As artes visuais à luz da doutrina da segurança nacional: os casos de censura a exposições de arte nos anos de 1967 e 1968

Abstract

This thesis deals with the censorship suffered by some visual artists in the following exhibitions: IX International Biennial of São Paulo (1967) and II National Biennial of Plastic Arts of Salvador (1968), when there was still no specific legislative institute that allowed the military dictatorship to strictly control the visual arts, which would only come with Constitutional Amendment No. 1 of 1969. The first working hypothesis is related to the legal instruments that allowed the aforementioned censorship events, which would be article 150 of the Federal Constitution (1967), derived from Institutional Act No. 2 (1965), and also the National Security Law instrumentalized through Decree-Law 314/1967. The second working hypothesis is related to the visual criteria adopted for the realization of the aforementioned censorships, in contrast to the exemption given to other works that contained messages of a political contestation content even more forceful than the censored works. Regarding the methodology adopted, three different approaches were used due to the variety of natures of the documentary corpus, which ranged from newspaper and magazine news, legal instruments, texts present in exhibition catalogs, military police investigation, to images of works of art. The discussion is structured around the ideas of censorship, national identity, nationalism, cultural production, anti-communism and national security. The results point to the use of the ideas of propaganda of subversion present in Institutional Act No. 2 (1965), and of adverse psychological warfare contained in the National Security Law or Decree-Law 314/1967, as a legal framework that allowed the censorship investigated. And that the visual criterion used to choose the works that were censored would be subordinated to the ease of reading the visual message contained in the work of art by the general public.