From "Antropophagia" to "Conceptualism"

When the Tropicália environment installation by artist Hélio Oiticica was created in conjunction with the “Nova objetividade brasileira” exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderne (Museum of Modern Art) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil had already been under military dictatorship for three years. This is an important point to mention when one considers that—according to Luis Camnitzer, an artist, author, and curator living in New York—Latin American conceptualism cannot be understood without taking into account the political repression that had begun at the time in neighboring countries.¹ In this context, English art critic Guy Brett writes that the artistic practice of Brazilian artists such as Oiticica und Lygia Clark was concerned with enabling the individual “[to regain] trust in his own intuition and his most passionately-pursued ambitions.”² Oiticica’s “Creleisure” concept can also be understood against this backdrop of neologism which shows that the conceptual designs for his works, which were created in the second half of the 1960s, were no longer oriented on the model of industrial production, in contrast to concrete art, to which he had still felt obliged during the late 50s and early 60s. Instead, Oiticica propagated a combination of “creativity” and “leisure” that was his answer to the living conditions within an authoritarian working society that was—for a large portion of the population— characterized by poverty and hunger.

‘Creleisure’ is a neologism based on a punning amalgamation of ‘creativity’ and ‘leisure’, whose implicit reference to the leisure culture of the proletariat was meant to counter both the elitist art views of the bourgeoisie and the production ethos of the proletariat as expressed in concrete art.

‘Not to occupy a specific place, in space and time, as well as to live pleasure or not to know the time of laziness, is and can be the activity to which the “creator” may dedicate himself. (…) Is Creleisure creation of leisure or belief in leisure? (crer = to believe, tn.) – I don’t know, maybe both, maybe neither. The dumbos can quit at this point, because they will never understand: it is stupidity which predominates in art criticism – luckily they were punished by their own indifference to pleasure, to leisure, or to cannibalistic supra-states, though this identification does not interest me here.’³

Hélio Oiticica’s body of work is extremely diverse. It ranges from drawings, paintings, objects and installations, to his “Quasi Cinemas,”⁴ which he began creating at the end of the 1960s, and which expressed his affinity for the films of Andy Warhol and Jack Smith and, consequently, for homosexual underground cinema. In 1978, Oiticica returned to Rio de Janeiro, where he died two years later at the age of 43. Before he went to New York on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979, Oiticica had been one of the protagonists of the “Tropicalism” movement which, in incorporating music, art, literature, and theater, took a stand against the cultural, U.S.-dominated mainstream on the one hand, and against elitist and/or conservative-patriarchal forms of national art (traditions) on the other. In close collaboration with his fellow artists Lygia Clark and Lígia Pape, Oiticica developed the concept of a “new objectivity” that was devoted to the mutual understanding of artistic practice and the art of living. However, only fragments of the natural connection to the legacy of the historical avantgarde are apparent in his conceptual works. They are characterized by an increasing distance to the vocabulary of geometrical abstraction which influenced certain tendencies of Constructivism and Neoconcretism. As the Belgian art historian and curator Dirk Snauwaert writes, geometric abstraction was “of all the avantgarde movements (...) the one (...) which can most substantially claim to have successfully propagated its aesthetic worldwide.”⁵ Snauwaert relates the problematic of universalism and colonialism discernible therein to the interaction of new “technological modes of production” and “the transformation of the language of forms.” This developed, he claims, “parallel to the beginning of modernization in the second Industrial Revolution, with phenomena such as mass production, mechanization, and urbanization.”⁶

It’s true that such factors played just as important a role in Oiticica’s artistic change of direction as did his increasing interest in the modes of depiction and aesthetics of everyday life. As a result of his relating their “objectivity” to conceptual sign and object languages, the style/stylistic eclecticism propagated by the anthropophagic manifesto became the subject of a specific, popular-cultural interpretation within the context of Tropicalism. There was a corresponding artistic concept of (everyday) practice which would today be labeled as micropolitics. That’s because the criticism of geometrical abstraction also points to, as Snauwaert emphasizes, the “pressure from minority movements, [which] beginning in the late 60s, turned away from the program of a uniform, dominant, formal language and focused on language as the motor and substance of cultural identity.”⁷ The factors Snauwaert mentions were also considered by American art historian Benjamin Buchloh to be decisive with regard to both Oiticica’s position and that of fellow artist Lygia Clark, who was so important to him, as belonging to that group of artists who

“questioned the possibilities of continuing the universal project of abstraction (...) during the 60s.”⁸

