Available From UC Press

Circa 1960, artists working at the margins of the international art world breached the frame of canvas painting and ruptured the institutional frame of art. Members of the Brazilian Neoconcrete group, such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, and their counterparts in Japan, such as Akasegawa Genpei and the Kansai-based Gutai Art Association, challenged the boundaries between art and non-art, between fiction and reality, between visual artwork and its discursive frame. In place of the indefinitely deferred promise of a revolution of the senses, artists called for “direct action” here and now. Pedro Erber situates the beginnings of these profound transformations of art in the politically charged debates on realism and abstraction and in the experiments of 1950s concrete poetry. He shows how artists and critics in Brazil and Japan brought modern painting to a point of crisis that paved the way for the radical experiments of the 1960s generation. In contrast to the “dematerialization” of the art object promoted by New York–based critics and conceptual artists in the late 1960s, avant-garde artists and poets in Brazil and Japan embraced materiality as intrinsic and fundamental to their highly conceptual practices. Breaching the Frame explores their uncannily contemporaneous trajectories, tracing the emergence of participatory practices and theories that challenged the limits of aesthetic contemplation and redefined the politics of spectatorship.

Pedro R. Erber teaches in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. He holds a Ph.D. in Asian Studies from Cornell University, M.A. in philosophy from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, and B.A. in philosophy from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Erber is the author of Política e verdade no pensamento de Martin Heidegger and articles on intellectual history, art, literature, and aesthetics.

"Breaching the Frame offers a courageous, cosmopolitan, and original reading of the events that preceded and constituted the period in which art, in the process of its globalization in the 1960s, gained strength through its appeal to the radicalism of the historical avant-garde. Pedro Erber effectively deconstructs the oppressive dichotomies implanted by art criticism and decenters the framing of postwar art production. This book is sure to occupy a privileged position in the scholarship on twentieth-century art and become our irreplaceable companion."
 —Silviano Santiago, author of The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture

"Erber’s study helps us with the difficult, yet crucial, transition from postcolonial critique to a new way of thinking globally—and without simply affirming the global as the new universal.” —Sven Spieker, author of The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy

“Breaching the Frame strategically juxtaposes multiple interconnected presents to form a vision of the modern international world and propose a new method for mapping the rise of contemporary art. In returning the subject of expression to the materialist dialectics of contemporaneity, Erber calls into question the putative positionality of the West as the progressive future of the world and the exceptionalist geopolitical center of humanity.” —Naoki Sakai, author of Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism