[…] a great artist is most likely to appear ‘at a moment of transition in national life with results that are recognised as having significance for the whole civilised world.’ […] the universal artist is universal because he is above all national. […] A supreme artist exercises an influence on the national consciousness that is incalculable. He is created by it but he himself illuminates and amplifies it, bringing the past up to date and charting the future […].
The title of this paper is an obvious provocation directed at the scholarly circles dedicated to the study of the art and life (the two are interconnected) of Hélio Oiticica. Its objective is nevertheless distinct from those who question the relevance or perhaps the extent of international attention that the artist has received particularly following his death in 1980. Indeed, this is not a critique of the artist, nor is it a questioning of his international standing but a call for a renewed analysis of his work beyond the discourse that has come to define him.
A second generation of Oiticica scholars has expanded the philosophical context of his work, developing those lines of enquiry initiated by the artist himself and/or bringing them up to date with the latest developments in the field of art theory. Yet for an artist so concerned with the continuous re-evaluation of his own practice, little has been done in terms of establishing an account of the relation between his own critical discourse, its inextricable connection with the contemporaneous socio-cultural debates and the ever-increasing dissemination that the work has received. In fact, few recent studies have analysed the significance of the shifts in the artist’s own writing even when various publications such as Aspiro ao Grande Labirinto, the book of letters between Oiticica and Lygia Clark, and the online availability of his writing have so painstakingly been compiled. This paper briefly traces a few examples of shifts in Oiticica’s writing in order to emphasise the importance of a historiographical approach in apprehending the artist’s trajectory.
The pertinence of undertaking such a task relates to the necessity of constructing a history that is, as far as possible, disconnected from the mythology that has been created around the artist. My title thus refers to a seemingly obvious contradiction between photographic evidence and personal testimonies relating to Hélio’s involvement as a passista in the hierarchy of the Samba School Estação Primeira da Mangueira. His virtuosity as a dancer has so far been taken for granted, receiving expert and first hand confirmation from eminent intellectuals and friends of the artist such as the art critic Frederico Morais, the journalist and Samba School historian Sérgio Cabral and distinguished scholars, curators and critics such as Wilson Coutinho, Luciano Figueiredo amongst many others. Despite the consistency of these affirmations, they seem somewhat at odds with the majority of photographs depicting Hélio dancing during Samba School rehearsals or indeed during the carnival parade. These images repeatedly show the artist in total concentration paying particular attention to his feet. This figure of total immersion within the act of dancing contrasts starkly with the other dancers depicted, who unlike Hélio seem to perform the same moves while maintaining a general allure of elegant effortlessness. If Hélio received private tuition from inhabitants of Mangueira such as Miro, this does not deny the fact that his level of virtuosity could hardly be equivalent to those who had been performing since childhood. For Oiticica’s contemporaries, accounts of his virtuosity as a dancer pertain undoubtedly to the general amazement at the artist’s progression as a Samba dancer. However, once such accounts are referred to in subsequent narratives, the mythmaking processes are set in place. What is particularly worrying in this instance is that such affirmations can be transformed into representations akin to those of the character Tarsan, in other words, there is a danger of implicitly assuming the inherent superiority of the white man. The exotic nature of the favela, its attractiveness and repulsiveness, could in this sense become tamed via the figure of Oiticica.
Such suggestions would seem absurd within the specialised circles of Oiticica scholarship, yet the dissemination that the artist receives today is such that superficial and erroneous accounts on the artist’s trajectory are now a reality. The fact that to date no one has actually questioned the virtuosity of Hélio’s Samba dancing seems proof that some accounts tend to re-articulate contemporaneous narratives rather than examine the work and documentation afresh.
It is therefore necessary to affirm that as far as Hélio’s dancing is concerned, the most complex moves might have been learnt but judging from the photographs they were hardly effortlessly performed. The actual question of whether Hélio could or could not dance is not important in itself but it raises a fact – beyond the issues already mentioned - that needs addressing. There has been for some time an overwhelming emphasis on the artist’s involvement with Mangueira, with Samba and the architecture, environment and culture of the favela. The artist’s encounter with the favela community and his discovery of Samba and carnival were of course central to the development of his subsequent ‘inventions’ and mark a radical change in the trajectory of his creative output. However, he did not belong to the favela. His involvement within that community operated through his friendship with particular individuals. This does not mean that he had been accepted by the community as a whole. On the contrary, the fact that he did establish relations of friendship with certain individuals from Mangueira, despite the often-hostile environment, was indeed pertinent to the work and life of the artist. The late poet Waly Salomão recalled, for instance, a number of incidents that occurred during some of Hélio’s visits to Mangueira. Although Salomão did not clarify the motives - whether they were robberies, drug or sex related - these incidences involved inhabitants of the favela being violent towards the artist. Indeed, the very fact that the favela is a barra pesada (dangerous) place was one of the reasons Hélio was attracted to it. This desire for situations of potential conflict, it could be argued, was transposed into the work, the first example of which could be said to have been the inauguration of the Parangolé at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, when the artist and his friends from Mangueira were, as has been so often recounted, forced to leave the premises.
