Dezeuze.Hélio Oiticica's Parangolés

Tactile Dematerialization, Sensory Politics: Hélio Oiticica's ParangolésAuthor(s): Anna DezeuzeSource: Art Journal, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 58-71Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4134521 .

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H61io Oiticica. ParangolB P16 Cape 12, Da adversidade vivemos, 1967, worn by Nildo of Mangueira. Courtesy of Projeto Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: Claudio Oiticica.

Anna Dezeuze

Tactile

Dematerialization, Sensory Politics:

H lio Oiticica's

Parangols

Like the word parangole, a slang term from Rio de Janeiro that refers to a range of

events or states including idleness, a sudden agitation, an unexpected situation, or a dance party, the more than thirty objects so titled by Brazilian artist Helio

Oiticica have an indeterminate status. Produced mainly between 1964 and 1968, these flags, tents, and capes made out of jute and plastic bags, painted or printed fabrics, and sometimes including painted or stenciled texts, are meant to be

used by the viewer. A Parangole cape on a hanger is not a Parangole: its complex textures can only be revealed through the gestures and movements of the person who wears it. As the artist explained in a 1965 text, the spectator of these works becomes a participant or "participator" (participador).

'

Hitherto little-known outside Brazil, Oiticica's work rose

to international prominence when it was featured in the 1997 Documenta X, joining a selection of works which, as one critic

explained, "featured a critical political sensibility at the expense of aesthetics."'2 Indeed, the director of Documenta, Catherine

David, who also cocurated the first touring retrospective of

Oiticica's work in 1992, has stressed the transgressive aims of his

practice in texts focusing on the artist's conceptual, rather than

formal, innovations.3 In contrast, Brazilian critic S6nia Salzstein

warned in i994 against readings privileging the social and political dimension of

Oiticica's work because they tend to "surreptitiously overwhelm his work with a

sociological argument," making one "lose sight of its aesthetic thought."4 Oiticica's texts have played an important role in reinforcing the perception

of his works as "conceptual" practices, as promoted by Documenta X as well

as in recent surveys, exhibitions, and anthologies.5 In the 2002 Conceptual Art:An

Anthology, for example, Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson included texts in

which Oiticica defined the Parangole as "anti-art par excellence" and discussed his

aspirations "to create new experimental conditions where the artist takes on the

role of 'proposer,' 'impressario,' or even 'educator.'"'6 In general, his works and

writings have become points of reference in discussions of the specificity of

Latin American Conceptual art, which is described as more political in intent

than its European and North American counterparts.7 The main political aspect of the Parangoles seems to lie in their reference to

the favelas, the slums or shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro. Encouraged by Oiticica

himself, critics have emphasized the crucial role played by the artist's involve-

ment, from 1964, in the samba school of the Mangueira favela. Learning to dance

the samba, participating in the carnaval, and making friends in Mangueira, the

young man from a middle-class family discovered a whole new dimension of

experience that effected a radical turn in his work. Indeed, many of the Parangoles were made for and sometimes in collaboration with his Mangueira friends: some

texts included in the Parangole capes, for example, are known to have been sug-

gested by specific individuals. Moreover, Oiticica chose to display the Parangolks

publicly for the first time by inviting dancers from Mangueira to wear them at

the opening of the 1965 exhibition Opinfdo 65 at the Museum of Modern Art in

Rio. The irruption of the poor into the bourgeois atmosphere of the museum

caused such a scandal that the director had them evicted. As censorship worsened

in Brazil during the later i96os, Oiticica's association with Mangueira would

I. Helio Oiticica, "Notes on the Parangol"' (1965), in H'lio Oiticica, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: Centro de Arte H61lio Oiticica, 1997), 93. 2. Neal Benezra, "The Misadventures of Beauty," in Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century, exh. cat. (Washington: Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 1999), 17. 3. See, for example, Catherine David, "Helio Oiticica: Brazil Experiment," in The Experimental Exercise of Freedom, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), 169-201. 4. S6nia Saltzstein, "Helio Oiticica: Autonomy and the Limits of Subjectivity," Third Text 28/29 (Autumn/Winter 1994): 120. 5. See for example, Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998); Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950-1980, exh. cat. (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999); and Peter Osborne, ed., Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 2002). 6. H61io Oiticica, "Position and Program" (1966) and "General Scheme for the New Objectivity" (1967), in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1999), 6, 42. 7. See Mari Carmen Ramirez, "Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960-1980," in Global Conceptualism, 53-7 1; Alexander Alberro, "A Media Art: Conceptualism in Latin America in the 1960s," in Rewriting Conceptual Art, ed. Michael Newman and Jon Bird (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 140-51; and Peter Osborne, "Survey," in Conceptual Art, 38-39.

