Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame 9780226260334

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Hélio Oiticica

Hélio Oiticica Folding the Frame

Irene V. Small The Universit y of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Irene V. Small is assistant professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, where she is also an affiliated faculty member in the Program in Latin American Studies and the Program in Media and Modernity. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in China 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­26016-­7 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­26033-­4 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226260334.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Small, Irene, author.

Hélio Oiticica : folding the frame / Irene V. Small.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.



ISBN 978-­0-­226-­26016-­7 (cloth : alkaline paper) —

ISBN 978-­0-­226-­26033-­4 (e-­book) 1. Oiticica, Hélio, 1937–1980 — Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

N6659.O35S63 2016

709.2—dc23 2015012861 This publication is made possible in part by the Barr F ­ erree Foundation Fund for Publications, Princeton University, and the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Kha-­ai

Contents Note on the Text  ix Introduction  1 1 The Folded and the Flat  19 2 The Cell and the Plan  71 3 Ready-­Constructible Color  131 4 What a Body Can Do  181 Coda  229 Acknowledgments  239 Notes  243 Index  285

Note on the Text All translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted. Documents from Hélio ­Oiticica’s archive are cited by the document number designated by Arquivo Hélio Oiticica/Projeto Hélio Oiticica (AHO/PHO). Texts from the archive are cited in their original document form rather than in posthumous publications unless otherwise noted. Earlier versions of some sections of this book have appeared as “Pigment Pur and the Corpo da Côr: Post-­painterly Practice and Transmodernity,” October (Spring 2015); “Morphology in the Studio: Hélio Oiticica at the Museu Nacional,” Getty Research Journal 1 (February 2009); and “Material Remains: On the Afterlife of Hélio Oiticica’s Work,” Artforum (February 2010).

Fig. Intro. 1 Hélio Oiticica, NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1, 1960. Photo by Alexandre Baratta. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Introduction What does it mean to fold a frame? A frame is a limit, a boundary, an edge. It establishes a distinction between an inside world and an outside world, and in so doing, focuses attention on the world that is framed. To fold a frame is to produce and simultaneously dispel distinctions between inside and outside worlds. It is to treat the liminality of the frame as a generative structure—­a structure with which to fold. But who folds a frame? And what kind of worlds result? Consider a photograph of a group of children inspecting a hanging work by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica titled NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 (NC1 Small Nucleus 1) (1960) (fig. intro. 1). Taken in 1966 for a feature in the monthly magazine A Cigarra, it shows the work installed as part of the artist’s first solo exhibition, at Galeria G4 in Rio de Janeiro. The work is marginally a painting, its rich orange and peach surfaces recalling a series of monochrome planes. Yet here two dimensions have been pushed into three, converting lateral extension into labyrinthine sculptural form. Departing from the wall, the entire configuration is suspended in space like giant folded origami. The artist has placed a mirror beneath this entity. And although partially obscured by the photograph’s angle, this reflected surface allows its viewers to see the intricate structure of the work, its hollows and crevices, secret pockets of air, deep inner space. This visual information is fundamentally different from the experience of the sculpture as a material thing perceived in time. The solid entity solicits a mobile viewer who experiences the sculpture elliptically, surface by surface, fold by fold, pausing hands upon knees, as the children do to peer into its interstices from beneath, or leaning close on tiptoe as an adult might to glimpse its divisions from above. The mirror, by contrast, transforms the density of this phenomenological experience into a two-­dimensional image, as if to diagram its structure. In it one sees the logic of the sculpture’s nested folds: that the configuration is not a single entity, but two sets of paired units that fold away from each other in space; that it is organized around a central square implied by its innermost folds; and that this square in turn is concretized in the units of the latticed grid from which

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it hangs. Yet the mirror also indicates that this structure exceeds a simple logic of symmetries and squares. One paired unit pivots away from its counterpart but also inverts it, as if to absorb the mirror’s capacity to reflect and reverse. At first diagramming the sculpture’s structure, the mirror’s repetitions and inversions quickly multiply into a dizzying vertigo that propels the viewer back to the three-­dimensional object. This material entity, it is now clear, is not independent from the mirror, but has incorporated mirroring into the structure of its folds. Surely the children pictured in the photograph do not attend to all of these details. Still, their fascination is driven by the perceptual interplay between the physical folds of the object and its immaterial reflection. Shifting their gaze between the sculpture and its image, the children approach the doubling and differencing of the work as a puzzle of optical and tactile cues. A blond boy reaches upwards to touch the sculpture. He recognizes that the space nested within it extends into the literal space in which he stands. The work has opened up into his environment. In so doing, it solicits not simply a viewer, but a participant who activates the work in his own time. A girl in pigtails, meanwhile, perches on her heels and leans forward in anticipation. Her hands are poised just above the mirror, as if to reach into its virtual space, her image doubled in reflection along its far edge. Enveloping real space into virtual space, the mirror gives the little girl a picture of herself within the work. She sees herself seeing. But she also sees a space in which to act, and stretches her hands forward as if to grasp the work’s folds. For her the mirror’s diagram of structure has become experiential. Folding external space into the internal content of the work, the mirror allows the little girl to construct a phenomenal world of her own. Such a world belongs neither to the virtual space of the mirror nor to the physical space in which she exists. Instead, it belongs to the epistemological thickness of perception. This thickness creates the potential that interior worlds might transform the experience of exterior space. A hint of this, too, is visible in the picture. Ambient light bouncing off the mirror has thrown up a faint projection onto the wall, transforming the mirror and the girl together into a luminescent lozenge of shadow and light. Contingent and indexical, it registers the temporary event of the work’s viewing within the encompassing space. Yet, captured and recorded by the photograph, this moment is now concretized alongside the work and its viewers. Parallel to the flat surface of the photograph, this fleeting detail returns me to my own conditions of beholding and suggests that I too am folding their frame. The pictured children enact the emergent possibilities of participation inaugurated by the spatial folds of Oiticica’s NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1. But it is my distinct perspective—­ temporally and spatially removed from this scene—­that desires to render such possibilities historically legible today. To fold a frame is therefore a conceptual and archival operation as well as a phenomenological one. It conjoins past and present through the act of interpretation. It insists that the performativity of this reception proceeds from the work’s formal intervention—this is t­ he locus of its critical claim.

2

Introduction

* Hélio Oiticica was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937 and began working in geometric abstraction in the mid-­to late 1950s. Moving from a painterly to participatory practice over the course of the 1960s, then incorporating experimental writing and expanded cinema in the 1970s, Oiticica’s work charts a unique engagement with several of the most important tendencies of advanced art of this period. These include a rejection of discrete objects in favor of experiential, environmental, and informational works; a concern with aesthetic, social, and psychic emancipation; a critique of art’s institutional protocols; and a shift in emphasis from authorial creation to the viewer’s reception, interpretation, and use. In the years following Oiticica’s premature death in 1980, his reputation as an uncompromising, even unclassifiable, artist grew. An important volume of his writings was published in 1986 in Brazil, where his work resonated with recent processes of democratization and renewed attention to the country’s legacies of radical art and critical thought.1 Soon after, he was absorbed within an international art circuit animated by discourses of globalization and difference.2 There he provided a compelling articulation of avant-­garde practice instigated outside of Europe and the United States. Such decentering impulses established Oiticica in contradistinction to the putative rationalism and insularity of contemporaneous Western modes as a standard-­bearer of both politicized and sensorial Latin American art.3 As participatory and collaborative practices gained international prominence in the 1990s, his work appeared to both anticipate and challenge the utopian tendencies of “relational aesthetics” and the turn to the social.4 And as analytic rubrics of transnational migration complicated notions of locality and identity at the turn of the twenty-­first century, Oiticica’s sojourns in New York and London evinced the complex mechanisms of affiliation, translation, and legibility in artistic practice and historiography alike.5 By the time that an accidental fire in Rio damaged or destroyed a majority of his mature works in 2009, Oiticica was considered a pivotal actor in the history of modern and contemporary art. One of a small number of major works that escaped the fire unharmed, NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 will doubtless occupy a privileged place in Oiticica’s future reception. Yet how will such a piece be read? Is it a painted object that registers the traces of the artist’s brush and, as such, a historical artifact to be preserved as evidence of Oiticica’s hand? Or is the very notion of authorial inscription displaced by the work’s participatory dimension—­a latent aspect that came to define the trajectory of Oiticica’s work at large? If the mirror is a primary catalyst for participation, what of the fact that it appears in some period photographs as a single pane of glass and as divided into four, horizontal and vertical axes demarcated by a slender groove, in others? Does this difference indicate a de­finitive change in thinking by Oiticica? A move to reiterate the orthogonal grid repeated in the latticed structure from which it hangs? Or might it suggest a lack of finality to the work as a whole—­a demonstration of what he would later call

