Notes on the Parangolé

The Parangolé developed as a "softening" of the structural planes of the work; as Helio Oiticica writes, "everything which before was either background or support for the act and the structure of painting, transforms itself into a live element." The viewer/participant, enveloped within an artwork whose structure was deepened in a dynamic play of spatial and social relation, was now prompted to wear its structural planes on the body, or view others doing so, such that the elements of the work were always created by direct bodily action. The Parangolé took the form of a soft, wearable vesture that resembles a cloak or cape, made of one or more layers of brightly-colored material that requires direct movement of the body and reveals itself in this act. The artwork, no longer something in relation to which one stands, became something in which one is immersed: a "cycle of participation" in which viewer and viewed, "watcher" and "wearer," are enmeshed in circulatory, changing patterns. Like the flat surface of the computer interface, the Parangolé is softened and deepened through interaction: it draws the participant into the space of the artwork similar to the way the interface draws the participant into an alternate, hybrid space or situation. To "put on" the Parangolé or the computer interface (or the environment that seemingly lies behind it) is to merge body and technology, in order to alter or extend body and sociality and to integrate subjects, bodies, and social formations in a process of constructing and inhabiting space.

Dressing oneself in the Parangolé implies, according to Oiticica, a "corporal-expressive transmutation" of oneself, heightening awareness of one’s body, motion, environment and their interrelations --as if, for example, one were suddenly placed on stage, where every action is magnified and takes on new significance. As an "other" watches one’s movement, an awareness of self and social dynamic is set into play, creating an inter-corporeal space that the Parangolé actively mediates. Both the "wearer" and the "watcher" perceive the unfolding of this space: the watcher sees the "objective spatio-temporal plane of the work" while, in the other state of wearing, this plane is "dominated by the subjective-experiential." This interstitial space or intermediate phase between subject and object, watching and wearing, action and inaction, body and environment, movement and structure, is marked out by the Parangolé in its embodiment of "structure-action." The Parangolé constitutes a fluid, mediating element, through which one seeks to uncover the "perceptive molding" of socio-environmental structure -- structure-action in space. Its form is not resolute but wavering, held in tension, poised at the divisions of inter-corporeal space, whose mechanics and dynamics it reveals, however fleetingly, like the soft rush of a shadowy figure as it crosses the periphery of vision.

Formerly the material of the picture plane, the Parangolé unfolds and interweaves itself within the social and spatial environment, disrupting and agitating the conditioned situation of the artistic experience, instigating alternate relations while, accordingly, making such relations visible. However such visibility is not covetous and controlling, not oriented to ocular possession; as Lygia Clark, a contemporary of Oiticica's, writes, it addresses itself to the "eye-body" not the "eye-machine," and is always in a process of becoming. It thus escapes the totalizations of the eye and its binary, vector relationships, and instead results in a kind of circuitous, interstitial seeing. Such a seeing opens the channels between body and environment such that "sight" is not originary, Cartesian, and linear, but rather a phenomenon arising within a transactional network: a decentralized, configurative site of ongoing negotiation where bodies, bodies of codes, and environments are actively interlinked.

Oiticica intended to establish "'perceptive-structural relations' between what grows in the structural grid of the Parangolé..." and what is 'found' in the spatial environmental world." Consider Oiticica's description of the favela, a structure that for him has an implicit Parangolé character: "The structural organicity of its constituent elements and the internal circulation and external dismemberment of these constructions mean that there are no abrupt transitions from 'room' to 'living room' to 'kitchen,' only the essential, which defines each part connecting to the other in a continuity." Such orders "are not established 'a priori,' but create themselves according to creative necessity as it is born." Appropriating its "objective-constituent elements upon embodying itself, upon forming itself in its realization," such a structure forms itself contingently through the path and actions of the ambulatory subject, who engages in a process of inhabiting space. In this sense the Parangolé constitutes interfacial techniques of resistance against a totalizing geography -- a landscape of segmentation, homogenization, commodification -- and instead fuel what Michel de Certeau calls a "mobile organicity" in the environment, a kind of pedestrian speech that weaves "sequence[s] of phatic topoi." The totalized construct, whose relations are reflected in the gloss of its factory sheen, dissolves. Through such fissures, alternate sites of agency and speech erupt.

(Originally published in Blast 4: Bioinformatica, New York, X-Art Foundation, 1994.)

Artist, writer and media theorist Jordan Crandall is founding Editor of Blast, and Director of the X Art Foundation. He lectures widely on the cultural and political dimensions of new technology.