domingos had represented two vital chapters in the museum’s history where education was considered, as one journalist commented, a key philosophical

“girder” for the institution, “its reason for being.”¹⁶⁵ Subsequent decades would reveal different histories. Yet there is little published information. Over the course of the past few years MAM’s Research and Documentation Center has undertaken a vital cataloguing of all the museums courses and events, an inventory that will become shortly available to researchers and will hopefully be the focus of much future research. During my time of research this material was unavailable, so beyond the publications cited previously in this chapter, the only institutional sources of information are museum program brochures and news reports. Administration files occasionally reveal a treasure or two but there appears to be no standardization in what was kept.

In addition the brochures were only published from 1952 – 59 returning in 1975 – 78 and then again in 1983. Apart from recent decades, they have very different approaches to content, format and design, ranging from newsletter style to straightforward programmatic information, some including staff names, others not and they were not always regular. There are many narratives to reconstruct. I present here a very schematic outline focusing on three programmatic phases that seem to have particularly impacted educational direction and investment and related experimentation. It is very preliminary and serves primarily to offer some brief context of the evolving history of the museum’s relationship to education prior to the Nucleus beginning.

The reconstruction and disastrous loss of more than 1000 works due to the 1978 fire would mark the first important programmatic turning point. After various stops, starts and crises,

164 [Author translation. Portuguese original: “Não para orientar mas para iniciar determinados processos.”] Frederico Morais in Guilherme Coelho, Um domingo com Frederico.

165 Victor Zappi, “MAM: o futuro no presente,” Jornal do comércio, January 9^th, 1974.

Paulo Herkenhoff was invited to assume the role of arts coodinator (1985 – 1990) where he would critically emphasize museological standards, rebuilding the collection and documentation amidst the post fire restauration work. In a news article entitled “Um novo MAM para um novo decada” (A New MAM for a New Decade), published in January 1990, only months before a public financial crisis, staff layoffs and change in administration, Herkenhoff discusses his vision of the museum as a “Brazilian visual encyclopedia.” He underlines a museological institution as one that collects, studies and exhibits, highlighting the task of reconstituting MAM’s collection along with various initiatives such as Projeto Fênix (Phoenix Project) engaging contemporary artists to create works in MAM’s spaces to donate to the museum and the role of the library and the documentation center which had recently begun work on the Lygia Clark archive.¹⁶⁶

Critically, with the opening of the Parque Lage School of the Visual Arts in 1975 and its increasing prominence for young artists, the “school” dimension of the original museum plan may have seemed less and less relevant. While in the early 1980s various courses continued to be offered (including a brief return of Morais), the formerly active program was considerably diminished. From museum information bulletins in 1985/87 following President Manoel Fransisco do Nascimento Brito (1985 – 2002) assuming leadership there was a clear desire to rethink institutional direction and in addition to Herkenhoff as art coordinator, Luis Paulo Horta was hired as music coordinator and the two realms seem to have been equally weighted, one focused more on internal museum infrastructure and collections and the other on public programs.

According to Herkenhoff when he arrived as coordinator he was told by Brito of the decision to stop the educational courses, news the curator would have to communicate to the teachers, a move that effectively closed the School Block (although the print studio returned in the 1990s for a period) to never be re-opened.¹⁶⁷ Herkenhoff locates responsibility within the confines of formalist generation whom he cites as associating education with Ivan Serpa and children’s art classes, one imagines at that juncture to have well lost their initial luster, asserting that art is a science and not for children.¹⁶⁸ It seems the closure took place in 1987 as the museum bulletin

166 Arthur Araújo, “Uma nova MAM para uma nova década,” Uh Revista, January 8^th, 1990.

167 Paulo Herkenhoff, “Dilemmas sociais na esfera pública da arte,” panel discussion: Paulo Herkenhoff. Responder:

Márcia Ferran. Moderator: Fred Coelho, Reconfiguring the Public: Art, Pedagogy, Participation organized by the Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art at MAM – RJ, November 2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6XdjYlcJMs&index=1&list=PLO-GRBBoQZrjDOO0B7xSTsSu40BYBE48m Program brochures (or rather in the case of these years more like an information bulletin)There is no documentation in MAM’s files that would confirm Herkenhoff’s version or indeed if it was Parque Lage’s active presence that influenced such a decision. Clearly more research needs to be done to historicize the School Block itself, its ultimate closure and implications.

168 Ibid. Stating this more than 25 years later with clear distaste suggests this was and is still a sore point for

Herkenhoff. Certainly subsequent projects point to his commitment to education such as the 24^th São Paulo Bienal and his current artistic directorship of MAR (Museu de Arte do Rio). Interestingly, throughout Herkenhoff’s time at MAM there was an active music program coordinated by Luiz Paulo Horta curiously, at least from program brochures, an

announces the suspension of the “department of educational activities” citing the overall restauration work and especially the needed expansion of the Cinemateca but also noting that the museum plans to devote significant energy to reformulating MAM’s role “in the education field, a sector of major importance to a center of art and culture.”¹⁶⁹ The School Block now houses a small exhibition gallery currently featuring a timeline of the museum’s history organized by Elizabeth Varela, curator of MAM’s Research and Documentation Center, their offices and archives as well as those of the Cinemateca, replete with old canisters and obsolete editing stations lining the hallways itself an archaelogy of the modern.