For the first generation of Oiticica scholars such events served as appropriate analogies for questioning the institutionalisation of art and its complicity with a particular geopolitical demarcation defined by the Western canon of art. If the Museum of Modern Art did not allow a particular sector of the population to enter into the premises on their own behavioural terms, the same could be said about the presence of the non-Euramerican artists within the canon. Despite Oiticica’s later significant inroads into European and North American art institutions - such as his exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London 1969 and his participation in MoMA’s ‘Information’ exhibition in New York 1970 – his work remained until relatively recently peripheral to the narratives of Western contemporary art. The great achievement of individuals such as Figueiredo, Morais, Guy Brett, and later Chris Dercon, Catherine David and others, was to address this problem and expand the geopolitical boundaries of what was perceived as legitimate contemporary art practice.
The situation today is nevertheless very different. Major institutions such as the Tate Gallery are eager to address the limitations of their collections leading to the work of artists such as Oiticica being regarded as highly desirable acquisitions. The reasons for such a momentous shift within institutional practice are too complex to expose in this paper. A very brief outline would posit their origin as perhaps being located historically with publications such as Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 and the exposure of the processes behind the Western construction of its others. In parallel to the emergence of the field of post-colonial studies other factors such as the expansion of the traditional ‘Western’ art market further contributed to this process, when during the 1980s, it began to look beyond the saturated European and North American regions. This was followed in the 1990s by an explosion of international Biennials of contemporary art and large scale exhibitions that drew on a combination of the market interests and projects of local cultural assertion. These have propelled an exponential increase in the international exposure of artists who played key roles in the development of contemporary art in their respective ‘non-canonical’ contexts. This coupling of interests nevertheless led to the often forceful association of historic work with the current generation of artists. As art historians, critics and curators working with such artists, our attention should therefore shift from the critique of non-inclusiveness into more relevant enquiries that focus on revising the often-simplistic way in which such historical connections have been constructed.
As I have stated elsewhere ‘the increased attention to such histories and practices has brought with it attitudes towards display that inscribe themselves within what has been described as a ‘“rhetoric of universal inclusion”: a politically correct move that promotes the ideal of multiculturalism by maintaining such production isolated in its difference.’
To assume that the work of early Oiticica scholars possessed an element of strategic essentialism would be reductive, however, the way in which the significance of the artist has been received following such a decisive re-structuring of the international art circuit, fails to do justice not only to the work but also to the relation that the artist held with the local socio-political and art historical context. There has in effect been an uprooting of Oiticica’s practice that posits him as a locus of otherness concurrently establishing a legitimising process for (predominantly but not exclusively) Brazilian contemporary practices. These almost invariably operate through simple, often formalist, associations. With regard to Oiticica, this operation maintains a historical dimension that is overwhelmingly based on his involvement with the favela. It is in effect an a-historical reading since it ignores the subsequent development of the artist’s practice and sees the favela through a Western fascination with otherness, presenting it as contextually empty: a malleable signifier that conveniently enables the most varied associations with contemporary practices. Hence it is constructed as a place outside history, where the exotic becomes inextricably connected with the mythical aspect of the place. Oititica was in fact at first interested in this mythological aspect of that culture yet his own subsequent revisions to his aesthetic-ethic are too important to be ignored.
Oiticica’s ‘discovery’ of the favela was not exclusively the driving force in the change that his work underwent in the mid-sixties. In fact, Ferreira Gullar when recently arguing against the artistic value of Oiticica’s Parangolés - while I do not agree with his conclusions - correctly affirmed that such work was the product of an application of a sophisticated set of theoretical enquiries that had occupied the artist during the neoconcrete period. Attention to the artist’s writing prior to 1964 - when invited by fellow artist, Jackson Ribeiro to work on the production of carnival floats, Oiticica first entered Mangueira - reveals that the principle theoretical concerns that would inform his ‘radical leap’ in 1964 had already being elaborated. It is also worth mentioning in this context the general lack of historical rigour in relation to the description of Oiticica as a neoconcrete artist. The artist’s work during the brief period when the neoconcrete group (1959-1961) was active is indeed very distinct from his subsequent production, yet his entire oeuvre is frequently described as neoconcrete. This is perhaps the most apparent symptom of the a-historical approach I have been discussing.
Following the Neoconcrete Manifesto and prior to the publication of Gullar’s ‘Theory of the Non-Object’ (respectively March and December 1959), we encounter in Oiticica’s work a concern for colour and a preoccupation with the relationship between the work of art and its surrounding space: neoconcrete concerns par excellence. Oiticica’s writing in 1959, focused on the relationship between colour, space and time positing the discussion within a particular development of art history that related to Bergsonian notions of intuition. Intuition had in fact acted as a central issue in the disagreements between the São Paulo concretists and the Rio de Janeiro neoconcretists, and these could be assumed to belong to the context of this theoretical line of enquiry developed by Oiticica.