59 art journal



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Helio Oiticica. Parangold PI I Cape 7, Sexo e violIncia ..., 1966. Photographs: Alessandra Santarelli.

increasingly be linked to a political resistance to the dictatorship that had taken over the country in 1964.

Oiticica's discovery of Mangueira was also singled out at the time in Brazilian critic Mario Pedrosa's 1966 article, "Arte ambiental, arte p6s-moderna, Helio Oiticica."8 In this important theorization, Pedrosa described the new

"post-modern" phase in twentieth-century art as a move away from "the her- metic individual subjectivism" (o subjetivismo individual hermetico) of modern art,

dealing exclusively with "purely plastic values" (valores propriamente plasticos), and toward the increasing prominence of social and political concerns. According to Pedrosa, Oiticica's "post-modern" turn corresponded precisely to the moment when the artist abandoned the "ivory tower" (torre de marfim) and discovered

Mangueira, an "initiation" that would forever transform his conception of the role of art and artists.9

While it seems impossible to dissociate the Parangoles from the context in which they were first produced, the exact nature of their political dimension is difficult to describe. Moreover, Oiticica's claim, in his writings, that the Parangoles can be worn by any viewer seems to be contradicted not only by his dedications of some of these works to specific individuals but also by the photographs, taken in his lifetime, in which the capes are usually worn by his Mangueira friends. In this article, I will seek to disentangle the Parangoles from the complex web that links the objects with Oiticica's texts, their original context and reception, and the photographs that have been repeatedly exhibited and published. To do so, I will use as a starting point an experiment I conducted with photographer Alessandra Santarelli in London in December 2002 and March 2003. Without

showing her existing photographs of the Parangoles, I asked Santarelli to take photographs of myself wearing Oiticica's 1966 Parangole PII Cape 7. Drawing on my personal experience of wearing the Parangole as well as the photographs that were

produced during the two sessions-one in a studio, the other outdoors in a

park-I will explore the nature of the relation between the artist's formal experi- mentation and his political objectives. Instead of rehearsing the rather reductive

opposition noted earlier between David's "anti-aesthetic" stance and Salzstein's

praise for his "aesthetic thought," I hope to demonstrate not only that Oiticica's Parangoles succeed in uniting both of these apparently conflicting aspects, but that the very articulation of this polarity constitutes their strength and their signifi- cance within the history of I960s art.

Intimate Spectatorship

Any attempt to document the experience of wearing a Parangolk stumbles on the

problem that a single photograph is insufficient to capture the temporal process of discovery which it requires. Lifting the cape, turning my head, moving my body, I can relish the contrasting bright colors, touch the rough green fabric and the soft cotton cloth, and compare its two sides. I can pull out the long piece of gauze from a pocket in the cape and read the words on it, hold it up in front of

my face like a semitransparent mask, or use it as a kind of shroud to cover parts of my body.

The temporal dimension of the viewing experience figured among Oiticica's earliest artistic concerns and was intrinsically linked to his exploration of the

8. Mario Pedrosa, "Arte ambiental, arte p6s- moderna, H61io Oiticica," Correio do Monhd, June 26, 1966, repr. in Mdrio Pedrosa, Textos Escolhidos ill: Acad6micos e Modernos, ed. Otilia Arantes (Sdo Paulo: Editora da Universidade de Sdo Paulo, 1998), 355-60. 9. Ibid., 356, 355, and 356.

60 SUMMER 2004



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formal qualities of color. In i96o, he noted that "when ... color is no longer

subjected to the rectangle [of the canvas] or the forms represented on this rec-

tangle, it tends to become 'embodied' [se'corporificar']; it takes on a temporal

dimension, creates its own structure, and the work thus becomes the 'body of

color' [o corpo da cor]." '~ In fact, the trajectory of Oiticica's works, from his

1959-60 hanging, brightly painted Spatial Reliefs and Nuclei to the later Parangoles, can be read as an incessant search to convey this material, corporeal, and sensual

"body of color." Inviting viewers to move around or inside the work in order

to observe its structure and formal qualities, Oiticica sought to transform the

spectator into a "discoverer" (descobridor) of the work. " In order to achieve this,

Oiticica set up an intimate relation between the work and the viewer. Suspended works are hung low enough for one to peer into the nooks of their folded planes

(as in the Spatial Reliefs) or the numerous corners of their mazelike structures (in the Nuclei), while in his B6lides Caixas (Box Bolides, or Box Fireballs), started in 1963,

one is invited to open the hinged doors or drawers of painted boxes of varying sizes to discover related hues of yellow, red, pink, and orange, and alternating smooth and granular surfaces, as well as pigment and fabrics.

In the late i9gos Oiticica belonged to the Neoconcrete group in Rio de

Janeiro, whose 1959 manifesto referred to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writings as an alternative to the kind of Pavlovian, mechanicist model of perception

explored by the Concrete artists in Sdo Paulo.'2 Desiring to distinguish them-

selves from these Concrete artists, the Neoconcretists sought to emphasize the

temporal, bodily encounter of the viewer with the artwork. Although created

after the official end of the movement, Oiticica's Box Bolides are direct extensions

of his painted Neoconcrete objects and are exemplary of Neoconcretism as a

whole. In their use of simple geometric volumes and their focus on the relation

between viewer and work, Neoconcrete works can be compared to works by certain American Minimalists. Indeed, one of the most striking points of com-

parison between Neoconcretism and Minimalism is both movements' affinity with phenomenology. 13 Both Oiticica's Box Bolides and Donald Judd's boxlike

works, for example, dramatize the "dialogue between subject and object" that

lies at the heart of the phenomenological experience, according to Merleau-

Ponty.'4 By setting up relations between inside and outside, between volume and

void, and between the object and the space in which it has been directly placed, the box format in these works highlights some of the characteristics of perception described in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: its mobilization of

several senses rather than a disembodied gaze, its relation to movement, and its

privileging of the "primordial experience" of encountering objects in the world

directly, with a sense of wonder that precedes scientific distinctions among time,

space, form, structure, and color.

Within this similar exploration of phenomenological perception, however,

Oiticica's Box Bolides and Donald Judd's works set up very different relations

between the work and the viewer: Oiticica's 1964 Box Bolide 9 invites us to play

with the sliding panels and open the drawer filled with pigment, while we tend

to peer into and gaze through Judd's I965 steel and Plexiglas box. Indeed, if the

number of fingerprints found on Judd's works in museums across the world tes-

tify to the viewers' irrepressible desire to touch them, this invitation is frustrated

by the industrial dimension of both materials and production: their perfect

10. Helio Oiticica, "October 5, 1960," in H6lio Oiticica, 33. I I. Helio Oiticica, "A Transigio da cor do quadro para o espa?o

e o sentido de constructividade" (I 962), in Aspiro ao grande labirinto: textos de H6lio Oiticica (1954-1969), ed. Luciano Figueiredo, Lygia Pape, and Waly Salomdo (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986), 53. 12. The Neoconcrete manifesto, written by Ferreira Gullar, cosigned by artists Amilcar de Castro, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Reynaldo Jardim, Theon Spanudis, and Franz Weissmann, and published in the Sunday supplement of theJornal do Brasil, March 22, 1959, has been reproduced and translated into English in various anthologies. For the Portuguese original, see Arte construtiva no Brasil: Cole?o Adolpho Leirner, ed. Aracy Amaral (Sdo Paulo: Dorea Books and Art, 1998), 270-75. 13. For accounts of the relation between Minimal- ism and phenomenology, see Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1977) and Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (London and New Haven: Yale Univer- sity Press, 2000). For a comparison between Minimalism and Neoconcretism, see Paulo Herkenhoff, "Divergent Parallels: Toward a Comparative Study of Neo-concretism and Minimalism," in Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, exh. cat. (Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, 2001): 104-3 1; and Anna Dezeuze, "The 'Do-it- yourself Artwork': Spectator Participation and the Dematerialisation of the Art Object, New York and Rio de Janeiro, 1958-1967" (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2003), chap. 4. 14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ph6nom6nologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 154. 15. Briony Fer, "Judd's Specific Objects," in On Abstract Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 130-5 I. 16. Robert Morris, "Notes on Sculpture, Part 2" (1966), in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 23 I. For a detailed account of the differences between Judd and Morris, see James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 200 1). 17. Frederico Morals, "Oiticica: a poesia abrigada," Didrio de Noticias, October 5, 1967 [H61lio Oiticica Archives, Rio de Janeiro, Projeto H61lio Oiticica]. 18. Frederico Morais, "'A pureza ndo existe,'" Didrio de Noticias, October 6, 1967 [H6lio Oiticica Archives, Rio de Janeiro, Projeto H61io Oiticica]. 19. Potts, 4.