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his “program-­in-­progress,” that is, the organic and permanently evolving character of his thought process and oeuvre?6 In the 1960s the notion that the identity of a work of art was wholly determined by its author was repeatedly undermined—­on the one hand, by the proliferation of “open works” whose structural indeterminacy required interpretation for their completion, and on the other by the “death of the author,” the recognition that a work does not register individual authorial expression so much as constitute, as Roland Barthes wrote, a “multi-­dimensional space” in which existing texts “blend and clash.”7 Haroldo de Campos and Umberto Eco (who independently coined the term “open work” in 1955 and 1958 respectively), as well as Barthes, whose essay “The Death of the Author” appeared in 1967, all noted modernist precedents to these phenomena, most notably in the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé.8 But it was the wholesale reconfiguration of the work of art in the postwar period that best embodies the confluence of these twin ­phenomena: as iterative event actuated at a remove from the artist (as in Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings), realized via an instructional scenario (as in the Fluxus score), or vivified by a participant by way of material props (as in Lygia Clark’s sensorial objects).9 Yet plotting Oiticica’s location along these critical vectors is a complex task. A consummate writer and thinker, he contributed the single most insightful commentary to his own work as well as to that of many of his contemporaries. He noted the importance of this discursive role in a 1961 interview: I think it is of utmost importance that artists leave their own testimony of their experience. The tendency is for artists to be ever more conscious about what they do. It is much easier to penetrate the artist’s thinking when he leaves a verbal testimony of his creative process. I always feel compelled to make annotations about all the essential points of my work.10 Not surprisingly, the precise taxonomies Oiticica developed in order to classify and systemize his works continue to exert a determining role in narrating his conceptual trajectory. A voluminous archive of typed diary entries, carbon-­copied letters, marked newspaper clippings, exhaustive inventories, and meticulous notes—­sometimes dated even to the hour—­offers a formidable interpretive ­armature to those who enter its labyrinth. Following the digitalization of a large portion of these documents in 1999, this archive has itself become a central object of inquiry.11 This depository, combined with Oiticica’s magnetic personality, dramatically truncated life, and passionate rhetoric extolling “life-­experiences,” “anti-­art,” and a “return to the world,” has led to an enduring mythos regarding the mutual elucidation of his biography, work, and texts. Indeed, some of the earliest and most compelling accounts of Oiticica’s work come from those who could still recall the particular “form of living”—­as art historian Aracy Amaral once put it—­that he embraced.12 Yet if Oiticica’s categories and conceptual frameworks were the coeval inventions of an experimental practice—­“inaugurated” and made “intelligible”

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with each new work—­the intervening years have rendered this lexicon increasingly, even excessively, transparent.13 Where there was once exploration and emergence, there is now tautology and coincidence, with Oiticica’s neologisms simply projected back upon the work. Thus, despite the fact that the work’s participatory nature thoroughly disrupted the hermeticism of artistic expression, its reception has largely consolidated and circumscribed the traditional notion of the author as such. In the wake of the fire, this condensation has opened up to two extremes of quasi-­fetishistic retrieval: first, of the auratic authenticity of the material object and, second, of the ideational authenticity of the text.14 As auction prices for undamaged works soared, some critics opined that the fire had liberated Oiticica’s ideas from their material cage.15 According to this view, Oiticica’s works are primarily prompts for experience better conveyed by propositions and writings than physical remains. Yet by positioning the written document as the privileged anchor of artistic intent, this idealist position curiously overlaps with its market version, since propositions and projects are easily editioned and sold when remade. While Oiticica’s fastidious records of paint mixtures have allowed many damaged works to be conserved, his notes and documents had already facilitated posthumous production of several unrealized propositions before the fire forced the issue into sharp relief. A largely unreconstructed concept of the author thus stands at the locus of both the contraction and expansion of works put forward in Oiticica’s name, and this despite the fact that it is the participant—­ Barthes’s newly constituted reader—­who is called forth by the works themselves. In this book, I proceed from the assumption that the delimiting frames of modernist art history—­authorship and the autonomous art object, but also the historical methods by which such categories come to mean—­must be ­topologically reconfigured in order to account for the emergence of participation as a structural element within Oiticica’s work. I conceive of this reconfiguration as a fold that embeds such categories within a complex tissue of possibility and determining constraints. Thus, rather than offering a definitive account of ­Oiticica’s work as a series of authorial procedures, I adopt the generative position of the reader in order to excavate the critical potential of propositions that were intended to open up beyond their own bounds. In so doing, I aim to recover participation as an experimental and highly contingent phenomenon rather than an a priori end. Despite the capacity—­or perhaps desire—­for Oiticica’s propositions to ­surpass the ontological limits of the work of art, the participatory paradigm I trace here does not constitute a rupture with art as such. In this regard, the book decisively departs from the predominant explanation of the radicality of ­Oiticica’s work and Brazilian participatory practice more broadly. By and large this history has been a triumphal affair. First narrated in the testimonies of its practitioners and then rehearsed in later accounts, the story is one of formal episodes that chart the progressive dismantling of the bounded, autonomous art object, culminating in the integration of art and life.16 Evolutionary, teleological, and punctuated by moments of glittering rupture, it belongs to a long rhetorical

5

Introduction

tradition of the avant-­garde. Indeed, artists such as Oiticica and Clark self-­ consciously traced their lineage to prewar European figures such as Piet Mondrian, whose paintings were insistently sovereign entities and anticipatory ­fragments that imagined the end of art.17 Brazilian participatory art thus stands paradoxically as both the first truly “Brazilian” avant-­garde movement and the ultimate realization of this earlier European avant-­garde’s utopian aim.18 Yet, in casting such innovation as a sequence of formal solutions to problems posited along a singular trajectory of advanced art, this narrative has cultivated a critical paradox: it approaches works purely from within the frame of art itself. For all the emphasis on the ultimate dissolution of art into life, the foundational account of Brazilian participatory art relies on the precise ontological framework such practices aimed to collapse. This lacuna has likewise shaped the political interpretation of Oiticica’s work. If art and life remain confined to mutually exclusive realms of autonomy and engagement, then any ingress of artistic practice within the social realm can easily be construed (and misconstrued) as liberating in and of itself.19 As Oiticica and others were enlisted to perform the signal difference of Latin America within the newly globalized art world of the 1990s, this apparent exodus from art dis­ tinguished their work from contemporaneous critiques advanced by European artists such as Marcel Broodthaers and Daniel Buren. In critic Craig Owens’s influential formulation, these artists responded to the “death of author” by “shift[ing] attention away from the work and its producer and onto its frame,” by which he meant the entirety of art’s institutional apparatus.20 By abandoning this frame in order to act in life, by contrast, Latin American artists launched what curator Mari Carmen Ramírez, following Simón Marchán Fiz, persuasively termed an “ideological conceptualism” aimed directly at the social body and the repressive state.21 Yet Buren recognized that frames follow artistic practices whether or not they are circumscribed by physical walls (or, for that matter, the nomenclature of “art”).22 In short, bypassing the frame often fails to acknowledge the persistence of its structuring force. At several key junctures, Oiticica distanced his work from simplistic accounts of the marginal and resistant. He decried the “folkloric” interpretation of his engagement with the favelas (the informal settlements of Brazil’s urban poor) and theorized the “subterranean” as an alternative and permanently evolving critical state.23 Likewise, although he differentiated the “ethical” from the more broadly “social” in works such as B33 Bólide Caixa 18 “Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo” (Homage to Cara de Cavalo) (1966), these terms are frequently telescoped within a single narrative in which all that is not art retains the s ­ emblance of the authentic, emancipatory, and real.24 To the degree that this partition of experience reinscribes the very dynamics of social schizophrenia Oiticica’s ­practice sought to disrupt—­poor, black, and marginalized subjects relegated to a permanent outside to which the work of art can merely gesture or point—­ the bifurcation of the political and the aesthetic does little to unleash the manifold intervention of participatory art.

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What kind of historical method, then, might give texture to the ambition of works like these? Works that dispensed with frames and moved out into space? That solicited viewers’ manipulation, acted as engines of sociability and zones of experience? That borrowed from the materiality of the world in order to reconceptualize it as a perceptual field? A philosophical exegesis offers an elegant solution but often suffers from the ahistoricity of its analytic lens.25 An approach that foregrounds institutions falls prey to an inverse oversight, for it apprehends neither the poiesis nor the irreducible strangeness of the artistic endeavor. A social history premised on the centrality of the artist as historical actor poses obvious problems, as the very notion of a participatory practice demands that we recover a calculus of possibilities set in motion, not by intentions but by artworks themselves.26 As Oiticica’s works are primarily nonmimetic and abstract, neither does a history mortgaged to iconographic representation or narrative content deliver a sufficient optic. Indeed, one enduring predicament of the contextualist approach is its tendency to render the work of art inertly illustrative of its presumptive historical background. Reproducing an essentially representational conceit at the level of interpretive method, such an approach consigns work and context to a rigid figure/ground relation that never takes part in a single topology of actions and effects. The question, then, is how to write a social history of art that proceeds from the radicality of abstract, participatory form as both the subject of analysis and as a method—­even as it recognizes the mediation of narrative as a generating force. In light of this challenge, this book attempts to meet Oiticica’s practice on its own terms, not by simulating its provocations but by developing a paradigm of methodological elaboration from procedures embedded within the work. It proposes that the double challenge of this work—­to conceive the viewer as an active participant and to imagine an artistic practice as part-­and-­parcel of the world at large—­can only be engaged by taking seriously the work’s capacity to act as an epistemological device, that is, as a material, embodied model of emergent knowledge. As a corollary, it argues that the social (that most elusive element of art historical accounts and individual artistic events alike) is not a preexisting horizon but the active construction of subjects in conjunction with the assemblage of physical artifacts, textual propositions, and transitory sensations that together we call the work of art.27 To approach works in this manner is to ask them to be affective as well as theoretical, to perform historicity and metaphorical extension at the same time. Such demands exert real pressures on the work of art. But the reward is to reclaim it as an agent rather than a historical effect.

* The formal operation that guides this study is the fold. Self-­same and self-­other, the fold performs a reflexivity that consistently differentiates and diverges from itself. As a figure of the relationship between form and method, the fold is therefore not a prescriptive schema. Rather, it is a dynamic modality that

7

Introduction

continually enacts the production of affinity and dissimilarity that motivates the critical process and embodied reception alike. Both the specific operation and its broader methodological justification take their cue from formulations advanced by members of the Neoconcrete group, which emerged in the late 1950s in Rio and was the primary aesthetic and discursive field from which Oiticica launched his mature work. Neoconcretism itself was short-­lived, its status as a movement largely the efforts of its principal polemicist, Ferreira Gullar. Yet the artistic dialogues that proceeded from it were highly generative, then as now. The mobilizing distinction that Neoconcretism drew from Concretism—­the predominant form of geometric abstraction practiced in Brazil at the time—­ pivoted on the relationship between theory and practice. Specifically, the priority the Neoconcrete group placed on experiential, inductive research undertaken from within the affective realm as opposed to the illustrative application of a priori principles to works of art.28 The Neoconcretists were not averse to theory: Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenology, Ernst Cassirer’s constructive philosophy, and Henri Bergson’s duration, for example, all played important roles for various members in elucidating the organic, expressive, and temporal character of the artwork and its encounter. Yet these artists understood theorization as an explanatory and contextualizing procedure undertaken after formal experimentation, research, and realization had occurred.29 By contrast, the epistemological character of the work of art—­its ability to inaugurate conditions of knowledge, to constitute, and therefore reconfigure, one’s perception of the world—­was located first and foremost in its initial emergence as an independent entity. Neoconcretists aimed for this revelation to recur with each encounter with the work.30 In seeking to recover the significance and texture of these conditions of emergence, I therefore resist using Oiticica’s writings as one-­to-­one encapsulations of his work in favor of treating them, when they appear, as experimental, partial, and dialogic texts. I likewise resist importing external theoretical formulations of the fold in favor of excavating the category as an operation driven by the aesthetic and historical particularities of artistic practice. Thus while there are moments of resonance and conceptual overlap with the rich philosophical discourse on the fold—­as chiasmic reversibility of body and world in Merleau-­Ponty, as structuring hiatus in Jacques Derrida, as engendering plurality in Luce Irigaray, as infinitely transforming monad in Gilles Deleuze’s writing on Gottfried Leibniz, and as process of subjectivization in his work on Michel Foucault—­these models are not primary reference points for my analyses.31 Instead this study is an experiment in treating the work of art as what Hubert Damisch calls a “theoretical object,” an entity that provokes but also problematizes the relation between theory and history in and of itself.32 Let us return, then, to folding the frame. In NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1, Oiticica orchestrates a structure and corresponding experiential scenario in which interior and exterior are porous and mutually constitutive, resulting in a topology rather than a set of discrete parts. As I will elaborate, the radical structural possibilities of the fold were epitomized in postwar Brazilian art by the Möbius loop, a single-­sided surface given iconic form in the Swiss artist Max Bill’s sculpture

8

Introduction

Fig. Intro. 2 Max Bill, Tripartite Unity, 1948–­49. Stainless steel, 114 x 88.3 x 98.2 cm. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zurich.

Tripartite Unity (1948–­49), widely known to artists at the time (fig. intro.2). Bill’s sculpture, however, is an exceedingly traditional work. Not only is it isolated and immobilized on a pedestal, per the figural conventions of monumental sculpture, the recursivity of the Möbius strip’s topological surface consistently returns the form inwards. This produces the “unity” of the work’s title but also staves off the

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Image courtesy of Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo.

Fig. Intro. 3 Lygia Clark, Composição n. 5, Série: Quebra da Moldura, 1954. Industrial paint on wood, 107 x 91 cm. Photo by Mark Morosse. Courtesy of Associação Cultural “O Mundo de Lygia Clark.”

possibility that the work might open to anything beyond itself. In other words, folding produces sameness but not difference. Difference has long been the province of the frame, as it holds the work of art distinct from its environment. The cutout frames and shaped canvases of artists associated with Arte Madí and Arte Concreto-­Invención in Buenos Aires in the 1940s, as well as Clark’s Quebra da Moldura (Breaking the Frame) series of 1954, both pressured this function (fig. intro. 3).33 The former sought to rid the painterly plane of illusionism by dispensing with its traditional formats. The latter absorbed the frame within the painting as a single but newly discontinuous pictorial unit. Both integrated external space within the painting. Yet because their planar surfaces remain attached to the wall, these works are ultimately experienced pictorially in the conventional sense. NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1, by contrast, decisively articulates the fold as an operation enacted upon the frame—­it is, after all, all frame and all fold at once.

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In so doing, it actualizes an epistemological model in which the mediating entity that presumes to establish the incommensurability of inside and outside terms—­ the frame—­becomes the very agent by which inside and outside, sameness and difference, are relationally intertwined—­the fold. NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 posits this model from within the phenomenological conditions of encounter: spatial structure, chromatic inflection, temporal duration, and mimetic recognition. But the theoretical operation it performs is extensive in its implications. I want to elaborate on some of the consequences for the historically interdependent constructs of autonomy, the subject, and modernity here. The first term—­autonomy—­concerns the distinction between art and life so prized within modernist rhetoric as art’s raison d’être, and within an avant-­garde formulation, as its necessary end. The autonomy of art has long depended on this division, and the convention of the frame gives it physical form. Modern art, we could say, enacts the double process of securing this frame and seeking its rupture. By folding the frame (as opposed to ignoring, blurring, transgressing, or otherwise seeking to circumvent it), the theoretical model given form by NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 recasts the ontological question that undergirds the art/life duality as an epistemological one. The autonomy of art, it follows, is no longer a function of the maintenance or breach of boundaries. Rather, it is reciprocally produced via a complex interplay of utterances that characterize “art” and “non-­ art” alike. We have long recognized utterances within the history of art as material gestures, rhetorical gambits, and self-­aware statements that establish a field of communication by way of negation, dialogue, and response. They make meaning out of historically specific circumstances, even when they are blind to the relations that they construct. But utterances cannot be understood simply—­or exclusively—­as works of art. They are also objects, propositions, and actions that in­habit the world at large. Folding the frame allows us to recognize that the significance of art as art is generated neither within a mythical realm of pure reflexivity nor its negation but by virtue of topological relations by which fields of communication are constantly made and remade. Further, it permits us to see that the very physical matter that constitutes utterances—­the paper upon which words are printed, the particles of pigment that make up paint—­manifest this topology in and of itself. This brings me to the second arena—­that of the subject—­that NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 reshapes. If utterances span discourses and material presences—­ statements and inert things—­the classic opposition between subject and object can no longer be maintained. Not only philosophically, where the dichotomy is largely obsolete, but methodologically. In his influential formulation of the linguistic utterance, Mikhail Bakhtin argued that language acts are two-­sided affairs in which meaning is shared by a speaker and an audience as part of an ongoing process of dialogism and institutionalized response.34 Art histories attentive to the relational matrix of practice and reception have made productive use of this articulation, whether in analyzing an individual artist anticipating a public or an entire field such as Latin American art as it interfaces with the