Various elements of Oiticica’s thought during the neoconcrete period can be associated with Bergson’s discussions on the relationship between intellect and intuition. These informed Oiticica’s own approach to the neoconcrete articulation of expressive geometry in opposition to the perceived overt rationalism of concrete art. The Bergsonian distinction between perception and conception, for instance served Oiticica’s enquiries about the concept of the object in space, through an investigation of the perceptual power of colour. For Oiticica, the relationship between space and time was respectively equated with intellect and intuition:
Space exists in itself, the artist temporalises this space in itself and the result is spacio-temporal. The issue at stake is thus time and not space, one depends on the other. If it were for space we would arrive again at the material, the rational. The notion of space is rational par excellence, it arises from the intellect and not from intuition (Bergson).
It was Bergson’s ‘discovery’ that scientific time possesses no duration that affected most profoundly Oiticica’s interpretation of his own neoconcrete work. Bergson realised that there was a ‘gap’ between scientific thought and the reality to which it attempted to relate but ultimately failed to reach. In other words, the scientific act of measuring time inevitably required a conceptual ‘freezing’ of time, that is, the consideration of time as undifferentiated, or as a neutral space. Real time, or duration, as Bergson defined it, consisted of a subjective experience, being always different never homogeneous. This implied subjectivity inherent within the work of art would become a central means of maintaining theoretical consistency through the radical transition that Oiticica would undergo in the following years. Indeed, some of Bergson’s comments might indeed invite those with a speculative incline to see in them the seeds for later works by Oiticica.
The whole of matter is made to appear to our thought as an immense piece of cloth in which we can cut out what we will and sew it together again as we please. Let us note, in passing, that it is this power that we affirm when we say that there is a space, that is to say, a homogenous and empty medium, infinite and infinitely divisible, lending itself indifferently to any mode of decomposition whatsoever. A medium of this kind is never perceived; it is only conceived. What is perceived is extension coloured, resistant, divided according to the lines which mark out the boundaries of real bodies or of their real elements.
With regard to his neoconcrete paintings, Oiticica equated metaphysics with the silence that emanated from within the work. Since silence can only be perceived as time, the work of art became inescapably associated with duration: in his view, it became duration. He argued, in contrast yet not entirely in opposition to Gullar, that although the work inevitably related to space, the artist’s task was to temporalise space. It was thus the relation to time and not space that belonged to the realm of metaphysics.
Oiticica therefore offered an elaborate theoretical differentiation between the rationalism of processes of creation within concrete art and the intuitive nature of neoconcrete production.
What Oiticica seemed to be proposing during that period was a parallel interpretation to the concurrent reading of Lygia Clark’s work by Gullar. The relationship between rational form and intuition, expressed in Clark’s work through such notions as the organic line, was ‘translated’ by Oiticica into the domain of colour. Oiticica discussed Clark’s Unidades in relation to colour and time. Indeed, the fact that Clark’s Unidades and Oiticica’s Monocromaticos possess similar dimensions emphasises the assumption that Oiticica’s use of colour could be seen as equivalent to Clark’s use of line.
Having briefly analysed some of Oiticica’s theoretical elaborations with regard to his neoconcrete practice, I will now argue that the encounter with the culture of the favela did not represent a rupture within such theories which could be implied by accounts that concentrate on the transition from the two dimensional plane to three dimensional space. To develop this argument it is however necessary to digress.
It is undeniable that Oiticica’s thought process during neoconcretism was subsequently affected by the collapse of developmentalist ideology, a period in Brazilian history that was marked by an unremitting faith in modernity, which during the 1950s, implemented a project of widespread industrialisation, led to the construction of the new capital Brasilia, and serves as the contextual background for understanding the neo-constructivist avant-gardes in Brazil during the period.
While the collapse was primarily due to national and worldwide economic factors, in the field of culture it was accompanied by a renewed interest in the field of popular art, driven by political ideology. This sector of cultural production had been ignored to a large extent by the rhetoric associated with the modernising drive of the nation. Indeed, the constructivist avant-gardes had consciously rebelled against the nationalist themes of artists associated with Modernismo, which particularly in the 1930s became widely attached with socialist aesthetics. As Ronaldo Brito has argued, the Brazilian contructivist avant-gardes, in light of the ‘ideological limitations of the nationalist proposition’ could only act by ‘abdicating the political field’ and by ‘placing themselves within the neutral territory of culture and philosophy’. Brito suggests that while a number of neoconcrete artists such as Amilcar de Castro and Franz Weissmann represented the apex of the constructivist tradition in Brazil, another more disruptive group within the movement went beyond it, effectively rupturing that tradition. The latter, included artists such as Clark, Lygia Pape, Oiticica and it could be argued Gullar himself. Whilst both Clark and Pape breached what Brito defined as the neoconcretist laboratory of ideas through an increasing reliance on the sensorial aspect of spectator participation, Oiticica’s shift involved a direct engagement with the popular. Oiticica’s great achievement was to maintain his aesthetic/theoretic approach in relation to the divergent positions of other key figures of the neoconcrete movement, namely Lygia Clark with her sensorial research and Ferreira Gullar with his political engagement with the popular.
