Hudinilson Jr.: the fragmented diary of a desiring and queer self

Embora o legado da abstração, do minimalismo e da arte conceitual pareça impor uma história oficial da arte no Brasil durante as décadas de 60, 70 e 80, algumas figuras, a exemplo de Hudinilson Jr., desenvolveram sua prática na intersecção entre diário pessoal, experimentos com novas mídias e ativismo político.

Major figure in the late 1970s and 1980s, Hudinilson Jr. has been reflecting for several decades on the status of the artist, his political and aesthetic position – not seeking to make a distinction between them. His numerous experiments testify to a formal self-reflection on his own artistic experience. The artist was also part of the famous group 3NÓS3, connected to the youngest and most transgressive agents willing to intervene in the city and also to scholarly focused figures interested in discussing new technologies in art and its power to convince, to reach and also to violate behavioral and political rules during Brazilian dictatorship. The artist was born in São Paulo in 1957 and died in the same city in 2013 – he was still productive at the time. His work continues to resound with and stimulate new generations of artists in and outside Brazil. For this reason, we can say Hudinilson Jr. was a transgressive figure. 

While the legacy of abstraction, minimalism and conceptual art seems to dominate a more official history of art in Brazil during the 60s, 70s and 80s, figures such as Hudinilson Jr. developed a practice at the intersection of diary, new media experiments and political activism. For instance, each “Caderno de referência” gathers, like a diary, pages on which are arranged press articles, photographs, homosexual erotic and pornographic photographs, cinema and video stills, critical reviews, as well as the collected documents.

The representation of a desiring body, the evocation of skin and the occurrence of sex scenes, combined with a sensitivity towards social environment, permanently present in his works, testify to a desire to free the body. The latter then becomes the essential tool for the liberation of a condition threatened by bourgeois morality, the violence of the dictatorship, the legacy of positivism. Spanning from this line of thinking, Hudinilson Jr. photographed himself as Rrose Selavy (‘Eros, c’est la vie’ ‘Eros, that’s life’), Marcel Duchamp’s feminine alter ego, in the work “Marcel Duchamp, xeque-mate na Arte do Nosso Século”. This appropriation of an iconic gesture by Duchamp is an indication of the artist’s political positioning, who develops in his notebooks, collages and Xerox art a representation of the sensual and transgressive self, a reversal of the official image of the male body under dictatorship and censorship in Brazil.

With a personal reflection on the representation of the self and the construction of an intimate identity, Hudinilson Jr. reinvests the figure of ‘Narcissus’, which then becomes a driving force of the individual action to resist. The use of found documents combined with the self-produced images invites to contemplate the self-representation of the body, and its intimacy as a political autofiction.