{"id":114869,"date":"2017-09-06T11:00:45","date_gmt":"2017-09-06T15:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=114869"},"modified":"2017-09-06T16:39:15","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T20:39:15","slug":"helio-oiticica-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/helio-oiticica-new-york\/","title":{"rendered":"H\u00e9lio Oiticica in New York"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Miguel Rio Branco, Babylonests<\/em>, 1971, digital projection, dimensions variable. Courtesy of C\u00e9sar and Claudio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The late fifties\u00a0and early\u00a0sixties in Brazil were filled with modernist dreams. The arts were flourishing under the newly elected president, Juscelino Kubitschek, who had promised to achieve \u201cfifty years of progress in five.\u201d Musicians were mixing samba with jazz and developing bossa nova, while visual artists experimented with abstraction and participatory sculpture. Modern architecture would revolutionize the face of the country in 1960\u00a0with the inauguration of the newly constructed capital, Bras\u00edlia. Designed by the country\u2019s\u00a0greatest modern architect, Oscar Niemeyer, the capitol was a symbol of hope and transformation in a poor country that had been politically unstable for decades. But all that was swiftly overshadowed by the reactionary military regime, which overthrew the government in 1964.<\/p>\n

In response to the new government\u2019s violent, nationalistic rhetoric, artists began drawing even more heavily from cultural trends abroad to create a new, anarchist cultural movement, Tropic\u00e1lia. Like the indigenous cannibals who ate their colonialist enemies to become stronger, these artists wanted to consume foreign culture and to outdo it. For musicians, such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, this often meant fusing psychedelic rock with Brazilian beats; visual artists such as Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape melded the handcraftsmanship of indigenous communities with modernist aesthetics.<\/p>\n

H\u00e9lio Oiticica, whose work is currently being celebrated in a massive retrospective, \u201cTo Organize Delirium<\/a>,\u201d at the Whitney Museum, was another actor at the center of this movement. Born into Brazil\u2019s upper-middle class, he studied painting at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro and became a vital part of the city\u2019s art scene. Following the military coup, he began working with the marginal classes in the city\u2019s favelas, where he developed many of his ideas of making art in public spaces and designed his famous \u201cpenetrables,\u201d freestanding, colorful labyrinths\u00a0that\u00a0mimic the makeshift architecture of the favelas. In the\u00a0best known of these, \u201cTropic\u00e1lia\u201d (1967), two multicolor structures sit on an island of sand, a clich\u00e9d Brazilian setting; Oiticica wanted it to be \u201cthe cry of Brazil for the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the military dictatorship became more severe, many of Brazil\u2019s great artists were censored and declared enemies of the state. One by one, they started to emigrate. Veloso and Gil left for\u00a0London, and Oiticica departed\u00a0to New York. Brazil was regressing\u00a0politically and economically; \u201cfalling to pieces,\u201d Oiticica wrote in a letter to Clark in 1971.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Oiticica first thought of moving to New York in 1970, when he participated in the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s groundbreaking exhibition of Conceptual art, \u201cInformation.\u201d Writing to Clark, he said, \u201cI really felt that I\u2019m respected by the entire art world \u2026 This trip and now the prospect of coming back have cheered me up so much that it seems I\u2019m alive again.\u201d That same year,\u00a0back in\u00a0Rio, he\u00a0was awarded a two-year Guggenheim Fellowship. He promptly left his studio near the city\u2019s botanical gardens and moved into a loft in the Lower East Side.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Tropic\u00e1lia<\/em>, 1966\u201367, plants, sand, birds, poems by Roberta Camila Salgado on bricks, tiles, and vinyl squares. Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

When Oiticica first arrived in New York, he planned to create a sprawling installation of his penetrables in Central Park. He envisioned the installation as a space for community and called it the \u201cSubterranean Tropic\u00e1lia Projects.\u201d The title, he said, alluded to the disappointing fact that Brazil had essentially \u201cburied itself.\u201d But Oiticica\u2019s attempt to resurface Brazil in the heart of Manhattan failed, as he was unable to secure the funds.<\/p>\n

Still, he engaged with New York in quieter ways. He eagerly delved into the city\u2019s art scene, experimenting with film, a new format for him, and he took classes at New York University. In one particularly precious set of photographs from those years, he hands his parangol\u00e9s<\/em>\u2014bright capes, made from recyclable materials, that he often brought into the favelas for people to dance in\u2014to passengers on the subway, who awkwardly and bemusedly try them on. In another series, a young man, presumably one of Oiticica\u2019s lovers, stands seductively in a parangol\u00e9<\/em> on the rooftops of towering buildings, most notably the World Trade Center.<\/p>\n