11

Introduction

dominant canon.35 Still, Bakhtin’s utterance privileges speaking and responding subjects and is less adept at theorizing the peculiar disruptions of objects themselves. The displacement of the human subject in the turn to speculative realisms represents one attempt to overcome such a problem.36 But it is hardly adequate to the deeply phenomenological orientation and participatory activation of Oiticica’s work. By orchestrating perceptual and structural loops between object and image, abstraction and representation, the virtuality of space and the tangibility of things, NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 offers an alternate model of agency. It establishes the viewer and the work of art within a shared ecology of effects. This too is constitutive of an utterance as I want to understand it here. The much-­vaunted “organic” quality of the Neoconcrete work is therefore not a projection of the subject’s animate qualities onto the object. It is the production of an amalgamate entity in which participation is a behavioral extension of a work’s structural possibilities, much as an organism’s movement is contingent upon its skeletal frame.37 The subject is reconfigured in turn. It becomes less than, but also more than, its body and psychic effects. Because this participatory paradigm belongs wholly to neither an ostensible object (the work) nor ostensible subject (the viewer on the one hand, the artist on the other), we need to rethink the proprietory role of the individual artist. This does not discount authorship or intention but rather embeds this agency within a wider circuit of actors, objects, and events.38 Oiticica frequently used the term “invention” to describe both his own process and that which he hoped his works would catalyze for their viewers or participants.39 Unlike related notions such as “creation” (with its traditional associations of individual skill and craft) or “expression” (which remains enmeshed within a Romantic notion of subjective interiority), invention calls up a constellation of occurrences that, while unique in their specific innovations, are widely generative in their effects. “One invention engenders another invention,” Oiticica noted in one of the last interviews before his death, not simply for the individual artist but for a “family of inventors” whose works function like a galaxy of “points of light.”40 Oiticica’s formulation is akin to that of Bakhtin’s utterance in its dynamics of enunciation and response. But if we recast this concept by way of the folded frame of NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1—­ that is, as a blended behavioral and material assemblage—­we can conceive of invention as a radical change that includes but also exceeds the limits of the individual subject as such. My final observation by way of NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 concerns the topological field within which such inventions take place. In the same 1979 interview, Oiticica identified this field as modernism: “Modern art is the commencement of the emergence of what I call the state of invention.”41 Compiling the artistic references by which he situated his production—­Mondrian, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, but also Gullar, Clark, Aluísio Carvão, Oswald de Andrade, Haroldo de Campos—­reveals Oiticica’s understanding of modernism as a transnational field constituted by formal and conceptual innovation. Indeed, this is one working definition of the avant-­garde.42 Yet this constellation is not a self-­evident field. While modern art

12

imagines itself as universal, it operates by a logic of proximity and promotion. Certain utterances consolidate their legibility by virtue of frequency, repetition, and the availability of networks in which to travel, while others are required to construct their own circuits and may not be received at all.43 It is no coincidence that the Brazilian artists of Oiticica’s generation were familiar with the work of their European and American contemporaries, but not the other way around. The constellation model productively disrupts the fiction of unidirectional center-­ periphery flow. But it must be significantly pressured in order to account for the disequilibrium that structures the visibility of its points of light. From this perspective, although the ambitions of modernist invention are transhistorical, transnational, and comprehensive in scope, the enactment of invention can never be disengaged from the conditions of its locale. Coterminous with—­indeed, exceeding—­the field of modern art, then, is the field of modernity. Its effects are unevenly distributed according to the logic by which networks flow. If the fiction of modernity—­its phantasmagoric frame—­is that the modern and the nonmodern are mutually exclusive, consigned to distinct temporal and spatial terrains, then folding this frame reveals that modernity is a relational phenomenon writ large. Of course, the ideology of developmentalism also understood modernity in relational terms. But whereas it conceived of modernization as the linear process by which to overcome economic under­ development, the folded frame demonstrates the contrary: modernity is the means by which underdevelopment is produced and maintained.44 In this sense, modernity is neither plural nor unequivocally singular.45 It is a field of interactive, destabilizing tensions. Periphery, underdevelopment, and utterances unheard because they are separated in space—these are not exceptions to modernity. They are constitutive of its disjunctive force. In 1967 Oiticica asked, “How, in an underdeveloped country, to explain the appearance of an avant-­garde and justify it, not as a symptom of alienation, but as a decisive factor in its collective progress?”46 Folding the frame reveals that this question cuts to the paradox of the modern project at large. In light of this paradox, the topological formalism I extrapolate from NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 rearticulates Oiticica’s modernist constellation as neither a bounded field nor a linear vector but instead as a flexible surface defined by torsions, pockets, cusps, and unexpected bends. Such a topology depends upon conditions of possibility that structure action and interpretation. But it recasts this regulative latticework as a mechanism of curvature rather than restraint. Utterances occupy points of inflection and cause the surface to fold. By folding, the surface redistributes points of contact and allows for new utterances to be made and received. A point of inflection, as Walter Benjamin has written of materialist historiography, is “a configuration pregnant with tensions” that ­“crystallizes into a monad”: irreducible, defamiliarizing, and eruptive in its force.47 But as Deleuze has observed, a monad can also be thought of as a pleat. Tem­ poral and dynamic, each point of inflection is therefore a “unity that envelops multiplicity”—­a singularity that infinitely folds.48

13

Introduction

* Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame charts the formation of a participatory paradigm in Oiticica’s work between the mid-­1950s and the late 1960s. This period coincides with Brazil’s greatest push for economic development, itself a highly contradictory episode of modernity as an experience and idea. Though roughly chronological, the chapters do not provide a comprehensive account of Oiticica’s practice during these years. Rather, they investigate key moments of experimentation that transfigure the complex topology that I have described above. This topology was marked by the utopian legacy of European constructive art and the modernizing imperatives of Brazilian industrialization. Both conceived of develop­ment in starkly teleological terms. The organic systems and behaviors of Oiticica’s work, I argue, productively reimagined developmental processes as instances of dynamic emergence activated by the participatory encounter. In so doing, his works functioned as embodied epistemological structures for their users—­modes of intervention within the texture of everyday life. Each chapter explores a behavior that Oiticica’s works either perform or invite their participant to enact—­folding, building, making, wearing. Formally and conceptually, each of these behaviors proceeds from the inaugural operation of folding the frame. The first half of the book investigates the fold as a spatial procedure that draws external environments within the work and vice versa by means of the embodied subject. The second half concentrates on processes of unfolding by which the body of this subject is coarticulated with the work. Across these chapters, folding is not a uniform procedure. Rather, it performs a series of critical redoublings by which both the operation and its historical circumstances are reactivated and transformed. As the fold migrates from the rigid planes of NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 to the pliable tissues of the wearable Parangolés, the field that it transfigures shifts in response. Certain coordinates, such as the lineage of nonrepresentational art, are submerged. Others, such as the discourse of anti-­art, are intensified. Because the field is a topology, this migration does not reach climactic closure or perform the “radical leap” from art into life that commentators have so often, and beautifully, narrated of Oiticica’s work.49 The Parangolés do not “arrive” at the social because the social is always already present in the production of perception within a situated space. Nor do the aesthetics of form give way to an ethics of political emancipation. Participation, this book argues, is first, and comprehensively, an epistemological event. “The Folded and the Flat” introduces the historical parameters for Oiticica’s work of the late 1950s and early 1960s by examining the debates between the Concrete artists and poets of São Paulo and the Neoconcrete artists and poets of Rio. Both saw themselves as inheriting the most vital strands of the European constructive tradition, understood to encompass experiments in geometric abstraction spanning the prewar and postwar periods. These diverging

14

aesthetic affiliations gave rise to distinct models of information—­what I term the folded and the flat. Both models have their formal analogue in the quotidian object of the newspaper, a medium whose physically folded form allows for the efficient transferal of information when laid flat. This peculiar double analogue came to a head in the graphic redesign of the newspaper Jornal do Brasil, which occurred as the debates between Concretism and Neoconcretism played out in its pages. Concrete artists sought to integrate art and industry. They conceived of their paintings and sculptures as prototypes for industrial production and transparent vehicles of knowledge. In their works, strategies of seriality, graphic composition, and strong Gestalt forms resulted in bounded objects optimized for perceptual speed and visual legibility. By contrast, artists associated with Neoconcretism exploited the procedure of the fold and experimented with painted reliefs and moveable sculptures whose spatial density insisted upon the phenomenological duration of the viewing experience. These folded forms dispensed with frames, allowing the work of art to dialogue with its surrounding environment. Neoconcrete artists and theorists insisted on the work of art’s autonomy, refusing the perceived instrumentality and didacticism of Concrete art. Yet, by opening art into space through the formal procedure of the fold, the space their works engaged was not simply aesthetic but also explicitly social and historical. In “The Cell and the Plan,” I take up the formal and social consequences of the fold by examining the pressures exerted on art as the utopian aims of the Brazilian constructive project confronted actual spectacles of building, reform, repair, and ruin. These are doubly symbolized by the construction of the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio and that of the capital city of Brasília. Both commenced in the mid-­1950s and played a major role in the institutionalization of modernism in Brazil. I argue that the central question Oiticica’s generation faced in the late 1960s—­how to recuperate and revise the formal structures of modernism’s ­utopia after modernization’s political and social failure—­was condensed in the problem of scale. Oiticica responded by concretizing intermediary representational forms such as diagrams, plans, and models at a scale determined by the human body and its participatory aggregation. This strategy was reprised in Ready Constructible of 1978–79, a small sculpture made of stacked bricks that Oiticica described as a maquette “without scale.” This sculpture proposes a temporal modality of form that is not a static formal configuration but a dynamic principle of growth. Oiticica’s use of readymade bricks equalized the art-­work and construction-­ work that undergirded the Brazilian constructive project through a basic act of making. In “Ready-­Constructible Color,” I investigate how such acts intervened within an aesthetic and material field determined by the unique configurations of industrialization and developmentalism in postwar Brazil. Focusing on the knotty history of readymade color in modernist art, I examine Oiticica’s early 1960s Bólides—­moveable sculptures in which the viewer physically manipulates color in the form of painted surfaces, raw pigment, and found materials such as