62 SUMMER 2004



H1lio Oiticica with his Box Bolide 9, 1964. Painted wood, painted glass, and pigment. 19'%6 x 13'/ x

19/8 in. (50 x 34 x 50.5 cm). Courtesy of Projeto Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: Claudio Oiticica.

Donald Judd. Untitled, 1965. Steel and Plexiglas. 26 x 34 x 48 in. (66 x 86.4 x 121.9 cm). Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, NewYork. ? 2004 Judd Foundation. Licensed by VAGA, NewYork/DACS, London.

sheen is in fact quite spoiled by a fingerprint. Thus, as Briony Fer has demon-

strated, Minimalist objects such as Judd's are articulated through a double bind of anxiety and pleasure, unlike Neoconcrete works, which not only invite but

often require a tactile engagement in the process of their discovery.is

Although Judd's work was

very different from Robert Morris's Minimalist objects, Morris's descrip- tion of the relation between object and spectator in Minimalist sculpture in his 1966 "Notes on Sculpture" is

particularly relevant here. Morris

opposed what he called the "public" mode of viewing set up by large objects to the "intimate mode of

viewing" required by small objects, which "is essentially closed, spaceless, compressed, and exclusive."'6 This

very "quality of intimacy" rejected by Morris was, in fact, one of the defin-

ing features of Neoconcrete works.

According to the artist and critic Frederico Morais, writing in 1967, Oiticica's entire oeuvre could be seen as a search for a "sheltered poetry"

(poesia abrigada).17 Morais associated this kind of poetry with what the

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard

called "intimate spaces": spaces that we possess, protect, and love. The

Bolides, wrote Morais, have the poetry of small things which are "aconchegantes" -a Portuguese word that evokes

physical proximity, shelter, warmth, and coziness.'8

According to Alex Potts, the Minimalist object's "inert thingness, its impinging on the viewer's space" was still capable, in the i96os, of

"getting in the way of normative

patterns of visual consumption."'9 Neoconcrete works such as Oiticica's force viewers to physically encounter

their "thingness" not by "impinging" on the spectators' space but by inviting them to handle nonanthropomorphic,

geometric objects, thereby encouraging an acute awareness of the spatio- temporal experience of viewing. Thus Oiticica's and other Neoconcretists' appeal to tactile participation was an effective means of exploring the bodily relation

between viewer and object suggested, yet warded off, by Minimalism; and this,

63 art journal



I would argue, allowed their participatory works to resist somewhat better being assimilated as yet other kinds of art objects to be passively consumed.

One of the problems that Neoconcretism did share with Minimalism, how-

ever, was phenomenology's appeal to a "generic" spectator, described by Hal Foster "as somehow before or outside history, language, sexuality, and power."20

Just as subsequent art practices in the United States were described by Foster as

having expanded upon and critiqued Minimalism's phenomenological approach, so Oiticica's works in the i96os can be read both as extensions of the Neoconcrete

project and attempts to overcome its shortcomings. Taking as a starting point the

Neoconcrete exploration of a new type of intimate spectatorship allowed Oiticica to develop two crucial aspects of the Parangole to which I shall now turn: an exploration of identity as a self-reflexive, performative process, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the so-called dematerialization of the art object described by

Lucy Lippard as one of the key features of Conceptual art.2'

Identity as Performance

The failures of Neoconcretism were formulated most vocally by none other than

the spokesman of the group itself, the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar. In a radical

change of position that precipitated the break-up of the group in 1962, Gullar

rejected Neoconcretism when he aligned himself with the Communist Centros

populares de cultura (Popular Centers for Culture, or CPCs), in particular that of the

National Student Union, which conceived all art as "bourgeois" and elitist and set out to promote Brazilian popular culture instead. In his book A Cultura posta em questdo (Questioning Culture), written in 1963 and first published in 1965, Gullar

developed a ruthless self-analysis of his own Neoconcrete poetry and an impas- sioned critique of all artworks that valued "formal and stylistic factors over issues

of content" (supervalorizag•o

dos fatores formais e estilisticos sobre os de contefido).22 Gullar

called for artists to acknowledge that their apparent neutrality was in fact embed-

ded in the ideological position of an oppressive bourgeoisie that praised and

bought their works. Instead, artists should assume responsibility as citizens and communicate with "the people" in order to deal with the real problems

plaguing Brazil. Deeply influenced by Gullar's position, Oiticica would increasing-

ly emphasize the ethical responsibility of the artist, starting in his writings about

the Parangoles and culminating with his 1967 manifesto on the "New Brazilian

Objectivity," in which he stressed the importance of the artist's engagement with

sociopolitical concerns, and explained that artists' "communications" should not be directed to "an elite reduced to 'experts,' " but orchestrated "against this elite."23