The cultural shift from the optimistic 50s to the radically politicised 60s marked a period in which the arts (theatre, cinema, music and the fine arts) converged in their increasing association with political thought. This pertained on the one hand, to the questioning of hierarchies between high-art and popular culture, and on the other hand, to a desire to distinguish national from imported culture. While the issue of the popular in ‘developed’ countries related, at that moment, to a large extent to the emergence of mass culture (advertisement, films, product and graphic design) in Brazil although often disseminated by such media, the term ‘popular’ brought with it a strong traditional connotation. However, the definition of what ‘traditional’ actually meant, in the context of a ‘young’ nation, was anything but consensual. The political context of the emerging concern with the ‘popular’ amongst artists and intellectuals thus pertained to differing definitions of what the term encompassed. It often related in this sense, to a policing of the limits of Brazilian national culture and as far as the left was concerned, it appealed to a negation of imported (predominantly North American) ‘imperialist’ mass culture. Differing ideologies, in this manner, would define what was and, perhaps more importantly, what was not traditional culture.
During the 1960s, and particularly during the pre-1964 Goulart government, such paradoxes affected many intellectuals who now saw the political pertinence of their activity solely in relation to its engagement with the popular classes. This was the case of Ferreira Gullar who having acted as the principle theorist within the neoconcrete movement, in the dawn of the new decade abandoned all association with avant-garde practice to become involved with the Popular Centres for Culture (CPC) in 1961, becoming their president the following year. The emergence of the CPC during the early 1960s had as its philosophy the ideological engagement with the wider population through culture. Being driven by ideological convictions, it searched for the ‘authentic’ national culture in order to communicate more directly with the people. However, studies on the development of intellectual involvement within the domain of popular culture have pertinently argued that both the art inspired by popular traditions and art which addressed itself to the popular classes as its primary audience, remained highly problematic:
From an art inspired by the popular traditions to an art that adopts the people as its privileged receptacle, the problem of the limits and nature of the popular remains. If in the first case it is difficult to characterise it due to the fact that a sociologically improbable cultural unity is assumed [as representative] or at least, isolated manifestations ‘signify’ such a unity; in the second case, it passes through the intelligentsia or through the dominant political power.
The dilemma is not resolved by submitting the popular to a process of refinement, if only that would be possible, but through the questioning of its specificity. The more or less aprioristic acceptance of the existence of a popular culture, inevitably leads to a defence of a mythology of the roots and morals of a people, which are in turn freely translated into an idea of nationalism for official consumption; or alternatively for the dominant culture. In both cases the result is similar: the popular is the basic relationship of production-consumption. At the limits one can ask: if it is not the projection of a myth, could the popular today be more than just a question?
As the 1960s progressed such a question would become increasingly crucial for Oiticica whereby the issue of the popular and its associated mythologies would drive the shifts in the artist’s practice and theory. Initially, Oiticica’s analysis of the notion of the popular could be seen as having radicalised his writing that had run in parallel to that of Ferreira Gullar.
Gullar has stated that Oiticica considered him as an older brother, and that his respect for the poet was confirmed by the artist’s insistence in constructing Gullar’s ‘Buried Poem’ in his family’s back garden. It is therefore reasonable to assume that Gullar’s disengagement from neoconcretism must have caused a turmoil in the young artist’s mind. Again, Gullar has exemplified this fact by referring to the artist’s impasse when the poet, having abandoned his faith in the ‘possibility of a Brazilian avant-garde’ suggested that all of the neoconcrete production should be destroyed during a final exhibition. If we are to consider that Oiticica’s reference to Gullar in his 1967 essay ‘Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade’ is indicative of the artist’s enduring respect for the poet - despite the poet’s critical position with regard to contemporary art production, including Oiticica’s own post-neoconcrete production – then it could be assumed that Oiticica’s shift was in part a response to Gullar’s implicit ultimatum: in order to be ethical one needs to turn to politics, the avant-garde cannot be politically engaged due to the autonomous nature of its enquiry.
Oiticica and Gullar would from 1961, choose individual paths that would become irreconcilable. The radical changes which occurred in each of their trajectories indicates, other than the political circumstances of that historical moment, a mutual departure from the previous neoconcrete experiences and experiments. Oiticica’s move towards popular culture could be seen in this sense as a parallel project to that of Gullar, in a similar manner in which his Bergsonian analysis of space and time ran in parallel to the poet’s interest in phenomenology.
