Tropicália

This is how I spent my weekend:

These are a couple of pictures of me looking rather like a sci-fi elephant in one of Lygia Clark’s “Sensorial Hoods” at The Barbican’s Tropicália exhibition, celebrating that late-60s explosion of art and culture, reacting to the “sixties” taking root in the US and Europe, and to their own desperate political situation (Brazil didn’t have anything approaching a democratic government until the mid-80s). I knew something about the music (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and others, many of whom are performing in London this Spring). But I didn’t know anything about the vibrant and political visual art scene that went along with it.