A key Brazilian conceptual artist who came of age during the military dictatorship, Paulo BRUSCKY.

Bruscky uses art to build resistance and question power. Renown for his staged wry actions —standing around with a sign that asked ‘What is art? What is it good for?’— his practice has no boundaries: ranging from mail art, to collage, installation, artist books, films and poetry.

Bruscky’s unique brand of visual poetry demonstrates a fluidity between art and life that exploits the context of urban routine. In the 1970s and ’80s he published a series of classified ads in newspapers in Brazil and elsewhere advocating absurdist or impossible situations, whether searching for a meteorologist capable of tinting the clouds in the sky ((Air Art, 1974/1982, @guggenheim) or ads for technicians capable of recording dreams (Project of a Machine of Filming Dreams, 1977).

His works have often consisted of interventions on the streets of Recife and other global cities including Amsterdam, New York, and Paris. The first performance of ‘Vaccine Against Boredom’ (Vacina Contra Tédio) was made in 1984 at the Theatre Guiomar Novaes in São Paulo. Bruscky together with Daniel Santiago dressed up as doctors and administered vaccines to volunteers from the public: emphasizing how art combats boredom because it lies outside the routine and denaturalises the automatism of everyday life. Art is not just fun, but breaks up the order and replaces it with estrangement.

Bruscky reminds us that life and art need to be tackled with irony and levity: art is still the antidote for boredom for all of us, and he believes that “Art is still the last hope”, a symbolic phrase that became also the title of his 2013 retrospective at the Bronx Museum, in New York.