Hélio Oiticica
Museum is the world
21/09 — 06/01/2013
Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, 1979. Fotografia: Ivan Cardoso
The work of Hélio Oiticica (1937 – 1980), which in recent years has been discovered and
reassessed outside Brazil, represents one of the most significant achievements of the twentieth
century. The exhibition museu é o mundo constitutes the broadest possible retrospective of the
artist, featuring 117 works, some of which are displayed in the outdoor spaces of the Museu
Coleção Berardo.
In 1955, Hélio Oiticica started out on a remarkable journey. Taking neo-concrete abstraction as
a starting point, he aimed to explore new ways of moving painting away from the canvas,
creating devices intended to immerse the spectator, such as the Penetrables, or the Parangolés,
which could be worn. His installations Tropicália and Éden gave an ethnological and political
twist to concretist experiments and demanded a different kind of relationship with time and
pleasure. Many of his penetrable works, which abandoned the museum in an attempt to seek
new paths for painting, can be found in the exhibition along with the publication of his writings,
which enable us to understand the way in which Hélio Oiticica outlined the main problematics
with which subsequent artistic developments would be confronted.
Pedro Lapa | Artistic Director
Few artists reflected on their own work with such clarity and acuity as Hélio Oiticica. All
issues that emerged throughout his experimental process, which started in the brink of the
dissolution of Grupo Frente (a Concretist nucleus in Rio de Janeiro), in 1958, are documented
in notes, texts, interviews, testimonies and letters. In an interview granted Jornal do Brasil in
May 1961, he states: “I think the artist’s own testimony about his experience is extremely
important. The tendency is the artist becoming increasingly aware of his work. It’s easier to
penetrate into an artist’s thought when he leaves a verbal account of his creative process. I
always fell compelled to make notes about all essential points of my work”.
In the specific case of Oiticica, we can affirm that work and testimony are intercrossed in
such a degree that it’s impossible to separate them without generating a loss for both, for they
are essential for his qualification as a seminal artist of Brazilian vanguard of the 1950s, 1960s
and 1970s.
Oiticica’s poetical trajectory moves from the impeccable and almost aseptic works of his
initial phase, strongly influenced by international “Constructivism”, to a kind of “slum
Constructivism”. Such approach to Brazil through the wide-ranging via of “Concrete” and
“Neoconcrete” formal inventions takes shape when the sculptor Jackson Ribeiro takes him to
Mangueira Hill, in Rio de Janeiro. “It all started with the formulation of the Parangolé, in
1964, with the whole of my experience with samba, the discoveries of the hills, of the organic
architecture of Rio de Janeiro’s slums (and, consequently, others, such as the stilt villages of
the Amazon) and especially of the spontaneous and anonymous constructions in the large
urban centers – street art, unfinished things, barren areas, etc. Parangolé was the beginning,
the seed, even if still within the field of universalizing ideas (the return to myth, sensorial
incorporation, etc) of New Objectivity’s and Tropicália’s conceptualization.”
Therefore Hélio arrives at Tropicália through a process that begins with the conventional
“canvas” of Western painting, but that progressively deconstructs toward a Brazilian
experience. Such transformation doesn’t occur, however, in a representational or illustrative
scope. It doesn’t mean a change of subject, but a political transformation based on the
participation of the “spectator”.
Hélio Oiticica – museum is the world transcends the exhibition borders of the Museu Coleção
Berardo. With works spread through the public outdoor spaces of Centro Cultural de Belém, the
exhibition puts the public in direct contact the idea of “Ambulatory Delirium”, a form employed
by Hélio to awaken in himself a state of latent creation. His greatest aspiration from the
Penetrables (which start with Hunting Dogs Project and continue through the end of his
production) is having them as open and cosmic spaces, where the individual could create his
own sensations without visual or historical conditionings, that is, that he/she could find inside
himself/herself the key for a Experimental Exercise of Freedom, as proposed by Mário Pedrosa.
