CULTURE-BRAZIL: Gilberto Gil, Somewhere Between Art and Science

By Fabiana Frayssinet Reprint | | Print |

Fabiana Frayssinet

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 6 1998 (IPS) - An artist is someone who writes a chapter of their time, and songwriter/singer Gilberto Gil has done his bit in Brazil – starting in 1967 with a campaign against the military dictatorship.

On the threshold of the 21st century he is still going strong with new concerns, like the future of science.

“I think right now just at the end of the century the two universes have started to come together, that of art, religion, philosophy and magic, and that of science, mainly because of relativity, quantum mechanics, cybernetics and computer science,” said Gil in an interview with IPS.

Both universes will walk together in the coming century, science with its commitment to truth and reality, and art, “with its fantasy and with no commitments,” he said.

Both worlds are needed to unveil the mystery of the nature of the world. “I generally say the God of science is that of certainty, while the God of art is the God of beauty,” he added. In his latest record, Quanta, Gil translated this type of rumination on the future into poetic language.

“I thought it would be important to use the vehicle of popular music to tell the people on the street about this world, people who don’t have the time or are not in conditions to approach issues like this,” said Gil, the first Brazilian artist to have a page on the Internet.

He even included a song about this new type of world communication in his last album, but now he has had enough of diskettes, gigabytes and websites.

“My relation with Internet is similar to all my past relations with machines,” said Gil. “It is a relationship of fascination and annoyance at the same time. Just like all the amplifiers and simplifiers which attracted me at first and now annoy me.”

In Quanta there was also room for other concerns, like the confrontation between the Evangelist and Catholic religions.

In “Guerra Santa” (Holy War), the Gil describes a famous recent event where a minister from the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God was seen kicking an image of Saint Aparecida, the patron saint of Brazil, on television.

Although he supports the Green Party, Gil said he now believes in politics expressed through diplomatic channels like the United Nations.

“I lost a little of this desire to fight, for the struggle, for the war-like expression of politics, for having enemies, for beating them. All that is far removed from me today, I am peaceful, I prefer comprehension. I think today I would be a better diplomat than a politician,” said the 50 year-old songwriter.

His new preferences have found a framework for expression. Gil will accept the United Nations Education Science and Culture Organisation (UNESCO) proposal to become its “artist for peace,” a title to be awarded first to a Brazilian. But as with all his conceptions, peace also has a definition which is explicitly in his own style.

“I think the polarisation between war and peace will always exist because it is a characteristic of our human nature itself. When I think of peace I refer to a balance between the two poles,” he said.

Gil attributes these visions to an age he says he adores as it is the moment in life when “the old body and the rejuvenating soul unite, it is the union of the old man and the infant.”

This philosophy of life allows him to also accept, for example, the new directions taken by Brazilian music, far from its roots and which he explains and attributes to “the globalisation of art.”

“Brazilian music, the local traditions were very protected in the past. Now in the new era of globalisation, this and other cultures are coming together at great speed and they are feeding each other,” he said. “But I think that in the future the lack of things from the past will be felt and a new movement will emerge which will recover them. This is the evolutionary process of history.”

However, Gil did not say he had lost his past rebelliousness and stated that even today his dissatisfaction was the same.

“I am still concerned with the old issues like ‘apartheid’ the problem of the inclusion of the historically excluded and the new challenges which make these old problems more dramatic, like the increasingly swift technological changes which accentuate the social differences,” he explained.

“But now I express my concern in a different way, because I do it with the words of the older man I am now,” said Gil.