The large, looming city is itself a subject in the movies Oiticica made in New York. In his film Agrippina Is Rome-Manhattan<\/em>, from\u00a01972, he likens New York to ancient Rome. Two eccentric characters, playing a pimp and Roman patrician, pose in front of the city\u2019s neoclassical buildings but do not interrupt the constant flow of the city. Here, Oiticica seems to say, people are free to express themselves while going unnoticed, engulfed by their surroundings.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Parangol\u00e9 Cape 30 in the New York City Subway<\/em>, 1972, digital projection, dimensions variable.<\/p><\/div>\n

His most obsessive New York art project was his apartment,\u00a0the nexus of all of his creations,\u00a0where he slept and socialized inside sheer-cloth enclosures that he called his \u201cnests.\u201d Oiticica, who was gay, felt sexually liberated in the city, and invited young men into his home, photographing them suggestively and intimately. The television was always on and music, usually rock, played. There were lots of drugs, especially cocaine.<\/p>\n

But in the next eight years, Oiticica, who well overstayed his visa, would discover that he didn\u2019t have the necessary connections and resources to thrive artistically in New York. When he struggled to find work, he turned to drug dealing. Over time, he became increasingly withdrawn.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The title of the Whitney\u2019s exhibition, \u201cTo Organize Delirium,\u201d is taken from Oiticica\u2019s friend, the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos, who once said that Oiticica was able to \u201corganize delirium\u201d through his art. The curators\u2019 use of the quote is apt: Oiticica experienced delirium in manifold ways, from the chaos and disillusionment he felt in Brazil, to the sensory overload in New York, to the displacement that came with exile, to the heavy use of drugs\u2014and he used his art to organize it.<\/p>\n

One of the show\u2019s first artworks from Oiticica\u2019s New York phase is a slideshow of photographs, Top\u00e1zion-flor<\/em>, from\u00a01975, which he dedicated to Campos. Each frame is dominated by bags full of glowing cocaine, arranged on books about the Incas, Jimi Hendrix records, photos of parangol\u00e9s<\/em>, and notebooks. Sometimes the bag of drugs is held up, out of focus, almost floating. Suspended in the realm of cocaine and disoriented in a fusion of pop-cultural references, there\u2019s no depth of space\u2014you could be anywhere.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Eden<\/em>, 1969, sand, crushed bricks, dry leaves, water, cushions, foam flakes, books, magazines, \u201cpulp fiction,\u201d straw, matting, and incense. Installation view, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1969. \u00a9 C\u00e9sar and Claudio Oiticica<\/p><\/div>\n

The galleries are laid out chronologically, and the rooms devoted to Oiticica\u2019s New York years are dark, filled with slides and pages of words, much as the artist\u2019s apartment would\u2019ve been. The curators have re-created two of his nine \u201cCosmococas\u201d installations, which he staged in his loft in 1973 with fellow Brazilian artist Neville d\u2019Almeida as spaces to escape capitalist consumer culture. Around this time, Oiticica had been absorbing the avant-garde art around him, such as John Cage\u2019s recordings of street sounds and Jack Smith\u2019s improvised films, and reinterpreting it with Brazilian elements.<\/p>\n

The \u201cCosmococas\u201d series, for instance, immerses the viewer in trippy, nonnarrative visuals and chaotic, unpredictable patterns of sound. In Cosmococa I<\/em>, you lie on a mattress, surrounded by giant projections of pages from the\u00a0New York Times Magazine<\/em> and Frank Zappa albums\u2014objects he kept around at home. Popular Brazilian northeastern music plays, followed by recordings of Second Avenue. The museum offers you nail files to pass the time (Oiticica would\u2019ve given you lines of cocaine, the inspiration for the series\u2019 title).<\/p>\n

While Oiticica intended for his \u201cCosmococas\u201d to be installed in public, he was never able to, only realizing them behind the closed doors of his apartment. (Museums are now able to re-create them because of the detailed notes he made for each installation.) At this point, Oiticica had retreated from the art world and stayed mostly at home, obsessively writing in his notebooks, recording tapes of his thoughts, and photographing visitors; he called his home of nests a \u201cworld-shelter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

CC5 Hendrix-War<\/em>, 1973, thirty-three 35 mm color slides transferred to digital slideshow, sound, and hammocks. Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