Oiticica's highly politicized discourse should not, however, obscure the

artist's other, more formal, preoccupations reflected in the Parangoles. At the time

when Oiticica signaled his distance from Neoconcretism by shifting away from

man-made, painted objects to found materials and sprayed or predyed fabrics, one of the recurrent motifs of his writings was his desire to differentiate his

works from the Duchampian readymade. His Parangoles, he pointed out, evoke

tents, capes, or banners without being direct appropriations of existing objects. While the "poor" materials and the way they have been roughly stitched together

may evoke the precarious, rapidly built shelters of the Mangueira favela, Oiticica

explained that what appealed to him most in them was what he called their

20. Hal Foster, "The Crux of Minimalism" (1986), in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1996), 43. 21. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, I 966-1972 (London: Studio Vista, 1973). 22. Ferreira Gullar, Cultura posta em questeo; Vanguarda e subdesenvolvimento: ensaios sobre arte

(Rio de Janeiro: Jos6 Olympo Editora, 2002), 154. 23. Oiticica, "General Scheme for the New Objectivity," 40, 42.

64 SUMMER 2004



"structural organicity."24 Most important for him were the structural relations between the heterogeneous elements, in which the properties of each part contribute to the sensory experience of the work as a whole. Thus, as Carlos Basualdo has demonstrated, Oiticica started from a formal concern-how to

"embody color" in structural forms that would be discovered in ever-more-

complex participatory experiences-and found a logical solution to this problem in the vocabulary of the local culture of the favelas.25

If the Parangoles span the repertories of erudite and popular cultures, they do

not, however, iron out the tensions between the two.26 For just as the Mangueira dancers provoked a disruption by leaving the context of the carnaval to enter that of the museum in 1965, I, a white, European, middle-class art historian, can only feel uneasy about the distance that separates me from the culture of the favela when I put on a Parangole.27 If part of the experience of the Parangole lies in discov-

ering the object by one's self, its other dimension consists in revealing these hidden elements to others through one's own movements. After all, the bright colors and shiny fabrics are the same as those worn by samba dancers in the

spectacular Rio carnaval, and the short texts included in the Parangoles act like

speech bubbles transforming the wearer into an enunciator as well as a reader.

Oiticica described this double experience of the individual-at once private and

collective, intimate and spectacular-as the ciclo "vestir-assistir" (wearing-watching cycle) of the Parangole, which includes the experiences of wearing, watching, and

looking while being looked at.28

In 1966, the Brazilian critic Harry Laus described Oiticica as the "the

marginal man of art" because he lived at the margins of both the bourgeois

sphere that he had left behind and the favela culture to which he would never

fully belong.29 Oiticica's personal situation led him to maintain an ambivalent,

marginal position in relation to both cultures, and the Parangoles seem to invite

participants to experience this ambivalence by making them self-conscious of their appearances and their relations to the objects being worn. My own self-

consciousness increased as I wore the Parangole outdoors and a woman walking in the park came over and asked me what was stenciled in white capital letters on

my banner. "Sex and violence, this is what I like," I replied. Seeing the appalled look on her face, I felt suddenly uncomfortably aware of the statement that I was

making to others, as if I were carrying a political banner in a demonstration.

That Oiticica meant this statement sincerely is supported by his anarchist

celebration of certain forms of violence. His 1966 Box Bolide 18 Homage to Cara de Cavalo is an emotional work that includes photographs of and a poem to Cara de

Cavalo, a friend of Oiticica's and a criminal who was shot down by the police. For the oppressed, Oiticica explained in a 1969 text, crime is often "a desperate search for happiness," violence as a means for revolt may be justified, and figures like Cara de Cavalo should be celebrated as heroes or martyrs.30 Yet the Parangole is more than a political banner: it also functions as a kind of costume capable of

encouraging playacting. Although Oticica's friend Nildo coined the wording for

the 1967 Parangole that reads "Estou possuido" (I am possessed), for example, I would

argue that he is no more "authentic" or "sincere" a wearer of the Parangole than I

am. I could easily reassure the woman in the park that claiming I liked violence

was, in my case, ironic; but, in retrospect, I realize that I had in fact enjoyed the opportunity of mischievously shocking a potential audience: the anxiety of