15

Introduction

plastic sheeting and dirt. In these works, the imperceptible process of color perception is externalized and physicalized as participants modify light thrown upon the work’s interior spaces and pigments. Oiticica characterized this process as both an “unfolding” and a “field of development.” By allowing the viewer to produce and control this interaction, color that was both found naturally and selected as an industrial good is newly made through the participant’s touch. The transfer of the act of making from artist to participant therefore involves a coincident release of a “body of color” conditioned by the industrial field. The Bólides explore the dialogue that occurs between two newly conceived bodies: participant-­subject and work of art. “What a Body Can Do” investigates how this dialogue was amplified in wearable works Oiticica called Parangolés that must be manipulated by the participant’s entire body rather than simply his or her hands. Comprised of complex architectures of twisted and folded painted fabric, often lined with pockets and appendages such as sacks of colored pigment, the Parangolés envelop and extend the body while externalizing and poeticizing its behaviors in unfamiliar form. With these works, making concerns the epistemological construction of the body itself. Oiticica’s Parangolés have long been understood as indicative of the artist’s move from art into life. I argue, however, that his exit from the art museum was conditioned by conceptual frameworks he absorbed while working in a museum of natural history. There Oiticica adopted methods of taxonomy and morphology practiced within biological classification to develop an internal system of orders to organize and formulate his works. This classificatory system suggests that the conceptual emergence of the Parangolé in 1964 was not an unqualified statement of anti-­art but the product of rigorous interpolation between multiple systems of meaning—­ natural history, carnival practices, and the politics of the Brazilian avant-­garde. These systems were joined through the construction of the body as a highly contingent and composite structure that was knowable or classifiable not through static form but by virtue of what it could do. In concentrating on the inception of Oiticica’s participatory paradigm, there is much that this book does not undertake. I do not consider Oiticica’s years in New York from 1971–­78, which were rich in experiments in nonnarrative writing, expanded cinema, and the orchestration of a counterpublic sphere.50 Neither do I extensively analyze Oiticica’s relationship to Brazil’s military dictatorship, which came into power in 1964 but commenced its most repressive stage at the end of 1968, just as he was leaving for London and, subsequently, New York.51 In the intervening years, while the left continued to hold sway over culture, Oiticica produced a number of works that conveyed implicit political content.52 While the oppositional stance of such works is unquestionable, the most radical promises of participation—­to seat experience within the behaviors and material disposition of the everyday, to formulate a relational, contingent subjectivity, to question the category of the body and therefore the means by which bodies appear and are also restrained—­were already in place as a generative program. In this sense, I argue that that participation as an emergent—­

16

rather than reactive—­paradigm does not respond to repression by merely inverting its terms. It dismantles the very structure of power as a totalizing epistemology from within. Thus while Oiticica’s resistance to the military dictatorship has been key to the myth of “Hélio Oiticica,” the presumed legibility of this connection has obscured consideration of other, less familiar strains of agency and disruption.53 Letting go of the myth of Hélio Oiticica is of course no easy task. For several decades, it has sustained an epiphanic narrative of aesthetic and social transgression that kept many private memories alive while situating Oiticica within a transnational lineage of the avant-­garde.54 Yet as Oiticica’s position within Brazilian and global art history becomes increasingly canonical, the mythic character of this narrative grows brittle with well-­worn assumptions that reify the radicality of his work within neatly packaged accounts. This book, then, is an attempt to remobilize Oiticica’s work as a set of experiential, critical, and still unfamiliar theoretical possibilities—­a deterritorialization of the archive from the inside out.

17

Introduction

Fig. 1.1 Ferreira Gullar, “Arte Neoconcreta Agora,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, November 27, 1960. Courtesy of Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação do Jornal do Brasil and Ferreira Gullar.

What is inside is also outside. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe This path may lie in the creation of special objects (non-­objects) that occur outside all artistic convention and reaffirm art as the primary formulation of the world. Ferreira Gullar

1 The Folded and the Flat In Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some works of art were folded things. They displayed physical folds: pleats that drew space within them, creating inner cavities and hidden clefts, or bends that pressed flat planes into three-­ dimensional figures, cutting through space and organizing form against it. But their folded character was virtual as well: a free-­floating notch seemingly displaced from a plane, a temporal twisting, a hinge between work and world. Such folded works illustrate the article “Arte Neoconcreta Agora” (Neoconcrete Art Now), published by poet and critic Ferreira Gullar in the Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil on November 27, 1960 (fig. 1.1). At top, Gullar and Countess Maurina Pereira Carneiro examine a metal sculpture by Lygia Clark, the former touching the corner of the sculpture, his hand poised as if about to turn a giant page. The hinged and folded sheets of aluminum that comprise the sculpture—­its “pages”—­were meant to be turned. Turned, that is, and propped, flattened, swiveled, flipped, buckled, collapsed. Clark named this sculpture and its corresponding series a Bicho (animal, critter, or beast) because each work had a life of its own. Flip one “page” and the sculpture’s entire form changes in response as its flat, polygonal shapes pivot into unexpected three-­dimensional configurations. Turn it back, or attempt to, and an entirely new set of possibilities is disclosed. The Bicho’s form reveals itself successively, one “page” after another in time. Yet its heterogeneous movements defy linearity. “It is a living organism, an essentially active work,” wrote Clark. “When they ask me how many possibilities of movement [it has], I respond: ‘I don’t know, you don’t know, but it knows.’ The ‘Bichos,’” she continued, “have no reverse side.”1 Pictured below Clark’s sculpture is an untitled sculpture by Amílcar de Castro, likewise constructed from planes of folded metal. Unlike the Bicho, these rigid iron sheets cannot be manipulated. This work does not concern physical participation but rather the phenomenal experience of form in space: the consequences of a plane submitted to time and weight in order to fold; the apprehension of a shape that no longer has sides but, surfaces of interior and exterior extension. Space does not exist apart from form in de Castro’s sculpture. It is

19

created, squeezed out, and enveloped by the fold. The sculpture’s generative aspect does not lie in its medium so much as in the way its materiality dynamizes and defamiliarizes spatial perception. In Gullar’s words: “It is no longer a question of making a sculpture, of making a canvas, of making a poem, but of utilizing expressive instruments—­whatever they might be—­in order to give form to a new understanding of the world.”2 The illustration of de Castro’s sculpture merely implies a viewer who produces such an understanding in concert with the work. But this viewer returns in the article’s last photograph of two hanging works by Hélio Oiticica made from painted wooden plaques. In the background is a Relevo Espacial (Spatial Relief) (fig. 1.23), a folded, origami-­like construction composed of two interpenetrating lozenges, and in the foreground, the artist’s Bilateral Equali, an aggregate of five double-­sided squares suspended so as to create rectilinear columns of air. In each work, subtle variations in painterly tone—­red and orange in the first instance, white-­on-­white in the second—­render surface and edge as a series of chromatic zones. This spatialized modulation of color compels viewers to circumambulate the work and occupy its spatial intervals. Integrating plane and periphery through the cessation or continuity of a given tone, viewers perceptually create and recreate the work’s folds, activating its structure in kind. As the photograph makes clear, Oiticica’s hanging works have little use for frames. Frames enclose works of art from space, so designating their self-­ sufficiency. The folded forms and operations of these works depend upon space. In so doing, they enter into a dialogue, not simply with space but with everything space contains: the unordered world of real bodies, the chaotic realm of ordinary things. This, too, is visible in the picture. In seeking to capture the works’ scale, their phenomenological solicitation of the viewer, and finally their peculiar status as neither painting nor sculpture but suspended spatial structure, the photographer has documented a host of contingencies: the gloss of the suspending wires, the wooden scaffolding of a poster board, the puckering of a viewer’s shirt, the glint of an overhead light. Incidental to the work, such details are nevertheless pulled into its orbit in the process of encounter and documentation. The folds that turn these works back upon themselves, generating their reflexivity as autonomous aesthetic entities, then, are also the folds that dispel the distinctions between a given work’s interior and exterior space. Here, self-­ same operations consistently give rise to difference rather than equivalency. The occasion for these photographs was the 2° Exposição de Arte Neo­ concreta (2nd Exhibition of Neoconcrete Art), which opened in Rio de Janeiro on November 21, 1960. At this exhibition, the budding movement of Neoconcretism demonstrated its vigor, having added several members to its ranks—­Oiticica among them.3 Gullar emphasized that the Neonconcretists did not “constitute a ‘group’” and that their works exceeded “any conventional classification of genre.”4 Rather, their coherence stemmed from a shared investment in the work of art’s capacity to activate spectators through emergent rather than predetermined perceptual phenomena. For Gullar, this established nothing short of a “new type of communication.”5