Oiticica had obviously no intention of distancing himself from an avant-garde position, and as Paula Braga has demonstrated in her research, it was in Nietzsche that the artist found the means of addressing his own ethical dimension. Such a dimension was superimposed upon his theoretical analysis on colour and would ultimately lead to the process of transition from constructivist abstraction to his later participatory work:
It is necessary to establish the great order of colour in the same manner in which there is the great order of architectonic space. Colour in its structural sense can only be admired. This great order will be born out of the desire for an internal dialogue with colour, in its structurally pure state; it is a special instance that in repeating itself will create this order; these are rare instances. Colour has to structure itself like sound in music; it is the vehicle of the cosmicity of its creator in dialogue with his element; the primordial element of the musician is sound; of the painter is colour; not the allusive colour, that which is ‘seen’; it is the cosmic structure colour. But the dialogue creates its order, it is not unity but plurality: it demands time to express it; this time can be the crystallisation of expression, of which colour is the principal element, it is necessary that the artist becomes superior, that he should strive to move above, ethically.
The understanding of the concept of superiority, which has been the most distorted characteristic of Nietzsche’s philosophy is also central in the distinction of Oiticica’s and Gullar’s approach towards the popular. As already mentioned, the project of the CPC was to ‘simplify’ political concepts and present these through a cultural form that would be recognisable to the mass of the population. For Oiticica, there was never the question of simplification. He infiltrated their culture not because he was attempting to consciously bridge high art with popular culture but because it appealed to him as an individual. The experience was only subsequently integrated within his work. Therefore, the ‘superiority’ of his approach would pertain to the acknowledgement that the power of colour, which he had previously theorised, would be ‘felt’ intuitively, without any simplifying aid, by those who participated in his work.
Oiticica elaborated this position of the individual in the world as having a clear correspondence with Nietzschean thought. He argued:
The ancient position with respect to the work of art is no longer applicable – even works that do not require the participation of the spectator, what is proposed is not a transcendental contemplation but a state of ‘being’ in the world. Similarly, dance does not propose an ‘escape’ from this immanent world, but revels it in all its plenitude – what for Nietzsche would be the state of ‘Dionysian inebriation’ is in fact the ‘expressive lucidity of the immanence of the act’, an act that is not characterised by any form of partiality but by its totality as such – a total expression of the Self. Would this not be a fundamental character of art?
There was therefore, a clear attempt to assert the transition that his work had undergone through Nietzsche’s philosophy, as a means of distinguishing it from other contemporaneous critical positions. Oiticica’s approach to the popular distinguishes itself from those on the traditional Left and the Right for its affirmative stance, in a Nietzschean sense. Such an approach was ambivalent in its relation to art, being both Classical and Romantic, or Apollonian and Dionysian. Oiticica expressed the Dionysian tragic - the ambivalent condition of music, dance and suffering in the favela - within the Apollonian drama - that of the idealism of art and particularly the rationalism of the constructivist legacy. The stage for such drama was always Apollonian: the field of fine art. The development of his constructivist experience through the incorporation of a mythical experience related to a rejection of the object of art as purely contemplative within the specificity of the gallery or museum space. Dance became important to the artist as his involvement with the people of Mangueira operated initially through it.
The discovery of the favela in 1964 therefore acted as a means of escaping the dilemma posed by Gullar. Oiticica was thus able to relate the notion of intuition and his ideal of the sublime through the popular exuberance of Samba and carnival. The theoretical means of doing so had already been expressed in the pages of his diary, when in 1961 he quoted a passage from Goethe associating it with his concurrent theoretisations with space and time. It is interesting to note that he referred to this particular passage by Goethe the same year in which Gullar announced his abandonment of neoconcretism:
Goethe: ‘What is certain is that the sentiments of youth and the uncultivated peoples, with their indetermination and broad extensions, are the only adequate [receptors] for the “sublime”. Subliminity, if it is to be awoken in us by external things, has to be “informal” [informe] or consist of “inapprehensible forms”, enveloping us in a greatness that superseded us... But as the sublime is easily produced at dawn or at night, confusing the figures, it also disappears during the day which separates and distinguishes everything; that is why culture eliminates the sentiment of the sublime.’
At the moment I find this paragraph exact in relation to all the disquiet and mobility that I feel concerning the ‘sublime’. Goethe is excellent in his observations. And what I desire in the exteriorisation of my art, will not be ‘inapprehensible forms’; the artistic form is not obvious, static in space and time, but mobile, eternally mobile, changeable.
