Toward a Common Configurative Impulse

Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa’s theorization of art’s affective power, whereby the relational contract with spectator is neither rational nor purely visual but infused feeling, was decisive for understandings geometric abstraction as expressive in 1950s. “Toward a Common Configurative Impulse” turns to another modernism, nestled alongside ones that would come define aesthetic artists associated Concrete Art these years. Beyond Art, modernism also encompassed creative production diverse practitioners, among them, popular artists, self-taught and psychiatric patients (the latter subject my book Learning from Madness: Modernism Global Contemporary Art). With this mind, essay tracks historical discursive origins such an inclusive how embrace different artistic subjectivities calls necessary shift historiography at mid-century.