Avant-garde discourses and the musealization process: The museum of modern art in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s

This paper attempts to discuss the relationship between the museums and the avant-gardes, regarding the practices of innovation in the arts and their articulation to mnemonic techniques. Seen as modernity’s mausoleums, the museums have always been regarded as the aim of the historical avant-garde criticism. As Poggioli strengthened, the residues of nihilism and agonism have shaped the relationship between avant-gardes and institutions. However, as Andreas Huyssen after Peter Burger has shown, the avant-garde project of relating art to life, once hosted and exhibited by museums, has given shape to new practices and perhaps to a musealization process. The preeminence of curatorial practices, the emphasis on the foundation of cultural centers and the educative policies on exhibitory institutions are some of the consequences now related to a series of exhibitions that hosted and welcomed avant-garde art.

Presenting research results, this paper attempts to understand how the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro, in incorporating the avant-gardes discourses, has given shape to new musicological techniques and to social practices that can now be related to mass culture museums. I shall also underline how those changes in 1960s have deepened roots in the art world, ordering the foundation of new art institutions in the city. I shall, therefore, try to understand the consequences of these processes through the analysis of a new institution, namely the Museum of Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAR), expected to open in 2012, as part of the urban interventions for the 2016 Olympic Games. Finally, I shall discuss whether those practices have indeed contributed to the democratization process they claimed to engender.