The encounter with the culture of the favela hence facilitated the application of such theoretical issues, acting as a catalyst that generated the unexpected social dimension to the artist’s analytical development:
The collapse of social preconceived ideas, of separations of groups, social classes etc., would be inevitable and essential in the realisation of this vital experience. I discovered here the connection between the collective and individual expression – the most important step towards this – which is the ability not to acknowledge abstract levels, such as social ‘layers’ in order to establish a comprehension of a totality. The bourgeois conditioning which I had been submitted to since I was born, undid itself as if by magic – I should mention, in fact, that the process was already under way even before I was aware of it.
In such a demolition of the social conditioning the artist acknowledged having been submitted to, dance became an essential manifestation, as can be noted in the following statement of 1965:
Before anything else I need to clarify my interest in dance, in rhythm, which in my particular case, came from a vital necessity for disintellectualisation. Such intellectual disinhibition, a necessary free expression, was required since I felt threatened by an excessively intellectual expression. This was the definite step towards the search for myth, for a reappraisal of this myth and a new foundation in my art. Personally, it was therefore an experience of the greatest vitality, indispensable, particularly in the demolition of preconceived ideas and stereotypification, etc.
However, the above passage in his diary is also revelatory in that it equates Oiticica’s interest in dance with the improvised nature of Samba. This reveals the ambivalence inherent in the artist’s approach, whose combination of the rigours learnt from the constructivist tradition did not hinder his immersion into the excesses of that spontaneous cultural manifestation.
Dance is par excellence the search for a direct expressive act, it is the immanence of the act. Ballet dance, on the contrary, is excessively intellectualised through the presence of choreography that searches to transcend this act. However, the ‘Dionysian’ dance, which is born out of the interior rhythm of the collective, exteriorises itself as a characteristic of popular groupings, nations, etc. In these, improvisation reins as opposed to organised choreography; in fact the freer the improvisation the better. It is as if an immersion into rhythm takes place, a flux where the intellect remains obscured by an internal mythical force that operates at an individual and collective level (in fact, in this instance one cannot establish a distinction between the collective and the individual). The images are mobile, rapid, inapprehensible – they are the opposite of the static icon that is characteristic of the so-called fine arts. In reality, dance, rhythm, is the actual aesthetic act in its essential raw state – implied here is the direction towards the discovery of immanence. Such an act, the immersion into rhythm, is a pure creative act, it is an art. It is the creation of the actual act, of continuity, and also, like all acts of creative expression, it is a producer of images. Actually, for me it provided a new discovery of the image, a recreation of the image, encompassing unavoidably the aesthetic expression in my work.
Dance therefore demonstrated to Oiticicia how the expressive act could transcend determined categories and indeed fields of cultural production. It at once dismantled the boundaries attached with social hierarchy and disciplinary distinctions. The adopted position of self-maginalisation thus problematises assertions that Hélio thrived within the established categories of Samba School dancers, which were hierarchical by nature.
The unbalance that was entailed by this social dislocation, from the continuous discrediting of the structures that rule our life in this society, specifically here in Brazil, was both inevitable and charged with problems. These far from being overcome, renew themselves every day. I believe that the dynamic of the social structures were at this moment revealed to me in all their crudity, in their most immediate expression, precisely due to my process of discrediting the so-called social layers; not that I consider their existence, but that for me they have become schematic, artificial, as if all of a sudden I gazed from a vantage point onto their map, their scheme, being ‘external’ to them – marginalisation, naturally an already present characteristic of the artist, has become fundamental for me - this position represents a total ‘lack of social place’, at the same time as being the discovery of my own ‘individual place’ as a total man in the world, as a ‘social being’ in the total sense as opposed to being included in a particular social layer or ‘elite’, not even in the artistic marginal elite but that exists (I speak of the true artists, and not of the habitués of art); no, the process here is more profound: it is a process in society as a whole, in practical life, in the objective world of being, in the subjective lived experience – it would be the will for a integral position, social in its most noble meaning, free, total. What interests me is the ‘total act of being’, which is what I experiment here with – not partial total acts, but a ‘total act of life’, irreversible, an unbalance for the equilibrium of being.
More than the specific skills of the passista, Oiticica’s long-lasting interest in the intuitive and participatory nature of improvised dance seems to be confirmed a decade later when, while living in New York, he associated Rock music with the repercussions that Oswald de Andrade’s notion of Anthropophagy had in the 1960s, being both national and anti-nationalist. He equated Hendrix’s irreverent version of the American National Anthem with a mockingly anti-nationalist stance. Moreover, there is a strong sense that for Oiticica the Rock concert (he mentioned one that occurred in Central Park) represented a similar participatory experience to that of Samba and carnival, which had been so important in his creative development a decade earlier in Brazil. He affirmed this by arguing that the experience of Samba has the greatest proximity to that of a Rock concert. However, what distinguished the two musical forms was the sense of rhythm. Samba in this scheme was seen as elitist compared to Rock since it requires initiation while with Rock anyone is able to participate immediately. This is evidenced in the Hélio-Tapes, recordings that the artist produced during conversations with fellow Brazilians in New York. In conversation with the artist Carlos Vergara, Oiticica discussed the spontaneous nature of the Blocos de Samba. These distinguish themselves from the Samba Schools for their non-organisational character. Unlike the Samba Schools that are running within a competition and require several rehearsals in addition to possessing a hierarchical structure in which the dancers are placed, the Blocos are groups of people joined by a common theme and dress. Vergara and Oiticica discussed the ambivalence that the Bloco contained whereby it represented a group that nevertheless allowed the space for individuality. Vergara emphasised this point by claiming that:
In the Samba School there still exists, even at an individual level, a certain performance, this is not the case in the Bloco where there is only a desire since as there is no fixed choreography, there can be no good or bad dancer, it is this desire for participation that is marvellous.