Since the sixties, Oiticica had stressed the idea of viv\u00eancia<\/em> in his artworks: his idea that they were meant to be completely inhabited, even lived in. It would seem that in New York he took this idea to its literal conclusion, living so completely in his art to the point of secluding himself. He wrote long, discursive letters home, though sometimes he couldn\u2019t finish them. When he did, they would cause his friends and family to worry for his health and financial situation. Writing again to Clark, only a few years after settling in New York, he said, \u201cI feel as if I\u2019m in a prison in this infernal island.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Walking through the Whitney\u2019s galleries, there\u2019s a cacophony of sounds. Caetano Veloso\u2019s sprightly voice and Hendrix\u2019s electrifying guitar seep into the space. In the main gallery, you can listen to audio recordings of Oiticica\u2019s notebooks, which he collectively called his Newyorkaises. These notebooks, along with the rest of his output in New York, are generally overlooked, or at least deemed less interesting than the work from his earlier days in Rio. His writing is often dense or cryptic, and you\u2019re better off if you know both Portuguese and English. Even I, a Brazilian living in the United States who has this advantage, didn\u2019t think I\u2019d have the patience to read through it. But in his words, I felt something familiar.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a rich range of artistic influences in Oiticica\u2019s writing: Gertrude Stein\u2019s impenetrable prose;\u00a0the visual arrangements of Brazilian concrete poetry; the performativity of American Conceptual artists, such as\u00a0Vito Acconci and Yoko Ono. Naturally, Oiticica\u2019s New York notebooks also reveal someone whose life straddled two places and cultures: he invented his own language that mixed Portuguese and English, folding wistful allusions to Brazil into his thrilling experiences in New York. One of his favorite refrains was the Rolling Stones\u2019 \u201cGimme Shelter,\u201d which he always spelled in capital letters\u00a0and used as his own chorus when meditating on his parangol\u00e9s<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Anyone who\u2019s grown up bilingual will recognize what Oiticica does with language, even if the meaning is at times opaque. Language is often the first, or at least most evident, sign of one\u2019s identity being split and rearranged. But this mixing happens elsewhere, too, from the food one cooks to the music one listens to. This mixing happened palpably in Oiticica\u2019s art. Inhabiting two cultures at once is an exhausting, confusing, and exhilarating experience. It can be exciting to absorb another country\u2019s way of life, but with that comes pangs of loss, as well as the desire to forget\u2014to feel like you can start over, leave things behind.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In 1978, Oiticica returned to Rio de Janeiro. He had been hounded by immigration officials and narcos in New York and, as revealed by his lawyer after his death, had been interrogated about his homosexuality. Soon after moving back, he wrote to a friend that being in Brazil was \u201cmuch, much, much, much, much better than staying in fucking NEW YORK \u2026 I feel free free free and all the desire for those \u2018other things\u2019 vanished like a miracle and also my old chronic paranoia dissapeared [sic]; I couldn\u2019t feel happier.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a way, it makes sense that Oiticica confined himself in his home away from home. Even before he left Brazil in 1970, Oiticica had already imagined alternate realities and redefined his sense of place. Of\u00a0his New York apartment, he said, \u201cI want to create a place that is so complicated-complex that it\u2019s its own world.\u201d This became symbolic of his sense of displacement\u2014in both Brazil and New York\u2014but also of his taste for freedom and escape.<\/p>\n

Back in his native country, Oiticica, clean of drugs, felt restored and grounded. His reaction is not unlike that of other Brazilian artists who had been living in exile. Veloso, on returning from London, wrote, \u201cMy proximity, the certainty that I am real and vulnerable, brings my legend back to Earth\u2014to my immense pleasure, since in London I was climbing the walls sometimes, like a ghost.\u201d And Gil wrote \u201cBack in Bahia<\/a>,\u201d a song that distilled the longing he felt for home when also in London. \u201cIsland of the North, where I ended up out of luck or to be punished, I\u2019m not sure,\u201d he sings, \u201cToday I feel it was necessary to leave in order to come back.\u201d Returning to Brazil, for all three men, was a rediscovery\u00a0of the roots they once thought they\u2019d lost.<\/p>\n

