Earth, Wind and Fire

In the catalogue accompanying Hélio Oiticica's big Whitechapel exhibition in 1969 the Director wrote: 'Oiticica is famous in Brazil but little known in England.' Apparently this is still true. Oiticica did not capitalise on his success at the Whitechapel to launch a major international career. He did not think of art as a career at all, in economic or social terms, rather as a special sort of pleasure, a delirium. He never referred to his London showing as an exhibition, but as an 'experience' or an 'experiment', and he named it Eden. 'The visitor walks barefoot over the sand, steps into water in a covered-in place, stands alone in a small booth where there are large flat leaves on the floor, lies down on a mattress in a cabin which filters the light through in red and is full of a strange scent, or brings materials to make a "nest" in a little conglomerate of individual cells...' wrote a contemporary eye witness.1 Throughout the artist's own texts are scattered references to the London work - 'promenading through sites'...'languor inside tents'...'waiting for the internal sun' - phrases that idiosyncratically merge an abstract vocabulary with sensuous physicality and heightened, nearly ecstatic self-absorption.2

In the years after Eden, the special chemistry that Oiticica produced during a short life inspired a myth, although England was none the wiser. And England will remain none the wiser, since the spectacular, labyrinthine restaging of much of his work, currently travelling to Paris, Rotterdam, Barcelona, Lisbon, Rio and the United States will not come here. Oiticica's assault on good taste, his involvement with delinquency, marginality, drugs, transgressive sex, and the trance states induced by colour, samba and rock'n'roll may be one reason for this. It is just as possible that his deep commitment to art theory feels too foreign and his political acumen too unsettling to appeal to a repressed audience in a depressed era.

Desire, wildness, tropicalist kitsch, and the excesses of Carnival are heady elements in Oiticica, coexisting with prescient critical intelligence, conceptual rigour, an astringent sense of artistic order deriving from Malevich, Mondrian and Pevsner, and astonishing personal charisma. Euphoric and very specific, his texts and small works are perhaps a more amenable resource than the large environmental installations which are so provocatively provisional and flimsy, yet everything in Oiticica's abundant and heterogeneous production is, in its own way, a concise-as-possible, concrete-as-possible, manifestation of his reverie on transcendence and abjection. Oiticica used rational formats as containers or vehicles of mystical experience. He turned what must have begun as a personal contradiction into a dialectic by means of works that expose logical oppositions or formal conflicts and perhaps - depending on the viewer's capacity for active participation - resolve them.

From the perspective of his irretrievable and unclassifiable work, Oiticica's situation calls to mind that of Joseph Beuys. Posthumous exhibitions of artefacts and lists of achievements somehow can never satisfy the desire to experience the charismatic influence of either artist. The sedimentary remains - documentation, reconstructed installations, souvenirs, texts, photographs, videotapes, drawings, proposals, paintings, sculpture and films - for the most part feel like raw ingredients, insufficient evidence of magic. What the physical relics of the oeuvres of Beuys and Oiticica can never reveal is how their work worked, what happened when it did, and what it meant when it didn't. Like fossilised carapaces, the remaining traces in museums of both artists lack personality, the most essential element in art practices that consciously emphasise the provisional nature of art and the interactive, performative aspects of aesthetic experience. Without their bodies, their persons, their personalities, it may be impossible to experience the effect both artists intended, the promised transformation of ourselves in our ethical and social dimensions, by means of the aesthetic. By their poignant, immodest insistence, each in his own way, that the meaning of their works somehow exceeded mere visual, physical presence, Oiticica and Beuys both guaranteed that what remained could be burdened with the intangible weight of this potential extra significance.

Yet there could not be two more different artists, for although each wished to foreground the absolute creativity of everyone, Beuys understood the role of shaman as requiring him to star in his own myth, onstage as well as off, while Oiticica's myth led him to create works that starred others. While Beuys sanctified ordinary articles of clothing by wearing them, characteristically, as personal vestments, Oiticica made magical garments for other people, who felt themselves transformed by wearing his masks or by donning his winged cloaks proclaiming 'I am Possessed' (Parangolé 13) or 'I Embody Revolt' (Parangolé 11) or 'Out of your Skin Grows the Humidity, the Taste of Earth, the Heat' (Parangolé 10), or even 'We are Hungry' (Parangolé 14). Thus masked or dressed, or reverently handling the small objects he called Bolides, or exploring the luminous, flexible spaces of his large installations, the Pénetrables, the bodies of other people were to become their own instruments of a secular revelation, to which not just eyes and cognitive brains but tactile, auditory, and olfactory sensations contributed. The intended effect was metamorphosis or mutation, the cumulative result an emancipation of the participants from aspects of their socio-cultural and personal conditioning. For Eden, in 1969, he wrote: '...in Whitechapel, behaviour opens itself up for whoever arrives and bends forward into the created environment, from the cold of London streets, repetitive, closed, and monumental, and recreates himself...'3

Precariously poised in formal terms somewhere between constructivism and transgression, though not governed by any notional limitations, the works of Oiticica that can be seen today are only a collapsed sign of the larger work he made available. Parangolés as empty as discarded cocoons hanging motionless in a museum resemble institutional displays of archaic technology. Like old steam engines splendid in polished brass and enamel, they are presented to the viewer as relics of a dead past. Quiescent, decorative and ineffectual, the fact that they are meant to be functioning machines is overlooked. Seen like this, what Oiticica's work proposes may well seem decontextualised and intangible, or even incomprehensible.

But if correctly used, his real work could be understood as a form of realism, in which a realisation of the abysmal and transient nature of human being is accurately communicated between one body and another body by using these precisely-designed physical tokens. Oiticica's art is intended to be a machine that works. In this sense, the potential functional efficacy of his work is an hypothesis of abiding relevance, testable in the here and now, disquieting perhaps only in an era when aesthetic closure may have become an addiction as well as a consolation.

Postscript: A Fable

Once upon a time, the job of the artist was to provide a breakthrough or a revelation. It was a sort of heroism. 'Serious' or 'successful' art was supposed to make a a rupture in the old order, an opening through which future possibilities might emerge. But, eventually, grandiose, Romantic claims for art as wisdom, as salvation, or as cultural subversion began to seem naive and went seriously out of fashion. The old idea of art was eclipsed by versions providing a wider range of satisfactions.

Soon the proliferation and consequent devaluation of satisfactions became a problem. It was not just those old enough to recall the beginning of the movie who were haunted by the ghosts of certain immense pleasures. To solve this problem, nostalgic reinvocations of the austere and solemn satisfaction of 'great' art were designed as consumer packages. The packages comprised additional software for 'delivering' viewers to the virtual reality of an art world already producing endless hyper-real simulations.

However, to the disappointment of sponsors and organisers alike, these ultimate seductions produced only boredom and depression in audiences. When their feelings of boredom and depression were eventually understood by everyone as internalised anger, they began to suspect that implicit in their seduction by the organisers and sponsors had been a kind of violation that they needed to reject.

By this time it was no longer possible to think of subjectivity without ambivalence, paradox, even irony, but the implacable, stubborn presence of the human being had persisted, at least as a site of negation. In recognition of its persistence they awarded themselves the right to reinvent an ambivalent, paradoxical, ironic, and immensely serious art.

This happened several times.