Hélio Oiticica’s oppositional strategy in face of bourgeois art and society, however, is not
filed under the libertarian-messianic tradition of Marxist nature largely in vogue in Latin
America at that time, but it’s an anarco-romantic opposition within a libertine tradition
focused on the individual’s behavioral revolution. Perhaps this has kept his work at bay from
the illustrative social thematic in which many leftist artists sank.
The Curators, Fernando Cocchiarale e Cesar Oiticica Filho.
1. Abstraction and color
“In fact, what I accomplish is a synthesis, not an abstraction. In order to do this I had to arrive at
a one-color painting with various qualities, or change the direction of the brush strokes so that a
single color could take on two aspects. This is also qualitative difference. Such a color need not
be tonal (various qualities of same color), tonal here meaning something other than its accepted
sense. The work may be composed of various colors, but it was necessary to arrive at the tonal
in order to become aware of active color-light, even with two different qualities or tones, for
here, tone is quality, as is light. Thus, I arrive at the metaphysical conception of painting
through color.”
(December 1959)
2. The breaking of the painting's rectangle
“In my opinion, the breaking of the painting's rectangle or the breaking of any other regular
form (such as triangles, circles, etc.) is a desire to impart an unlimited, infinite sense to the
work. Far from being a superficial thing, this break - a break with geometric form itself - is a
structural transformation. The work begins to exist [to be made] in space, maintaining the
internal coherence of its organically-related elements as signals for itself. Space is already latent
and the work is born in time. There is a spatiotemporal synthesis.”
(September 4, 1960)
3. Spatial reliefs
The first step was to make a painting without a back. The structure of the painting turned through
180°. It was still a two-sided painting but now a sense of time had been added to it. Although
virtually destroyed, the rectangular shape remained. I felt the need to transform it.
The plane of the painting was still static; the sense of time did not wholly prevail; it did
not form part of the genesis of the work.
In the new expression that I am proposing, the elements that come into play are space, colour,
structure and time.
Although both sides of the painting were worked on, there was a separation between the
plates corresponding to what would previously have been a wall. This part remained an
aesthetic and inoperative element.
Out of a need to dynamize this enclosed part, to make it live, I began to raise the plates that
corresponded to the two sides. Instead of there being only two functioning sides, several planes
began to appear. The inner surfaces acquired meaning, beginning to function. It was then that I
created the hanging non-objects, whose plates open up at various fixed angles.
(Encontros – Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro: Azougue Editorial, p. 23-24. Section of a text
originally published in the Sunday supplement of Jornal do Brasil, 21 May 1961).
4. End of painting
“I no longer have any doubt that we have definitely entered the age of the end of painting. For
myself, the dialectic involving the problem of painting has advanced, along with the
experiments (the works), in the sense of transforming the picture-object into something else (to
me, the nonobject), as it is no longer possible to accept development "inside the picture", the
picture having been saturated. Far from being the" death of painting", this is its salvation, for
true death would mean any continuation of the picture as such, as in the "support" of
"painting".”
(Hélio Oiticica. Aspiro ao grande labirinto, Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986, pp. 26-27. Excerpt of
the text written on February 16 1961.)
5. Structure-color
“The experience of color, the exclusive elements of painting, became for me the very axis of
what I do, the way I begin a work. […] Color is one of the work's dimensions. It is inseparable
from the phenomenon as a whole, from structure, from space and from time but, like those
three, it is a distinct, dialectic element, one of the dimensions. It therefore possesses its own,
elementary progression, for it is the very nucleus of painting, its reason for being. However,
when color is no longer submitted to the rectangle, nor to any representation of this rectangle, it
tends to "embody" itself; it becomes temporal, it creates its own structure, and the work then
becomes the "body of color".”
(Hélio Oiticica. Aspiro ao grande labirinto, Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986, p. 23. Excerpt of the
text written on October 5 1960.)