20

What might such a “new type of communication” have meant in Brazil circa 1960? A type of communication reported in a newspaper, itself a vehicle for communication, and announced by a writer—­Gullar—­pictured within his article as an ideal viewer and thus coproducer of the Neoconcrete work? Between 1956 and 1961, Brazil’s most advanced modern art and poetry were divulged, theorized, and debated in the pages of the Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, the Sunday supplement of the Rio-­based daily Jornal do Brasil. Gullar was an art critic for the supplement and principal theorist of the Neoconcrete movement. The countess was director and president of the Jornal do Brasil, and it was her initiative that had brought the Suplemento Dominical into being in 1956. The photograph of the two with Clark’s Bicho at the top of the article “Arte Neoconcreta Agora” thus sets forth a complex chain of associations between readers and writers, artworks and pages, patrons and spectators, observers and users. Such a relay situates the embodied encounter described within the bounds of the article vis-­à-­vis the embodied encounter that occurs beyond it—­in the space of information transfer typified by the newspaper itself. This space, too, is conditioned by folds. Folds that collapse a newspaper’s textual density into an object, that are reversed when its pages are extended on a plane, that are reiterated and reconfigured by readers in the process of navigating the newspaper’s content. Indeed, it would be tempting to suggest that these dual instances of folding—­the folded artwork and the folded pages of the news­ paper—­are isomorphic in character. Such a one-­to-­one correspondence would posit the work of art as a self-­contained model for a social practice writ large. Yet the newspaper and the Neoconcrete work approach communication and a host of attendant terms—­information, fact, message, knowledge—­through radically different means. While the prototypical form of the newspaper is folded, for example, its informational content is legible only when it establishes a readerly zone that is flat. This zone may consist of a full two-­page spread or a single column isolated by a reader by means of multiple folds. In either case, folding is a means of delivering flatness. But it is flatness that is the newspaper’s privileged communicative state. By contrast, the Neoconcrete work conveys no content save the spatial and chromatic relations produced in the process of its perception. It does not transmit preexisting information as much as it provides the conditions for informational construction within a situated time and space. Like the newspaper, it becomes a communicative entity by virtue of its folds. But we might say that it mobilizes the newspaper’s medium rather than its message, isolating that interval in which content is suspended in favor of the independent materiality of the page. Refusing to reference or illustrate the world, the Neoconcrete work nevertheless establishes a coterminous relationship with it in time and space. The “new type of communication” lauded by Gullar is therefore one positioned in contradistinction to that of the newspaper, but plied from the very caesuras by which a newspaper’s communication takes shape. This chapter charts the emergence of two communicative modes—­“the folded” and “the flat”—­that were operative within works and discourses of

21

Chapter One The Folded and the Flat

Fig. 1.2 “Manifesto Neoconcreto,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 22, 1959. ­Courtesy of Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação do Jornal do Brasil.

­ razilian geometric abstraction between 1956 and 1961 and that shape the B aesthetic field through which Oiticica conceived of his first mature works. This period coincides with the split of the Concrete artists and poets of Rio from those of São Paulo following the 1° Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta (1st National Exhibition of Concrete Art), which opened in São Paulo in December 1956 and traveled to Rio in February 1957. It also coincides with the complete run of the Suplemento Dominical, which published key polemics leading to the rupture and served as the discursive vehicle for the new movement of Neo­ concretism to establish its theoretical claims (fig. 1.2). The break between the two groups has long been narrated as a difference in sensibility: between Concrete rationality and Neoconcrete intuition. First advanced in contemporaneous polemics but repeated ad infinitum in later accounts, this explanation appeals to long-­standing, if highly clichéd, tensions between residents of the two cities.6 In its sheer simplicity, it has consolidated

22

putatively coherent historical movements while ignoring the fluidity of identifi­ cation and divergence. While this regionalist narrative is insufficient as a causal explanation for the distinctions between Concretism and Neoconcretism, we must nevertheless take seriously the imperative to become distinct to comprehend the historical import of the works in question.7 As Brazilian critic Ronaldo Brito argued in his pioneering 1975 analysis, Neoconcretism staked its significance on a negation or supersession of Concretism in largely art historical terms.8 Yet in so doing, Neoconcretism crystallized the limits of the claim to universality upheld by Concrete movements in Brazil and elsewhere. By refusing to acknowledge either rupture or contradiction (for them, the Neoconcretists were simply “disoriented” Concretists), the Concretists held on to this universalist fiction, even as it butted up against the local specificities of Brazil. Such misalignments between universality and place are not surprising, as Concretism was itself something of a phantasm in the postwar period. Although its name derives from an eponymous 1930 manifesto by Theo van Doesburg that outlines a rigorously anti-­representational, anti-­naturalistic basis for painting, its implications in Brazil were tightly bound to articulations popularized by Swiss artist Max Bill and Argentine artist, theorist, and designer Tomás Maldonado in the 1940s and 1950s.9 Trained at the Bauhaus in the late 1920s, Bill was associated with avant-­garde figures such as Piet Mondrian and Jean Arp in the 1930s. In the postwar period, he fashioned himself as the principal disseminator of Concrete art in the international sphere. Through publications, exhibitions, and at the Hochschule für Gestaltung—­an institute of design he cofounded in 1953 in Ulm, Germany—­Bill promoted a systematic, mathematical art that, lacking the radicalism of earlier avant-­gardes, was nevertheless utopian and universalizing in its aspirations. In 1950, the newly inaugurated Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) staged a retrospective of Bill’s work. The following year, his sculpture Tripartite Unity won the international prize at the 1st São Paulo Bienal.10 In 1953 he returned to Brazil to give highly publicized lectures in Rio and São Paulo on art, architecture, and design. For his part, Maldonado was a leading protagonist in the development of geometric abstraction in 1940s Argentina. There, artists radicalized notions of “Constructive Universalism” and “invention” formulated by the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-­García. Having been active in Parisian avant-­garde circles in the 1920s, Torres-­García returned to Latin America in 1934 in order to launch his Escuela del Sur (School of the South), which aimed to synthesize modernist and indigenous abstraction.11 In 1953, the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-­RJ) showcased an exhibition of Argentine painters, several of whom, like Maldonado, now self-­identified as Concretists.12 That year, Brazilians Décio Pignatari and Waldemar Cordeiro met several of these artists when they passed through Buenos Aires on their way to Santiago de Chile to attend a congress on Latin American culture. There Pignatari, Cordeiro, and Maldonado all vigorously rejected the Communist Party’s advocacy of socialist realism. Maldonado, who soon departed to begin teaching at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, published a multilingual monograph on Bill in 1955, key sections of which were published in

23

Chapter One The Folded and the Flat

Brazil by the Suplemento Dominical.13 Bill’s and Maldonado’s formulations of Concretism and the broader legacy of constructive art thus provided a template upon which Brazilian artists could both model and distinguish their theoretical practice and work. To suppose a purely regional basis for the Concrete-­ Neoconcrete split is therefore to suppress a host of historiographic maneuvers by which the Concrete idiom was itself instrumentalized as a universal and portable method and style. This chapter triangulates Brazilian Concretism and Neoconcretism by way of the formal and ideological entity of the newspaper. In so doing, it yields an account that differs from both a regionalist narrative that naturalizes aesthetic and discursive differentiation and a totalizing modernism that subsumes such differentiation within a single art-­historical chain. In this alternate account, qualitative differences in approaches to communication between the Concretists and Neoconcretists do not chart fully actualized positions so much as aspirations or tendencies involving the capacities of communicative exchange. In this sense, Neoconcretism did not break with Concretism—­it assimilated and transformed Concretism’s strategies of flatness into folding. Insomuch as Concretism could only strive towards flatness as an ideal communicative state, Neoconcrete folding mobilized Concretism’s vulnerabilities and failures toward aesthetic ends. In their various formulations, both groups subscribed to a basic notion of the work of art as a container or catalyst for aesthetic information communicated to the viewer over the course of the perceptual encounter. The Concrete paradigm conceived of the success of this communication in terms of the equivalence of the information sent and received. It sought ways to minimize the “noise” of the perceptual process in order to maximize the fidelity of an artistic message or idea. Concretism likewise sought to integrate art and industry by producing visual prototypes that were metaphoric if not fully pragmatic in orientation. Conceiving of the work of art as a transparent and transferable vehicle of visual information, it exploited such techniques as bounded compositional fields, neutral pictorial spaces, simple graphic marks, and strong Gestalt forms in order to produce objects and images optimized for perceptual speed and legibility. In contrast, Neoconcretism dilated the process of perception. It approached information in terms of its variability and instability, its proclivity to break apart rather than cohere. It further asserted the autonomy of artistic expression. Insisting on the phenomenological duration and particularity of the viewing experience, its practitioners experimented with procedures such as folding in order to open the work of art into dialogue with its surrounds. The transmutation of Concrete flatness into Neoconcrete folding thus has at its fulcrum the use of information, for if information fails to cohere into a message, it does little more than call attention to perception’s procedures rather than its aims. Yet this transmutation, too, elides a simple opposition between the instrumentality of useful products and the self-­reflexivity of autonomous art. For over the course of the shift from Concretism to Neoconcretism, design changes in the layout of the Suplemento Dominical reveal the complex imbrication of art and industry in late 1950s Brazil. This relationship eclipsed the aspirational industri-

