“I CHOOSE TROPICÁLIA not because it is liberal but because it is libertine.” With this pithy turn of phrase, poet Torquato Neto put forth two of the Brazilian movement’s most provocative claims: first, that it provided an ideological alternative to defensive nationalisms, both Left and Right, in late-’60s Brazil; and second, that this alternative was constructed on an aesthetics of punning and resignification, a revaluing of words and positions, a flipping of public platforms into playgrounds that would invert the so-called predicament of Brazil’s tropical malaise into a vibrant cultural legacy

On the Lawn at Graduation 2001, a seven-minute looped video of a woman’s high-heel-shod foot swinging aimlessly to and fro, assumes added interest when accompanied by the martial rat-a-tat-tat rhythms of Gustav Holst’s “Mars: The Bringer of War,” the opening section of his suite The Planets (1918). In his recent exhibition, Chicago-based artist Ken Fandell set seven short, silent, single-shot videos to this modernist orchestral gem, variously adjusting and editing each one into evocative intersection with its seven sections. If we could free the term of its vernacular cultural baggage, Fandell’s