Oiticica added:
Rock, in my opinion, had something important about it which was that even the most awkward person could participate... you could never say ...ah! This person cannot dance, every one dances [...]
The association between Rock and Samba raised by Oiticica is pertinent since it serves to eradicate essentialist or primitivist connotations that might be associated with his work. Additionally, it emphasises the continuous interest in dance as a spontaneous and intuitive act, free from any association with choreography. It is thus possible to trace the continuous theoretical preoccupations of the artist throughout his shifting practice.
Another example of Oiticica’s continuous ethical stance with regard to the changing nature of his production can be noted in his shift regarding his most notorious work, the Parangolé.
Towards the end of his life, Oiticica made the assertion that all his previous work only represented a prelude for what would come. He associated this new direction in his art with a ‘demythologising process’. One can only speculate about what would have been the consequences of such a process had he not tragically died in 1980. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that the elimination from his work, of what he had previously defined as ‘the search for myth’ had already begun to take place from the late 1960s, and intensified during his residence in New York during much of the 1970s.
The idea of the work’s association with ‘myth’ had been encouraged by the artist in relation to his early Parangolés and the relation that they possessed with the culture of the favela:
There is another point that emerges […]: the occurrence of a true return, through the concept of the Parangolé, to a mythical, primordial structure of art, […]. If this factor was obscured from the Renaissance art onwards, it has tended to increasingly emerge again in the art of our century. An approximation to dance elements, mythic par excellence, or the creation of special places, and so on, implicit in the Parangolé, still needs to be clarified. There is, as it were, a ‘desire for a new myth’, furnished here by these elements of art; they make an interference in the spectator’s behaviour: a continuous and far-reaching interference, which would implicate the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology and history.
Oiticica considered the mythological experience, that his art of the mid-1960s proposed, as having strong associations with the primitive. The artist saw in the disenfranchised sectors of Brazilian society a window that opened onto the outside of Western civilisation. He saw the ‘desire for a new myth’, as stated in the above quote, as a recurring theme in modern art. He was convinced, at that moment, that this theme connected his work to various moments in art history: the early modern European fascination with the exotic, the efforts of Modernismo to portray the Brazilian native myths, and the experience that Oiticica’s mentors, Mário Pedrosa and Ivan Serpa, had with the work of the insane.
Such a position seems however strangely at odds with Oiticica’s subsequent note entitled Parangolé Synthesis:
Demythification of the Parangolé
program of the circumstantial ‘object-event’
open
non-mythified
non-theatre
non-ritual
non-art object
what remained from Parangolé-
first were the circumstantial situations
non-myth
meetings-events of experimentalism
open without aspirations to myth
or ritualism of the moment
amoment
breast-feed the moment: don’t elevate it to categories of
myth or of aesthetic preciousness
1964, PARANGOLÉ-first
= There the work requires direct corporal participation; besides covering the
body, asks it to move, to dance in the final analysis. =
at the time
DANCE
Represented for me aspiring to myth, but, more important, was already
in-corporation
today it is nothing more than
corporal climax
non-display
auto-climax
NON-VERBAL
Other than the obvious shift in the form of writing, the above note lists a number of characteristics that the artist wished to be disassociated from the concept of the Parangolé.
The significance of such a shift relates to Oiticica’s bitter statement (written in 1970) on the state of Brazilian culture: ‘Brazil Diarrhoea’. The essay was not only a reaction against the conservative environment imposed by the military regime in Brazil but a response to the general misunderstanding of Oiticica’s own ‘politics of ambivalence’. The artist stated very clearly that his critical position was dependent on such ambivalences since according to him:
[…] to be ready to judge oneself, choose, create, is to be open to ambivalence, since absolute values tend to castrate any of these liberties; I would even say: to think in absolute terms is to be constantly in error, to age fatally, to direct oneself towards a conservative position (conformisms; paternalisms; etc.); not meaning that one shouldn’t choose with firmness: the difficulty of a strong option is always that of shouldering the ambivalences and untangling each problem, piece by piece. To shoulder ambivalences doesn’t mean to accept, conformistically, this entire state of affairs; on the contrary, one then aspires to throw it into question. That is the question.