24. Oiticica, "Fundamental Bases for the Defini- tion of the Porangol6" (1964), in H6lio Oiticica, 87. 25. Cf. Carlos Basualdo, "Quelques annotations suppl6mentaires sur le Parangold," in L'Art ou corps, exh. cat. (Marseilles: Mus6e d'art contemporain, 1996). 26. Cf. Carlos Zilio, "Da Antropofagia

'

Tropicalia," in 0 Nacional e o Popular, Eligia Chiappini Moraes Leite et al. (Sdo Paulo: Editores Brasiliense, 1982), 38. 27. Although Oiticica made it clear that the Parangolds could be worn by anyone, performing for the camera certainly established an implicit comparison with the existing images of Oiticica's Mangueira friends. In a different setting, and worn by someone foreign to Oiticica's circle of friends, the close relation between the Porangol6s and Mangueira disappears from the photograph's field of signifieds. The full implications of this shift and the ambiguities of my personal position require a close analysis that exceeds the scope of this essay. 28. Oiticica, "Notes on the Parangol6," 93. 29. Harry Laus, "Oiticica: Marginal da arte," Jornal do Brasil, July 20, 1966 [H6lio Oiticica Archives, Rio de Janeiro, Projeto Helio Oiticica]. 30. Helio Oiticica, untitled text (1969), in H6lio Oiticica, 25.

65 art journal



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H6lio Oiticica. ParangolB PI 7 Cape 13, Estou Possuido, 1967, worn by Nildo of Mangueira. Courtesy of Projeto Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: EduardoViveiros de Castro.

being misunderstood and the pleasure of taking on another persona seemed inex-

tricably, and ambivalently, paired. Nildo may also have taken delight in playing at

being "possessed" in order to make his friends laugh and possibly scare bourgeois

passers-by. "You can never presume what will be a person's 'acting' in social life: there is a difference of levels between his way of being in himself and the way he acts as a social man." This comment by Oiticica in his text about Cara de Cavalo was triggered by the contrast between his own perception of his friend and soci-

ety's vilification of him as "public enemy number one."3' Favoring anarchism over Communist policies, Oiticica opened an alternative path to thinking about

popular culture and Brazilian identity beyond binary polarities that would have served to "primitivize" his Mangueira friends. Instead of embracing popular culture like Gullar and the CPCs, Oiticica explored class differences, through the

Parangoles, by shifting the key question from "Who am I?" to "Who am I in the

gaze of the other?" And this question, of course, poses the issue of power. On the one hand, the texts in the Parangoles give a voice to the unheard: a carnaval dancer

accusingly saying "We are hungry," for example, would no doubt disturb the

feel-good spectacle expected by eager tourists. On the other hand, these texts also ask me, the wearer, to reflect on who decides what I am-who actually

possesses or owns me.

Guerrilla Tactics, the "Suprasensorial," and the "Constructive Will"

Whereas in the studio photographs, the careful control of lighting and contrast

between the black background and the bright colors emphasized the formal

qualities of the Parangole as an object, the outdoor session was less staged and

more spontaneous. Caught in a dynamic process, the undulating shapes of the

cape were transformed into wings, and the long piece of gauze extended my

body into a kind of tail, as I ran, jumped, and climbed trees-activities in which I do not usually indulge when taking a walk in a park. Instead of being burden-

some and shroudlike, the Parangole seemed to mingle freely with the kites being flown on Hampstead Heath.

According to Mario Pedrosa, "It was during [Oiticica's] initiation into

samba that the artist shifted from a visual experience . . . to an experience based

on touch, movement, and the sensual enjoyment of materials." 32 In addition to the materials and the structure of favela architecture, Mangueira's most important revelation for Oiticica was the experience of dancing itself: according to the

artist's account, dance freed him from what he called the "excessive intellectual-

ization" that was threatening his work and encouraged him to explore the performative aspect of the objects by inviting people to wear them.33 The aerial

dimension of samba could only have struck Oiticica as he learned dance steps such as the parafuso, or "screw," which, as Waly Salomao described it, consists in

"jumping from the floor and spinning in the air like a screw."34 Significantly, as Salomio remarked, the Brazilian expression entrar em parafuso means to "get into

a state." This "state" of trancelike immersion or absorption, achieved through the

body's movements, is what struck Oiticica most.35 When the Brazilian poet Haraldo de Campos described the Parangole as a "hang-

glider for ecstasy" (asa-delta para o Extase), he not only aptly emphasized the aerial or

ecstatic characteristics of this immersion, but also pointed to the Parangole's status