6/7. Nuclei
‘The nuclei are the development of works suspended in space that I have been creating since I
took painting away from the picture and into space. These suspended works are known to the
public since they were exhibited last year. The Núcleos are also suspended. However, rather than
being a single piece they are made up of sometimes six, sometimes twelve, sometimes nineteen
and sometimes even twenty-six pieces. In my opinion they are the consequence of the paintingpicture transformed into a painting in space, arranged in nuclei, even coming to suggest the idea
of a ‘nuclear painting’. This is not the place to divulge the theoretical-aesthetic explanation
behind the idea. However, I believe that they are an extremely important innovation in the sense
that they integrate colour in a new aesthetic context that is not the ‘picture’ (which, for me, has
been surpassed) while also constituting a ‘support’ for the development of colour. In fact, it is a
question of integrating the elements of colour, time and space in a new structure’.
(“Projeto Cães de Caça e pintura nuclear”, in Encontros – Hélio Oiticica. Rio de Janeiro:
Azougue Editorial, p. 32. Section of statement, November 1961.)
[7.][…]
“The structure of a Nucleus is generated in a totally architectural sense, in wall structures which
– once ceilings have been added to them – become proto-houses. This might be clearer in the
large Nuclei (which are penetrable); in fact, the secret meaning of the nuclear structure is that it
recreates external space; a sense of external space being aesthetically recreated for the first
time.”
(“O problema dos opostos”, in Aspiro ao grande labirinto. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986, p. 39.
Excerpt of the text written on February 8 1962.)
8. Penetrable
“In a Penetrable, the fact that space is free and open – given that the work takes within it –
implies a different perspective or position as to what a "work" might be. A sculptor, for
instance, tends to isolate his work on a pedestal, not simply for practical reasons but because of
his work's very sense of space – it needs to be isolated. A Penetrable is simultaneously
penetrated and enveloped by environmental space. But aside from this, where does one situate a
Penetrable? The need to create what I call "projects" may be born from this situation. Not that
they are pedestals for Penetrables (what a superficial idea that would be!), but for "keeping"
such works – preludes to their comprehension, as it were. What would it mean to show a
Penetrable somewhere, even in a public square, without seeking to integrate or prepare to
counterpose to its unitary sense? This need is profound and important, not only because of the
origin of the idea itself but to prevent it from being lost through a gratuitous placement or site,
etc. What would be the point of possessing any such work if it were left at the mercy of a place
in which it not only did not fit as an idea but there were no possibility of fully experiencing or
understanding it?”
(Hélio Oiticica. Aspiro ao grande labirinto. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986, p. 43. Excerpt of the
text written on June 3 1962.)
9. Bolides
“One could call my most recent works, the Bolides, "transobjetos" (English translation,
transobjects, neologism). Actually, the necessity to give a new structure to color, to give it a
"body," led me to the most unexpected consequences, just as the development of the opaque to
transparent Bolides, where color is not only presented in the techniques of oil and glue, but in
their pigment state, contained in the actual Bolide structure. There, the glass cube that contains
color could be called a pre-molded object, since it is made ready beforehand. What I do as I
transform it into a work is not a simple "poeticizing" of the object or situating it outside of the
daily routine, but to incorporate it into an aesthetic idea, to make it part of the genesis of the
work, so that it takes on a transcendental character, seen as participating in a universal idea
without losing its previous structure.”
(“A transição da cor do quadro para o espaço e o sentido de construtividade”, in Aspiro ao
grande labirinto. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986, p. 63. Excerpt of the text written on October 29
1963.)
10/11. About the Parangolé
My entire evolution leading here to the formulation of the Parangolé aims towards this magical
incorporation of elements in the work as such, in a total experience of the spectator, which I
now call "participator." This is something of an institution and a "recognition" of an
intercorporeal space created by the work as it is unfolded. The work is made for this space, and
no sense of totality can demand of it as a work merely situated in ideal timespace whether or not
it demands the participation of the spectator. The "wearing," its greater and total sense,
counteracting the "watching,'" secondary meaning, so closing the cycle of "wear-watch.”
(”Anotações sobre o Parangolé”, in Aspiro ao grande labirinto. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986, p.
71.)
[...]
To me, the most predominant feature of the entire concept of environments may be found in
what I call Parangolé. This is much more than a term to define a series of characteristic works
(the capes, banners, and tent); Parangolé is the definitive formulation of environmental antiart,
precisely because in these works I was able to fuse color, structures, a sense of poetry, dance,
words and photography - a definitive commitment to that which I define as a total work, if one
may speak of commitment in such considerations. Thus, from now on, all the definitive
principles formulated here will be called Parangolé, including the most important of them – the
nonformulation of concepts.”