The increasing violence in the 1980s and 90s turning the once dynamic area of MAM and the Aterro into a graveyard coupled with attempts to revitalize these same locales and the emergence of new cultural institutions in the city center resulted in another critical shift. The

“new” MAM of the 1990s under Marcus Lontra (1990 – 1997), at the time former director of the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts, sought to reestablish “the cosmopolitan, active, provocative, and intelligent relationship between the museum and the city.”¹⁷⁰ A thread of experimental art and education resonant of Morais and the Neoconcrete interest in the sensorial re-emerged here with the Galpão das artes (Art Shed). Built on the site of the Theatre Block and part of Reidy’s original plan, the “Galpão” was an open space for workshops and performances aimed at awakening “the critical sensible perception of the collective.”¹⁷¹ Coordinated initially by the artist Luiz Pizarro (now currently MAM’s curator of education) and then Valerio Rodrigues and assisted by Marcia Waitz together with various course coordinators of music, dance, cinema and literature, the

“Galpão” was an “open school” that “privileged processes of creation.”¹⁷² Along with a rich array of courses and laboratory-style workshops for teachers, the Galpão also programmed events. One series called “anthropophagy week” featured everything from readings/performances with poet Haroldo de Campos, musician Caetano Veloso and theater director Gerald Thomas to a drag show for children.¹⁷³ Other events even included a “Domingo da criação” in July 1993 in the museum’s gardens with various artists such as Jorge Duarte and Paulo Paes, performers and workshops.¹⁷⁴ The barn was later closed and a new two storey structure built in the same location following Reidy’s design reopened in 2006 as an autonomous event platform for music concerts.

initiative that seemed almost equal to the importance of the visual arts. Once again clearly more research needs to be done to contextualize these histories.

169 Report on “Departamento de Atividades Educativas” in the 1987 Program bulletin. Research and Documentation Center, MAM-RJ.

170 MAM program brochure, August 1990, Research and Documentation Center, MAM- RJ.

171 Luiz Pizarro, coordinator Galpão das artes. Ibid.

172 Interview with Luiz Pizarro, March 16^th, 2016, Rio de Janeiro.

173 Events held as part of “Semana de Antropophagia” (Anthropophagic Week) at MAM in 1991. Ibid.

174 Renata Wilner notes that this event was coordinated by Marcia Waitz featuring: the children’s theater piece O Conquistador; Camera Obscura with Regina Alvarez; workhops coordinated by Angela Freiberger and Gustavo Braga;

Another programmatic phase manifests itself under Agnaldo Farias (1998 – 2000). One initiative, a project of documentation that had begun under Herkenhoff with the pyschologist and artist Lula Wanderley, inaugurated a rich and potentially fascinating experiment which was to be a “Permanent Lygia Clark” gallery presenting the artist’s work and opportunites to engage directly in her participatory proposals, unfortunately shortlived due to problems with the Clark family.¹⁷⁵ Another shift assumed a particular focus on education. Curiously, while the notion of

“monitors” and guided tours appears sporadically within MAM’s program brochures from the 1970s through the 2000s, it is only starting in 1999 that the museum had anything akin to a standard EuroAmerican model of a museum education department featuring school and family programs coordinated by the art educator Maria Tornaghi. Guided tours and multiple visit programs in collaboration with local schools were offered. Indeed some students who participated in these initiatives became “auxilaries” working with educators briefly in Permanent Lygia Clark gallery. Other highlights included cross-institutional city-wide collaborations called “Construindo Elos” (Building Links) with the Planetarium, Museu de Acude, and Museu da Vida. Tornaghi’s project continued as a permanent education program during the curatorship of Fernando Cocchiarale (2001 – 2007) and amidst various changes in president/directors until 2005, then on an intermittent basis dependent on specific exhibitions.¹⁷⁶ When the Nucleus began at the invitation of Luiz Camillo Osorio (2009 – 2016) at the end of 2009 and more substantively in September 2010 there had been no permanent education program or staff for several years.

live statue performance by Iumar Júnior; collective creation with garbage with Jorge Duarte; clay workshops with Carmen Sodré; inflatable ballons with Paulo Paes; and the circus group Grande Circo Popular do Brasil. Wilner sees the event’s more programmed and structured aspects as presenting a more hierarchical relationship between artist and public and less freedom than was present in the original Domingos. Renata Wilner, 13 – 14.

175 Lula Wanderley began a detailed cataloguing project of Lygia Clark’s archival files at the invitation of Paulo Herkenhoff shortly after the artist’s death in 1987 (indeed Clark’s wake was actually held at MAM). The family had the intention to donate her works and archives to the museum. Lula would critically piece together several boxes of letters and proposals that would ultimately be later presented as key works by Clark. Coordinator of Visual Arts Denise Mattar, following an exhibition of Clark and Oiticica organized for the 22^nd São Paulo Biennial that was also presented at MAM (January 19^th – Februrary 19^th, 1995) invited Lula to develop various experiments with the public as part of the exhibition. Agnaldo Farias later continued the idea of the experimental gallery with a view to making it permanent focusing more on Clark’s Bichos and relational objects. Interview with Lula Wanderley, Rio de Janeiro, February 17^th, 2016. However, in 2002, the Clark family began a judicial process against the museum to recover the archives and works that had been housed at MAM on long-term loan. The entire archive was returned to the family after the museum lost the process in 2006. Conversation with Elizabeth Varela, Research and Documentation Center, MAM-RJ, February 17^th 2016.

176 Tornaghi began her work at MAM at the invitation of Farias who she notes was very supportive of education. A key project at this time was a hugely popular Picasso exhibition for which Tornaghi created an “interactive space” that effectively inaugurated the “education room” for activities on the museum’s ground level. Interview with the author, March 10^th, 2016.