31. Ibid. 32. Foi durante a inicicaodo ao samba que o artista passou do experiencia visual ... para uma experiencia do tato, do movimento, do fruigio sensual dos materiais... Pedrosa, 357. 33. Helio Oiticica, "A

danca na minha experiencia,

12 de novembro de 1965," in Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 73. 34. Waly Salomdo, "HOmmage," in H6lio Oiticica, 241. 35. Paula Braga has discussed this state in relation to the "Dionysian intoxication" celebrated by Nietzsche, whose writings were influential for Oiticica. Cf. Paula Braga, "Helio Oiticica and the Parangol6s: (Ad)dressing Nietzsche's Ubermensch," Third Text 17, no. 1: 43-52. 36. Haraldo de Campos, "Hang-Glider of Ecstasy," in H6lio Oiticica, 217.

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H1lio Oiticica. Parangold PI I Cape 7, Sexo e violencia..., 1966. Photographs: Alessandra Santarelli.

as a tool or vehicle to reach this state.36 For Oiticica, writing in 1967, the aim was not to simply create "tactile works," but rather to produce "propositions" or

"exercises." These exercises were meant to lead participants to experience what

Oiticica called "suprasensation"-an expansion of the senses that facilitates the

discovery of one's "internal creative center" and the "expressive spontaneity" usually repressed in everyday life. 7 For Oiticica, the Parangolks, samba, carnoval, and hallucinogenic drugs were all means to an end: to create a "suprasensory (suprasensorial) state, a space where people can feel liberated from the rules and

regulations of a repressive regime and thus discover their capacity for revolt. The process of creating a space of dissent within everyday life is precisely

what Michel de Certeau described when he celebrated "tactics" over "strategy" in his 1980 'Invention du quotidien.38 Strategy is a means of calculation and manipu- lation in order to gain power over another, where the distinction between one's own space and the other's is clear-cut. Where this distinction is impossible, tactics are the only ways to act within the "other's space." Oiticica shared this kind of "tactical" processes withYippie leader Jerry Rubin, whose 1970 Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution encouraged all young Americans to rebel against the status quo.39 Modeling themselves on guerrilleros rather than organized parties, both Oiticica

37. Helio Oiticica, "Appearance of the Supra- sensorial" (1967), in H6lio Oiticica, 128. 38. Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien, vol. I, Arts de faire (1980; Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 59ff. 39. Jerry Rubin, Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution

(London: Jonathan Cape, 1970). Oiticica owned a

copy of this book.

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and Rubin emphasized action over theoretical projections and elaborate systems, and the local rather than the universal as the starting point for a political program. Like Rubin's "scenarios of the revolution," works such as Oiticica's

Parangoles can be used in more than one context. Mari Carmen Ramirez has described Oiticica's and other Latin American

artists' works in the 196os as "tactics for thriving on adversity," thus highlighting the relation between de Certeau's definition of "tactical" actions and Oiticica's motto "on adversity we live" (da adversidade vivemos), which he included in one of his Parangoles and as the concluding sentence of his text on the "New Brazilian

Objectivity."'4 Oiticica repeatedly celebrated the transformation of precarious- ness into strength, a process nowhere more visible than in the architecture of the favelas, which embodies human creativity and invention arising from the most dire of circumstances. Brazilians, according to Oiticica, should face the fact that they live in a Third World country and "shoulder and swallow the positive values given by this condition."4' In this context artists should be driven by a

"constructive will" as well as a sense of rebellion, simultaneously encouraging Brazilians to reject their underdeveloped condition and guiding them in the

creation, out of chaos, of a new cultural and national identity.42

40. Ramirez, 53. 41. Hi1io Oiticica, "Brazil Diarrheia" (1970), in H6lio Oiticica, 19. 42. Cf. Oiticica, "General Scheme for the New

Objectivity," 40.

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While the hovering shapes of Oiticica's Bilaterals or Spatial Reliefs, inspired

by the floating forms of Kazimir Malevich's Suprematist paintings and the hang-

ing reliefs of Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko, seem to embody the

Neoconcrete references to the "constructive will" of early twentieth-century

utopias, the aerial Parangoles evoke flight as a more urgent kind of escape from the

oppression of misery. Although I was far from the favelas and the long period of

dictatorship in Brazil, this initial spark of the Parangole's utopian aspiration came

through in my own experience of the work as I defied, for a few seconds, the laws of gravity and "flew" over Parliament Hill, on Hampstead Heath in London.