24

alism and social applicability of Concrete art while paradoxically undermining the Neoconcrete claim for artistic autonomy. While Neoconcretism failed to address the imbrication of art and the wider social realm within its own theoretical discourses, the works produced within its framework nevertheless articulated a compelling new epistemology to think through its effects. This epistemology took up the isomorphic structure between work and world posited by the Concrete paradigm of communicative flatness and propelled it into a dynamic relationality premised on the emergent quality of the fold. This mode of communicative folding was worked out dialogically by multiple artists and theorists associated with Concretism and Neoconcretism over the course of the late 1950s. Much of this chapter charts key episodes of this conversation by means of artworks, design practices, and the discursive vehicle of the news. Only twenty-­two when he joined the Neoconcretists in 1960, Oiticica is a minor protagonist for much of this story, as older figures such as Clark, Cordeiro, and Gullar defined the initial contours of debate. Ultimately, however, I argue that the transmutation of flatness into folding finds precise elucidation in Oiticica’s NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 (1960). In its complex orchestration and reversal of interior and exterior space, NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 functions as an epistemological model of the “new type of communication” heralded by Gullar in the pages of the Suplemento Dominical. To begin, then, we must consider the Concrete paradigm of communication, why it came to be expressed via isomorphic structures, and how this isomorphism constituted its own dynamic of inside and outside space.

Isomorphism and the Logic of Gestalt Form “What is inside is also outside,” wrote the Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa in 1947, citing the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, who in turn cited a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on the metamorphosis of plants.14 Pedrosa had studied Gestalt psychology in Berlin in the late 1920s, and the occasion for this citation was his thesis “Da Natureza Afetiva da Forma na Obra de Arte” (The Affective Nature of Form in the Work of Art).15 The reference itself derives from a 1920 study in which Köhler sought to demonstrate the parallel structure of a subject’s sensory experience and accompanying physiological processes. Just as Goethe posited that a plant’s outer form would reveal its inner constitution, so perception would illuminate cognition in reciprocal symmetry. From this initial isomorphism Pedrosa extrapolated another reciprocity between the perceiving subject and work of art. As the Brazilian critic wrote, “The act of perception is already an act of creation. Perceptual form obeys, in the rudiments of its organization, the same laws of good form that regulate the world and the work of art.”16 The reciprocities that Pedrosa establishes in this passage—­and the blind spots that surfaced when such reciprocities failed to coincide—­describe the contours of a field of advanced artistic production that flourished in late 1950s Brazil and, specifically, this field’s conception of the work of art as a communicative device. According to Gestalt psychologists, we do not perceive the world as

25

Chapter One The Folded and the Flat

undifferentiated chaos. Instead we organize it into perceptive wholes that dis­ tinguish themselves in figure-­ground relationships. Such perceptive wholes are greater than the sum of their parts, and only by forming wholes can subjects produce cognitive significance out of the raw matter of the world. “Good form” is that which lends itself to such patterns of cognitive organization. Simple, regular, and symmetrical, it corresponds to an innate mental tendency to prioritize stability and equilibrium.17 Information theorists transposed this theory of form to the idea of the message, defining it as an organized pattern that emerges against the chaos of an undifferentiated ground.18 Many advocates of geometric abstraction of the period located the unique potential of art within these formal and informational principles. By exploiting the principles of “good form,” art could trigger a viewer’s natural perceptual processes and therefore optimize his or her cognitive abilities. As Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos wrote of the Concrete poem in 1957, the “immediate stimulus” of a work might therefore bring “clarification to the mental habits” of a viewer.19 Aesthetics would be a sensorial training ground for the subject. The perceptual conditioning generated for the viewer by the work inside the frame could thus be transferred to perceptual habits exercised outside the work in the world at large. Fundamentally normative in its approach to perceptual processes, Gestalt psychology offered theorists and practitioners of art a set of scientific principles that appeared to operate at the most instinctual level of cognition—­far beyond the idiosyncrasies of individual subjectivity or the accumulated residue of cultural convention. This seeming objectivity was attractive for proponents of Concrete art, an idiom that embraced the factual and evidentiary qualities of geometric abstraction. It likewise provided a rationale for the ideological application of Gestalt psychology to the context of industrializing postwar Latin America, where theorists and practitioners often subscribed to an implicit reciprocity between cognitive and national development. The structuring principles of “good form” were thus seen as an antidote to the “disorganized” tendencies of the underdeveloped world. While Pedrosa’s interest in Gestalt form was complexly informed by his exposure to art workshops held at the psychiatric hospital Engenho de Dentro in the late 1940s, he nevertheless understood Concretism through this regulative lens.20 “Brazil is a romantic country par excellence,” he later remarked. “Concretism was a movement that required discipline and Brazil also needed discipline of a certain character, order, to educate the people . . . I felt that Concrete art could provide this discipline at the level of form.”21 Thus, while Pedrosa’s 1949 citation “What is inside is also outside” imagined interiority and exteriority in terms of reciprocity or stable equivalence, it nevertheless made Goethe’s aphorism available for a more radical interpretation in Brazil. This divergent reading—­that together interiority and exteriority are not only self-­same but self-­differing—­remained latent in Concretism, but constitutes the core of the Neoconcrete critique of Gestalt form. For Waldemar Cordeiro, the leading polemicist of Concrete art in São Paulo, the reciprocities between cognitive, industrial, and social structures were the

26

self-­evident and self-­emergent results of a particular historical formation. “Economic infrastructures” and their attendant “social relations” gave rise to forms of “visual communication” and corresponding “cortical phenomena.”22 The isomorphic interaction between perception and cognition advanced by Gestalt psychology was therefore not simply a scientific explanatory device. It was an epistemological framework for understanding the relation between art and the social realm at large. Yet as Pedrosa’s own reflections aptly suggest, industrialized modernity was still incipient in postwar Brazil. Concrete art thus took on both an anticipatory and pedagogic role, mapping an avant-­garde call for the new onto a disciplining impetus of social prescription and organization. Both strains of Concretism were evident at the 1° Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta, which Cordeiro was largely responsible for organizing, and which showcased works of Concrete art and poetry side by side (fig. 1.3). The Concrete poets traced their lineage to the poetry of Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and particularly Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance) (1897), which treated text and blank space materially, as graphic substance to be arranged on the page. In one of several polemics, Concrete poet Décio Pignatari noted that the exhibition’s “quasi-­didactic character” demonstrated Concrete poetry’s “critical synthesis” of modernist poetic techniques with the “rapid communication” of mass-­cultural forms such as newspaper headlines, advertising, and billboards. The resulting structural economy and verbal efficiency corresponded to a “general art of ­language” that was itself an “industrial product for consumption.”23 Cordeiro,

27

Fig. 1.3 1° Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1956. Photographs courtesy of Arquivo Hermelindo Fiaminghi. Permission for reproduction courtesy of Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo.

Fig. 1.4 “O Quadro Começa Quando Você Chega,” A Hora, February 1957.