(“Anotações sobre o Parangolé”, in Aspiro ao grande labirinto. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986, p.
79. Excerpt of the text written in July 1966.)
12. Tropicália
'What consequences or conclusions can be drawn from Tropicalia in the New Objectivity
exhibition?
For me, the experience of Tropicália was essential to what I want to carry out. I felt a pressing
need to adapt a series of Penetráveis (penetrables) that I had been making. In Projeto Cães de
Caça, in 1960, the Penetráveis (labyrinths with or without movable plates which the spectator can
enter, following a route) created a sort of abstract garden, which included (besides my works)
Reinaldo Jardim’s Teatro Integral and Gullar’s Poema Enterrado. Now, the need to create a
tropical environment, in which the Penetráveis might flourish, also led to the idea of including
works by other artists in them (…) — the environment created was obviously tropical, like the
land behind the grounds of a smallholding and, most importantly, there was a feeling that we
would be treading the earth again. This feeling, which I had previously felt when walking
through the slums, through the favela, and even when entering, leaving, or turning ‘through the
slopes’ of Tropicália, reminds me strongly of long walks through the shanty towns (…). Two
important elements in my development counted a great deal here: the first was that of creating
an atmosphere for behaviour, an atmosphere which would envelop the ‘works’ and be born in
harmony with them; the second refers to the behaviour of the participant himself based on his
direct contact with such an environment, his global perspectives that result in the behaviour
itself’.
(Encontros – Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro: Azougue Editorial, pp. 49-51. Excerpt of the text
originally published in Jornal do Commercio, 21 May 1967.)
13. Supra-sensorial
I then arrived at the concept that I formulated as the suprasensorial. It would be difficult to
define and explain it in all its vigor in this note – I intend to publish a text on the subject soon:
In Search of the Suprasensorial". It is the attempt to create, by means of increasingly open
propositions, creative exercises, dispensing even the object such as it became categorized – they
are not a fusion of painting-sculpture-poetry, palpable works, although they may possess such
an aspect. They are directed to the senses, that through them, from "total perception", they lead
the individual to a “suprasensation”, to the dilation of his usual sensorial abilities, to the
discovery of his inner creative center, of his dormant spontaneity of expression, conditioned to
everyday life. This implies a series of arguments that could not possibly be discussed here:
social, ethical and political ones, etc.
(”Aparecimento do supra-sensorial na arte brasileira”, in Aspiro ao grande labirinto. Rio de
Janeiro: Rocco, 1986, pp. 103-104. Excerpt of the text written in December 1967.)
14. Éden
“The Penetrables in Eden are different from one another. Do they originate in your own
experience?
Earlier, before I made those new cabins, I had the idea to “appropriate” places I liked, real
places, where I felt alive. In fact the Tropicalia penctrable, with its multitude of tropical images,
is a kind of condensation of real places. Tropicalia is a kind of map.
It's a map of Rio and it's a map of my imagination. It’s a map that you go into.
But I think more important now the idea that people should make their own environment.
In Eden I translated personal experiences into something open. In fact those cabins are all quite
alike. They are all based on a Leisure feeling - a place to lie down, to think. The sand, the straw,
you lie on or stand on, are just accessories to something that always relates to n condensation of
perceptions; to be in a situation where you can release inside yourself some essential things."
(Excerpt of the interview by Guy Brett, London, February 1969. Published in the catalogue of
the Oiticica Retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery, 1969)
15. Creleisure
Like the experience of pleasure or not knowing when it’s time to relax and be lazy, not
occupying a specific place in space or in time is or could be a “creative” activity.
Who is a creator or who might a creator be? One who breeds horses may be said to ‘create’ – a
horse breeder, for instance.1 But could a horse breeder be a “creator”? Perhaps... Why not?