In this context, the so-called “dessarrolismo” must also be mentioned. The name refers to a state-funded project, part of a delayed/compensatory capitalistic development that was started in the 1950s and 60s in several Latin American countries. The enthusiasm for development prevalent at the time was founded on the hope that southern nations, which were worse off economically than Europe and North America, could soon overcome their position as societal and cultural late-comers. That means that greater importance was attached to the expansion of so-called progressive industrial culture, and this was supported by the concretists more than it was questioned. In response to the rationalistic character of industrial language of form, Oiticica, Clark, Pape, etc. proposed alternatives such as intuition, creativity and subjectivity. In the following section on “Tropicália,” I would like to explain why these artists were so interested in founding a “new objectivity.”

“Tropicália” is an environment of sand, gravel, tropical plants, a cage containing two parrots, as well as two hut-like buildings reminiscent of structures found in the Brazilian favéla—so-called "Penetráveis," which can be translated as “penetrables.” Atop the strewn gravel, there is a stone with a poem painted upon it. (An dieser Stelle Fußnote weg, da es in den versch. Ausführungen der Installation unterschiedl. Gedichte gab) Inside the larger of the two huts, each consisting of wooden frames covered with fabric, there is a television that is switched on at the end of a dark, labyrinthine passageway, representing the only source of light. During my visit, the television could be heard even from outside. In the smaller of the two huts, the sentence “A pureza é um mitú” (“Purity is a myth”) has been written on the upper corner of a monochrome surface. Not only the labyrinthine spatial structure, but also the colorfully printed fabrics make a division between inside and out, or rather between “back” and “front”, appear superfluous. In other words: “Tropicália” takes the form of an ensemble of acoustic, tactile, visual, and semantic elements that reveals itself only through the physical involvement of its visitors. They are encouraged to literally penetrate the spaces.

The (self -)perception of the body in its movement through space and time also played a central role in minimal art in the United States: its credo was “presence” and “place.” Oiticica , however, had already been pursuing objectives typical of minimalistic series of art works—expressing time as space, or rather, space as time—earlier, specifically since the early 1960s. For example, in his text “About the Hunting Dogs Project”⁹ from 1961, Oiticica explicitly refers to the anti-linear time and spatial structure of the labyrinth—an antithetical model, as it were, to the concepts of constructivism, which were based on succession and progression. Here, too, one could recognize an “anthropophagic impulse”—indeed, in this way, the designs for Oticica’s works refer to cyclical concepts of time, which recall those of the Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs driven out by colonialism.

As American Robert Smithson writes, the affinity shown by the artists of the 1960s for labyrinthine, cyclical, crystalline forms also represented a revival of the Ultra-Modern of the 1930s. To support his argument, the artist mentions the rejection of the “organic” concept of time prevalent in the European Modern Age and inherent in the traditional conventions of painting, sculpture, and architecture.¹⁰

Precisely this moment can be identified in “Tropicália.” The folded-in spatial structure of the larger “Penetravels” stands in contrast to the smaller hut composed of four “canvases” which seems to inhabit the border area between painting, sculpture, and architecture. In one of his texts, Oiticica writes that he would prefer to speak of “Painting in Space” rather than sculpture despite the artificiality of the term. ¹¹ What he means by this can be recognized in the light of his installation “Grand Nucleus,” which refers to Piet Mondrian. Here, the static quality that was characteristic of Mondrian’s spatial organization, undergoes a wide-reaching dynamization. But in contrast to the traditional way of presenting a painting, which implies a primarily optical and/or visual mode of perception, Oiticica’s construction generates a direct physical relationship between the space and the viewer, in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Phenomenology of Perception.” Thus, the alternation between the two- and three-dimensionality of the stretched fabric surfaces generates a mode of perception that can be realized through physical movement. At the same time, other forms of "time experience" are discernible in Tropicália. Like many artists of his time, Oiticica was inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s and Quentin Fiori’s writings on the transformation of traditional concepts of reality through the new mass media. In this light, the inclusion of the television set can be interpreted as an allegory for the “Compression of Time.” Important in this context are Oiticica’s designs for so-called “supra-sensorial fields of perception,”¹² which he distinguishes from the deterministic stimulus-response model of Op Art and purely mechanical forms of interactivity— Alexander Calder’s mobiles, for example—in a text accompanying his exhibition “Eden,” shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1969. Oiticica’s spatial designs focus rather on the viewer's innate ability for unpredictable acts of perception. The potential of such an “act of perception” was recognizable in the crossing of two different perception modalities, evoked by the juxtaposition in space of the larger, colorfully printed and the smaller, monochrome hut. The former construction corresponds with “showing images” and, thus, with the visual imperative of mass media image production. The smaller construction corresponds with “seeing images” as an expression of the modernistic artistic imperative of a pure perception free of references and associations. At the same time, the television placed inside the larger huts acts as an interface between different ways of experiencing space and time (favélas, mass media, aesthetic abstraction), which are interwoven. Luis Camnitzer characterizes Oiticica’s model of perception as follows: “Whatever happens, it only takes place with the viewer, not for the viewer.”

