“A Questionnaire on Monuments” features 49 responses to questions formulated by Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty: “From Charlottesville to Cape Town, there have been struggles over monuments and other markers involving histories of racial conflict. How do these charged situations shed light on the ethics of images in civil society today? Speaking generally or with specific examples in mind, please consider any of the following questions: What histories do these public symbols represent, what histories do they obscure, and what models of memory do they imply? How do they do this work, and how might they do it differently? What social and political forces are in play in their erection or dismantling? Should artists, writers, and art historians seek a new intersection of theory and praxis in the social struggles around such monuments and markers? How might these debates relate to the question of who is authorized to work with particular images and archives?”

This article establishes the context for the original publication of Ronaldo Brito's pioneering 1975 essay, “Neo-concretism Apex and Rupture of the Brazilian Constructive Project” in the third and last issue of the Rio de Janeiro-based art journal Malasartes . It argues that Brito's text was a concerted effort to intervene within the determining logic of what the author and others termed “the circuit,” that is, the conjunction of protagonists, operations, and effects that produce and reproduce “the art world.” In this sense, Brito's essay was nothing less than a discursive rejoinder to the provocation of Cildo Meireles's seminal conceptual work Insertions Into Ideological Circuits (1970–75), likewise published in Malasartes . Brito not only provided the first political and structural analysis of the Neo-concrete movement as a localized response to a transnational field of constructive practices, he advanced a model of critical art history that realigned theoretical production with ideological critique.

This article analyzes a near-contemporaneous incidence of post-painterly practice—the use of raw pigment—utilized by the French neo—avant—garde artist Yves Klein and the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica. The use of raw pigment by both artists was conditioned by a self—conscious relationship to the history of modernist art and the monochrome as a limit and origin of painting. Despite the confluence of such orientations, Klein's pigments purs (pure pigments) and Oiticica's corpo da côr (body of color) resulted in radically divergent orientations toward the industrially produced commodity and hence the readymade. By exploiting inconsistencies characteristic of the commodity in developmentalist Brazil, Oiticica orchestrated a transfer of making from artist to viewer, initiating a newly participatory dimension within modernist color.