Thus, rather than being an illustration of a strict political program, Oiticica's

guerrilla type of artwork operates as what Pedrosa called "the experimental exercise of freedom": as a means both of becoming aware of one's own freedom and of preparing, of practicing, for another kind of freer society.43

In The Sculptural Imagination, Alex Potts makes a convincing case for a return to

phenomenology as an alternative to art-historical approaches that "exclude

any close consideration of the visual and perceptual dimensions" involved in

viewing works of art.44 As we saw, Oiticica's Neoconcrete works shared with

the Minimalist sculpture discussed by Potts a focus on the phenomenological dimensions of the viewing experience. Yet, unlike Minimalism, which set up a kind of confrontation between the human body and the autonomous art object, Neoconcrete works acknowledged the possibility of an intimate phenomenological relation between the viewer and the artwork in a way more in tune, in fact, with Merleau-Ponty's writings. This Neoconcretist innovation provided a starting

point for Oiticica's shift from autonomous objects to works such as the Parangoles, which can only exist when used, and act as extensions of the participant's body.

It was thus through an interrogation of formal elements that Oiticica was able to contribute to the "rethinking of materiality," which, as Michael

Newman points out, is a more suitable term than "dematerialization" to describe

Conceptual art's collective attack on "the fetishization of the handmade object."45

By making objects to be used, Oiticica was able to successfully free his works

from this fetishization by recasting the materiality of his works as performances instead of commodified objects. Moreover, the "experimental exercise of free-

dom" of the Parangole is based on each viewer's unique and often ambivalent

experience, which no photograph can capture. Whether taken in the artist's life-

time or in the recent collaboration between Alessandra Santarelli and myself,

photographs of people wearing the Parangoles can only ever serve as comple- ments-not replacements-for the experience of the work itself. Once this is

clarified, Oiticica's work emerges as a rare exception amongst the dematerializ-

ing conceptual practices whose "rethinking of materiality" did not prevent them from being refetishized, in a sense, by the commodification of documentary materials, the increased dependence on the artist's own body as a stamp of

authenticity, or both. Hence, paradoxically, the tactility and sensuality involved

in the experience of the Parangoles-which cannot be replaced by a photograph acting as a commodity object, and which are not mediated by the artist's body since they are to be worn by the viewer-are precisely what makes the works

lose their materiality as fetishized art objects.

43. Pedrosa's often quoted expression o exercicio

experimental do liberdade does not seem to

appear in his published writings until 1970, but both Oiticica and another artist close to Pedrosa, Lygia Clark, cite it much earlier. Oiticica quoted this expression in "Appearance of the Supra- sensorial," 127. Clark quoted the related term "the spiritual exercise of freedom" in her 1965 "A prop6sito da magia do objeto," repr. in Lygia Clark, exh. cat. (Marseilles: Musee d'art contem-

porain, 1998), 153. 44. Potts, 210. 45. Michael Newman, "The Material Turn in the Art of Western Europe and North America in the 1960s," in Beyond Preconceptions: The Sixties

Experiment, exh. cat. (New York: Independent Curators International, 2000), 73.

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Helio Oiticica. Parangol6 P17 Cape 13, Estou Possuido, 1967, worn by Nildo of Mangueira. Courtesy of

Projeto Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: Claudio Oiticica.

The contingent and precarious Parangoles can be conceived as conceptual tools

that mobilize sensual participation in order to achieve contrasting yet comple- mentary goals. On the one hand, by radically challenging conventions of muse-

um display that have traditionally discouraged any form of tactile participation, the Parangoles exist in a social space in which viewers become aware of identity as a shifting, ambivalent term constructed in a performative process involving self-

presentation and the gaze of others, and exploring issues of authenticity, play-

acting, and power. On the other hand, the Parangoles encourage a "suprasensory state of absorption, bordering on headiness, which can act as an effective trigger for contestation because it celebrates freedom and pleasure in the face of adver-

sity, conformism, and repression. Beyond oppositions between guerrilla tactics

and sensory pleasure, intimacy and political activism, Oiticica's Parangoles thus

opened the path for a kind of postmodernism in which the aesthetic and the

anti-aesthetic, rather than being mutually exclusive, are sewn together like two

sides of the same whirling fabric.

Anna Dezeuze is a research fellow at the AHRB Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism and Its Legacies, University of Manchester.

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Documents

Dezeuze.Hélio Oiticica's Parangolés