The last gallery, which is devoted to the final\u00a0years of Oiticica\u2019s life, contains a\u00a0large penetrable with water on the floors called\u00a0Rijanviera<\/em>, his homage to Rio. After he came home, Oiticica went back to making sculptural installations, or, as he told the art critic Aracy Amaral, \u201cI wrote all this material, notebooks and notebooks \u2026 This year had a change \u2026 I\u2019m not interested in ideas \u2026 now I want to make physical stuff.\u201d It\u2019s impossible to know what would have come of this, as Oiticica died of a stroke only two years later, at the age of forty-two.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elisa Wouk Almino<\/a> is the associate editor of\u00a0<\/em>Hyperallergic. She is also\u00a0a translator<\/a>\u00a0of poetry and fiction from Portuguese.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cTo Organize Delirium<\/a>\u201d is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through October 1.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The late fifties\u00a0and early\u00a0sixties in Brazil were filled with modernist dreams. The arts were flourishing under the newly elected president, Juscelino Kubitschek, who had promised to achieve \u201cfifty years of progress in five.\u201d Musicians were mixing samba with jazz and developing bossa nova, while visual artists experimented with abstraction and participatory sculpture. Modern architecture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[30401,30393,192,30390,16342,5733,79,8099,3292,30396,30399,30389,6177,9524,8117,30391,687,1757,30397,30398,30400,30394,165,11024,1631,30392,30395,2422,3748],"class_list":["post-114869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-aracy-amaral","tag-brasilia","tag-brazil","tag-caetano-veloso","tag-conceptual-art","tag-correspondence-2","tag-film","tag-frank-zappa","tag-gertrude-stein","tag-gilberto-gil","tag-haroldo-de-campos","tag-helio-oiticica","tag-jack-smith","tag-jimi-hendrix","tag-john-cage","tag-juscelino-kubitschek","tag-language","tag-lower-east-side","tag-lygia-clark","tag-lygia-pape","tag-neville-dalmeida","tag-oscar-niemeyer","tag-poetry","tag-rio-de-janeiro","tag-rome","tag-samba","tag-tropicalia","tag-whitney-museum","tag-world-trade-center"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nH\u00e9lio Oiticica in New York<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The late fifties and early sixties in Brazil were filled with modernist dreams.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/helio-oiticica-new-york\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"H\u00e9lio Oiticica in New York by Elisa Wouk Almino\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 6, 2017 \u2013   The late fifties\u00a0and early\u00a0sixties in Brazil were filled with modernist dreams. The arts were flourishing under the newly elected president,\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/helio-oiticica-new-york\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-09-06T15:00:45+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-09-06T20:39:15+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/19_babylonests.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1234\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"787\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Elisa Wouk Almino\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Elisa Wouk Almino\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"12 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/helio-oiticica-new-york\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/helio-oiticica-new-york\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Elisa Wouk Almino\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/519a54e10696816d330a7b3ea099c71a\"},\"headline\":\"H\u00e9lio Oiticica in New York\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-09-06T15:00:45+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-09-06T20:39:15+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/helio-oiticica-new-york\/\"},\"wordCount\":2361,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/helio-oiticica-new-york\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/19_babylonests-1024x653.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Aracy Amaral\",\"Bras\u00edlia\",\"Brazil\",\"Caetano Veloso\",\"conceptual art\",\"correspondence\",\"film\",\"Frank Zappa\",\"Gertrude Stein\",\"Gilberto Gil\",\"Haroldo de Campos\",\"H\u00e9lio Oiticica\",\"Jack Smith\",\"Jimi Hendrix\",\"John Cage\",\"Juscelino Kubitschek\",\"language\",\"Lower East Side\",\"Lygia Clark\",\"Lygia Pape\",\"Neville d\u2019Almeida\",\"Oscar Niemeyer\",\"poetry\",\"Rio de Janeiro\",\"Rome\",\"samba\",\"Tropic\u00e1lia\",\"Whitney Museum\",\"World Trade Center\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Arts & Culture\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/helio-oiticica-new-york\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/helio-oiticica-new-york\/\",\"name\":\"H\u00e9lio Oiticica in New York\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/helio-oiticica-new-york\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/helio-oiticica-new-york\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/19_babylonests-1024x653.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-09-06T15:00:45+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-09-06T20:39:15+00:00\",\"description\":\"The late fifties and early sixties in Brazil were filled with modernist dreams.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/helio-oiticica-new-york\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/helio-oiticica-new-york\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/helio-oiticica-new-york\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/19_babylonests.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/19_babylonests.jpg\",\"width\":1234,\"height\":787,\"caption\":\"Miguel Rio Branco, Babylonests, 1971. 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