The 1970s in Brazil were also the times of the desbunde. Given the most absolute impossibility of translating the term, here is an approximate meaning: the verb desbundar means to go totally crazy, to have too much power given to one’s imagination. The 1970s were a time of experiences in excess, of experimenting with excess. I don’t mean experiences in excess to, which denotes discontinuity, deterritorialisation, surrendering and ceasing fire, but experiences in excess of our recent past, which denotes continuity, reterritorialisation, creation of new sites, the lighting of new fires. In excess of political struggle, we had mysticism, esotericism, and the need of self-knowledge that came with all the modulations of the hippie dream of love and peace; and, for those who could afford them, the ventures and the risks of psychoanalysis. In excess of a feeling of failure and defeat, we had a sentiment of accomplishment, if not of our projects of having things in right places, the certainty that the best things are definitely out-of-place, that the most interesting and exciting things are those for which there is no place, those which demand the continuous reinvention of things and places, those which cost us dearer. In excess of our amplified slogans and screams of protest, we had the advantage of proximity, the intimate face to face of the whisper, and the subtle but explosive power of the metaphor. In the 1970s we were armed to the teeth.


And in excess of so many ideals and ideas in our heads, we had too much hair.
These are Cildo Meireles on the left, Artur Barrio on the right, Luis Fonseca in the middle, and on the right corner Vicente Pereira, a playwright of which one can only see the hair, with the Sugar Loaf on the background, photographed by Luiz Alphonsus in 1974. And this is 21 Petites Sculptures en Cheveux/21 Small Sculptures in Hair, a work, also of 1974, done by Artur Barrio with excesses of his own ideas and of his own hair, after doing some washing, or perhaps laying some eggs.


Conclusion

With this paper, I have paid homage to four artists, who also happen to be my friends. But there are other artists, and I have other friends. Only the choice of a concentration - on a period and a production of transition, as I pointed out - should justify a text on Brazilian art in the 1970s without the reference, among other artists just as fundamental for an understanding of the period, to Luiz Alphonsus, Luis Fonseca, Raymundo Collares, Antonio Dias, Iole de Freitas, Teresa Sim?es, Anna Maria Maiolino, Guilherme Vaz, Waltércio Caldas, José Resende, Carlos Fajardo, Tunga, Ivens Machado etc. And only the lack of references to the work of these artists should justify a lack of reference to the artist Milton Machado.

Thank you, obrigado
Milton Machado