Ambivalence enabled the constant re-evaluation of the artist’s own position. It signified a condition of continuous questioning: a state of self-doubt necessary to inform one’s own convictions. Oiticica’s approach – which surprisingly remains to be discussed by art historians - was directly related to his re-evaluation of the references to ‘myth’ which usually equate notions of the primitive with popular culture. ‘Brazil Diarrhoea’ was a conscious process of eradication of all references open to ‘dilution’ or essentialist misrepresentations. One needs only to compare Tropicália of 1967 with the artist’s subsequent Eden of 1969, not to mention later works such as Magic Square no.5 – De Luxe of 1978, to realise the extent of such a shift. The latter, it is worth mentioning, attest the artist’s continued interest in colour.
However, the posthumous dissemination of Oiticica’s work such as the Parangolé invariably relates to those produced during 1960s, that is, those that refer directly to the artist’s experience of the favela and Samba: in other words, those that searched for a ‘mythical’ experience. Yet, if we are to look at his subsequent capes, particularly those produced in New York, we note a substantial difference in approach and aesthetic. The early examples possess a level of rawness in their material and construction that is not present in the later versions which tend to be far more ‘constructivist’ oriented. The issue of marginality nevertheless remained albeit in a translated sense: from the aesthetics of adversity the emphasis shifted to that of sexuality.
Oiticica’s shift from the ‘mythical experience’ towards a re-evaluation or synthesis of his diverse output is perhaps a symptom of his own realisation that certain performative aspects contained within his work could only emerge under intense periods of proximity with the ‘community’ or friends he collaborated with. Friendship although bridging the alterity between Self and Other, is always a precarious condition. The fragility of the relationship, its inevitable end, parallels the material and conceptual degeneration of the Parangolé. Now in a museum, the dialogue between cultural domains has disappeared, and while the spectator is still invited – in some cases - to participate there is a distance that is installed by the institution that overshadows the original invitation to adopt free patterns of behaviour.
Oiticica realised that within a foreign context, the search for ‘myth’ as an experience served only to alienate the participant. Instead we witness Oiticica developing a mythical structure that responds to the mythological character of art itself.
The artist also realised that to produce work in New York with such overt references to the culture of Rio could hardly be maintained as a practice connected to the everyday experience.
It is strange therefore that the museum’s preferred work – that is, work which is most commonly disseminated abroad - is that which relates to Oiticica’s ‘search for myth’ rather than the later production. This is symptomatic of a tendency, described above, of presenting work that is nevertheless displayed ‘isolated in its difference’.
Such a paradox could be equated with the interpretation that Oiticica’s work is submitted to today. As I have stated elsewhere, the dissemination of current Brazilian art is often guilty of evoking the spectre of the past as a sign of its authenticity, which in turn acts as the significant element of the work’s contemporaneity.
This phenomenon has been identified as emerging on a general scale from the articulation between the universal and the national within the postmodern era. Andrew Benjamin, speaking from a European position, that is itself already dated, describes this aspect of contemporary artistic production in terms of:
the ability of a particular artist either to repeat and develop the themes that made up the national heritage or to give expression to a particular aspect - be it geographical or transcendental - of national character. The linking of tradition and nation would provide the grounds for a critical exclusion or inclusion; one sanctioning the promulgation of a canon of national artists. Admission to the canon would reside in the work’s capacity to further artistic national identity.
The re-emergence of the national character in culture clearly stems from a notion of pluralism as diametrically opposed to universalism. References to the national within this binary scheme tend to gravitate towards a sense of unity and essence, where the main factor for judgement of cultural pertinence is equated with belonging. This had been a characteristic of European art during the 1980s and 90s, which now seems to have subsided. However, in peripheral or post-colonial cultures, as happened in Brazil during the 1960s, reference to the national has often coincided with a struggle for autonomy from the dominant culture. Although this places such production in a different light compared to European and/or North American artists, it becomes problematical, as is still often the case, if seen as an exclusive and determining characteristic. Like the ‘supreme artist’ described by C.L.R. James at the beginning of this paper, to view Oiticica’s production as pertinent within the new globalised world context, requires an understanding of how it emerged from the paradoxes generated from national politico-cultural shifts.
In order to establish such a view it is necessary to abandon the exclusive analysis of particular moments in his ‘career’ and to focus on the articulation of paradoxes that mark his trajectories of thought and practice. By doing so it will become evident that whilst Hélio had no ginga, Oiticica had it to spare.
Dr. Michael Asbury is a research fellow in the history and theory of art. He is a core member of the Research Centre for Transnational Art Identity and Nation at the University of Arts London, where he runs the open lecture series, supervises five PhD students and is the director of the MA in the Theory and Practice of Transnational Art. His own PhD was entitled: Hélio Oiticica: politics and ambivalence in 20th century Brazilian art.