More so than many of the pansies painting around. Of course, it depends on how you do it, on
how you come upon it in leisure-pleasure-making. Farewell, oh aestheticism, folly of long gone
bourgeoisies, of customers thirsty for aesthetic twitches, for detail or for the color of a master of
that subject or that motto.
Yes, nowadays we still have the aestheticism of Pop, or Op, or Minimal art or the happening.
Those who do not confront Creleisure cannot know it, nor believe that one might live without
the type of “thinking” that always comes a priori and was once the glory of the Western world,
seeing as how the East always looked upon European “white madness” with indifference or
incomprehension.
Is Creleisure the creation of leisure or a belief in leisure?2 – I don’t know, maybe both, maybe
neither one. The bores can stop right here for they will never understand: stupidity prevails in
art criticism – luckily they’ve been stuck by indifference to pleasure, to leisure or to the suprastates of cannabis, even though such identification is of no interest to me here.
(“Crelazer”, in Aspiro ao grande labirinto. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986, p. 113.)
Translator’s note: Oiticica’s elaborate punning is lost in translation. ‘Cria’ – the third person
singular of the Portuguese verb ‘criar’ (meaning to ‘create’) – and the Portuguese words for
suckling, foal or kid – are one and the same, making English translation of this sentence a complete
non sequitur...
2 Translator’s note: Once again, one of the levels of Oticica’s wordplay is lost in translation. The
original Portuguese plays with the similarity between the verbs ‘criar’ and ‘crer’ (meaning,
respectively, to create and to believe).
1
16. Crelazer and Cama Bólide
The Whitechapel experience confirmed many things for me, overturned several others, and now
leads me to the goals of "what to think" and "where to go" – initially to the revitalization of the
early penetrables and nuclei (from 1960 on) – and then to the definitive transformation of the
"world of images", from abstract-conceptualism (derived from neoconcretist concepts) to
Tropicália, in which a repertory of "images" as such is established in its own awarenesss, in a
synthesis, after which it moved beyond itself to a new meaning in which what was “open”
became “supra-open”, and structural concerns dissolved into “structural disinterestedness”
(structures having become receptacles open to signification). Herein lies the beginning of the
entire Eden concept: the transformation of an imagistic synthesis – Tropicália – as it moves
through the formulation of the Suprasensorial all the way to the idea of creleisure, initially
conflagrated in the bed- and area-bólides made after 1967 – the bed-bólide actually allowed me
to conceive the seed of everything that came later, with the execution of Eden at the
Whitechapel [Gallery] in February, 1969.
(“Crelazer”, in Aspiro ao grande labirinto. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986, p. 114. Excerpt of the
text written in Paris, May 10, 1969)
17. Cosmococa (tradução abaixo)
“[…] white on white isn’t just a painting by Malevich… White and white is the result of an
invention, through which everyone must pass. I’m not saying everyone needs to paint a white on
white painting, but everyone does need to experience a state of mind that I call white with white
in order to deny the whole world of past art, all the old premises… that one may a state of
invention.”
(R. F. Luchetti, Ivampirismo: o cinema em pânico. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Brasil-América /
Fundação do Cinema Brasileiro, 1990. Excerpt of the interview by Ivan Cardoso, 1979.)
18. Exterior
This series of projects relate to my former work from 1959 on, in the way that they are a
consequence of the invention of what I call penetrables (1960 on); all my work from that period
on has been a development of the disintegration of formal concepts (starting with that of
“painting” itself) of art, ultimately questioning the nature of the “work of art”, and looking for a
form of non-contemplative expression; the participation of the spectator (participator) touching,
dressing, penetrating the actual pieces, developed towards actual propositions (propose to
propose): something similar to practices of the spontaneous self, non-ritualistic, as an actual
anti-art permanent position; the denial of the artist as a creator of objects, but turned out into a
propose of practices, in which ideas and discoveries are opened and barely suggested, and
realize themselves in the course of such practices. This shows why the propositions in these
projects are simple and general, not yet completed, shown as situations to be lived.
(Hélio Oiticica – Projects [Subterranean Tropicália Projects, in Newyorkaises, 1971].)
Translation: Steve Berg; Kennis Translations
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