It is precisely this element of participation that allows the cultural-critical dimension of Oiticica's artistic project to come to the fore, as apparently, this “expansion of perception” did not come about for its own sake. Taking a specific lifestyle as its subject—this is discernible in the reference to the building methods of favéla huts—is a suitable way of standing up for values other than those of the art market. In contrast to works of minimalist and pop art, the “favéla-esque” huts are consciously deprived of the status of trademarks. In this way, Tropicália formulates the possibility of reversing the avantgarde promise of transferring art into how one lives and placing it into a socio-geographical relationship with those experiences of time and space exclusive of modern artistic consciousness.

In this sense, one may conclude with the question: Does Oiticica’s Tropicália offer points of departure for a further development of Oswald de Andrade’s concept of Anthropophagia, especially with regard to its underlying model of time and space? And if so, to what degree?

In this context, I am reminded of the criticism of popular concepts of “identity” and “difference” expressed by the American cultural theoretician Lawrence Grossberg.

In his opinion, despite wide-reaching attempts, cultural and post-colonial studies have not really proven themselves capable of overcoming dualistic-hierarchical identity and difference relations. He believes this is fundamentally due to the primacy

given to the category of “time” as compared to space in the modern philosophy of history.¹³ Grossberg points to a phenomenon that is apparent not least of all in language. We speak of “simultaneity,” or things happening “at the same time,” but we lack a term for “in the same space.” Here, “time” refers first of all to a simple subdivision into past, present and future as proof of a reliable order. The prevailing concept of history is also subjugated to this notion,¹⁴ for it fosters the stories that grasp the European Modern Age as a genuine and exclusive phenomenon while other cultural manifestations are perceived as the expression of a lagging and/or delayed development.¹⁵

For that reason, Grossberg suggests viewing history as spatially “placed time.”¹⁶ This would mean understanding history not in the sense of a (teleological) continuity or a dialectic unfolding of contradictions, but in the sense of a simultaneity of singular events and disparate forms of becoming. From this, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—with reference to the philosopher Henri Bergson¹⁷—have developed the theoretical possibility of describing an “Otherness” which is neither derived from oneself nor constituted by the “I” versus “other” or “own” versus “foreign” relationship. Rather, they suggest a concept of otherness which makes the “difference of the difference” conceivable.

In my view, Tropicália appropriates the anthrophagic idea in this sense, according to which that which is supposedly Brazilian (i.e. the “tropicalistic” world of objects) first requires a physical incorporation in order to thus be able to go against the grain of the conventional differentiation between the “one’s own” and the “Other.” The environment achieves this, in my opinion, by making us aware of different modes of perception of time and space.

Oiticica works with the aesthetic difference between European and American-influenced geometrical abstraction and the location-specific iconographies that distinguish the plants, patterns of fabric, parrots, etc. he uses. In this sense, the term “tropicalism” refocuses the attention of Europe’s Modern Age on Latin American nations—a Modern Age that must fail to recognize the particularism of its universal project in order to be able to consume cultural differences as exotic products. Oiticica’s assertion of a counter-myth as seen in the term “tropicalism” is correspondingly ambiguous. With regard to de Andrade’s concept of “Anthrophagia,” the “becoming incommensurate” through consumption, which is based on physical pleasure, seems to be that which comprises one of the basic ideas of Oiticica’s designs: “(...) it is undoubtedly more correct to ‘consume consumption’ (...).”¹⁸ The fact that precisely such an “act of perception,” which goes beyond common patterns of consumption, signals an ability based on an experience other than that of dualistic-hierarchical identity and difference-related concepts of space and time—that is what for me makes Tropicália one of the most aesthetically and intellectually pleasing examples of historical conceptualism.

Sabeth Buchmann

(Translation: Louisa Schaefer, Cologne)