­ eanwhile, suggested that the best way to unite m “the thinking of ‘simple’ [people] and that of artists and intellectuals” was to situate the work of art “in the sphere of direct experience” as “a product” rather than an “expression.”24 Such works would not be vulnerable to the elite privatization of art and its fetishization of individual authorship but would stand as “rational and impersonal” products with the potential for wide-­scale reproduction.25 In short, Brazilian Concretism aimed to train a “new type of consumer” whose perceptive habits anticipated the industrialized society to come.26 This new consumer was further conceived of as an informational message him-­or herself, a coherent structure opposed to dis­integration and noise.27 A newspaper photograph and accompanying captions showing a visitor to the 1° Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta in Rio demonstrates both the optimism and precariousness of this informational paradigm (fig. 1.4). A man is shown staring intently at a painting by Hermelindo Fiaminghi, his back inclined forward and eyes trained on the work ahead. A caption above the photograph proclaims “The picture starts when you arrive,” underscoring an active, even communicative relationship between work of art and viewer.28 Yet the news­paper item also hints that this intended communication may be faulty. A heading states, “Perplexed (or Irritated), Cariocas Attend to the First Exhibition of Concrete Art.”29 A short descriptive text further notes that the painting’s forms were intended to change before the spectator’s eyes, continuing, “Here we see one of the visitors to the Concretist show attempting, in good faith, the metamorphosis of the picture.” While Gestalt psychology appeared to offer artists tools for direct, universal communication with the viewer via the work of art, the writer’s copy suggests that this particular viewer’s unsuccessful efforts to properly “attend to” the painting belied the objectivity and inevitability of its perceptual mechanisms. In other words, it was possible that a painting might not sufficiently organize the subject’s attention or serve as a conduit of information—­that it might remain a mute aesthetic object, a “mere” work of art.

* The tension between a work’s objective existence as a literal, actualized entity and its ability to isomorphically extend itself as a communicative model within perceptual, social, and economic realms is a central paradox of Concrete art. It was also one particularly pronounced within the context of developmentalist

28

Brazil. On one hand, Concrete art defined itself following van Doesburg’s 1930 formulation as wholly constructed and autonomous. As opposed to being “abstracted” from the world, it was self-­referential and nonrepresentational—­a “concrete” reality in and of itself.30 Compositions were meant to operate according to an internal rather than illustrative logic, creating, as Pedrosa wrote of Gestalt form, a “vitalized spatial world” upon the surface of the actual canvas.31 On the other hand, the rhetorical appeal of Concrete art as an organizational tool for cognitive and national development depended upon isomorphic analogy.32 Yet if we trace one such analogy—­part to whole as a Gestalt relation of form, as a machinic logic of standardized elements and industrial production, and finally as a social contract between individuals and the nation—­it is clear that these isomorphisms are merely metaphoric in scope. This metaphoric character imposed a heavy load of representational work upon paintings and sculptures that were meant to be wholly abstract. Concretism thus wavered between tautology and symbolic projection, in the first instance striving for a work of art that communicates purely its own communicative capacity, in the second instance, for a work whose compositional relations allegorize entirely distinct relations in the world at large.33 In order to synthesize these contradictory imperatives—­towards literal actualization and perfomative illustration—­Concretism aimed for (but did not always achieve) a type of communication that was paradigmatically flat. In order to trace the character of communicative flatness, let us return to Bill. A key proposition of his Concretism was that art should function as “a unique vehicle for the direct transmission of ideas.”34 By recourse to units of structured visual information that operate according to the perceptual logic of Gestalt form, works of art could convey thought “succinctly” and “comprehensively,” without the dangers of misunderstanding and interpretation that characterized other formats.35 By circumventing language, art could bypass individual, cultural, and national differences to achieve universal expression. The utopianism of the Concrete communicative paradigm thus depended on the immediacy and legibility of the aesthetic “idea.” As Pignatari later put it, art would be an “unchangeable message” that any “adolescent, child, man, woman, rich or poor could arrive at and understand.”36 How might works of art operate as conduits for “the direct transmission of ideas”? Consider Bill’s 1938 suite of lithographs, Fifteen Variations on a Single Theme, exhibited at the artist’s São Paulo exhibition in 1950 (fig. 1.5). Here, Bill submitted a basic “theme”—­“the continuous development of an equilateral tri­ angle to a regular octagon”—­to various rule-­based treatments of angle, line, and shape. Colors assigned to each initial shape remain constant throughout the series, providing a visual clue by which to decipher subsequent operations. While the exact procedures enacted by each variation are perhaps not as transparent as Bill imagined, the prints nevertheless demonstrate the paradigm of Concrete art as a cognitive exercise: an optical message transmitted through the logical development of color and form. In this series, graphic lines and simple Gestalt forms efficiently transmit visual information to the viewer. The work also depends upon a neutral pictorial

29

Chapter One The Folded and the Flat

Fig. 1.5 Max Bill, Fifteen Variations on a Single Theme, 1938, installed at Bill’s retrospective at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 1950. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zurich. ­Courtesy of Collection Biblioteca e Centro de Documentação do MASP.

space wherein this visual content becomes legible as a coherent idea. It likewise assumes a demarcated pictorial field, since it is only by clearly establishing the limits of the work that its internal system of signification can be maintained. Even though the prints of Bill’s Fifteen Variations on a Single Theme have no physical frames, the establishment and progression of the work’s animating idea assumes a virtual one that allow a given form “to organize itself in accord with its own ‘law of development’ and . . . internal facts,” as Maldonado wrote.37 Once established, this “law of development” was supposedly transferrable to other mediums and functions. As Maldonado argued, the method used to generate Fifteen Variations on a Single Theme was therefore equally suitable “to prepare

30

the birth of a sculpture for a pavilion, a comb, or a table.”38 In this way, Concretism aimed to be both specific in conceptualization and generic in applicability—­ the two possibilities held together by the coherence and legibility of the artistic idea. Herein lie both the appeal and limits of the Concretist paradigm of iso­ morphism and its declared equivalence of inside and outside space. By treating works of art and industrial, social, and economic structures as analogous rather than coterminous relations, Concretism conceived of the work as a bounded entity uncorrupted by context even as it claimed application to the world at large.

Perceiving Flatness, Constructing Informational Folds Within the Concrete lexicon of painting, a work of art’s idea concerned the way in which its composition, or visual information, was organized as a legible message upon the surface of a canvas. Informational flatness maximized the coherency and hence portability of this message. As modeled in Bill’s Fifteen Variations on a Single Theme, Concrete works of art aimed for such informational flatness by means of a rational logic of composition conveyed by graphic marks or simple Gestalt forms and, secondly, by virtue of a neutral pictorial space and circumscribed field of operations wherein this visual content could be developed as a self-­reflexive theme. Finally, it appealed to isomorphic extension: an idea generated internally within the work of art might be applied to phenomena entirely distinct from the work itself. As the perplexed visitor to the 1° Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta suggests, however, such characteristics alone could not guarantee communicative, as opposed to mere informational, flatness. For in order for communication to occur, a message must not only be transmitted but also successfully received. In this light, it is useful to consider Bill’s series alongside Cordeiro’s 1952 Ideia Visível (Visible Idea), one of several paintings of the same title completed between 1952 and 1957 (fig. 1.6).39 While Bill’s use of seriality provided a template against which development and variation could be compared, measured, and deciphered, Cordeiro’s 1952 work condensed the serial method onto a single canvas, thereby superimposing processes of production and response. In each Ideia Visível, a stable geometric figure or symmetrical structure is ­developed in logical progression until it reaches stable asymmetry, or vice versa. For example, a V marks the center of the 1952 work, from which arcs with a radius equal to the length of its arms enclose two swelled triangles on either side—­this defines the basic geometric theme. Each of these swelled triangles then pivots counterclockwise to generate three additional iterations and a downward-­pointing equilateral triangle at the center. The stable symmetry first established in the theme is thus developed into an equally stable asymmetry, the two structures visible simultaneously in the slanted H superimposed upon the anchoring V. As in Bill’s series, an idea is defined and developed. However, Cordeiro is not interested in the number of individual permutations the theme allows so much as how the variations create a single dynamic composition on canvas.

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Chapter One The Folded and the Flat

Fig. 1.6 Waldemar Cordeiro, Ideia Visível, 1952. Tempera on wood, 61 x 61 cm. Courtesy of Analívia Cordeiro.

Cumulative progression—­the gradual development and superimposition of forms—­results in the visual idea. Importantly, it makes little difference if we trace alternate routes to the one mapped here in order to generate the final structure. The process is always step by step, each route as logical as any other. In this, Cordeiro’s Ideia Visível eschews serial form for a serial process of understanding, one, moreover, that is fully commensurate with the artist’s original process of compositional development. Following the example of Bill’s Fifteen Variations on a Single Theme, the canvas conveys an idea. But it also pictures and temporally collapses the mental space in which this idea becomes visible.40 In that all possible progressions are both logical and simultaneous, the canvas stands in perfect isometric symmetry between the mental acts of the viewer and producer. The former’s process of understanding is now fully exchangeable with the latter’s act of composition. The work’s formal structure, conceptual generation, and spectatorial solicitation are thus fully superimposed and co­­ incident. This metacommunicative charater flattens any temporal, spatial, and interpretive distinctions that might otherwise intervene between artist, audience, and work. Vanguardist in conception and regulative in effect, Cordeiro’s Concretist superimposition of production and reception allows the viewer to actively participate in the perceptual training initiated by the work. Communicative flatness, it becomes clear, does not entail a passive viewer. It simply attempts to prescribe the message that this viewer can receive. The idealized communicative flatness of Cordeiro’s Ideias Visíveis allowed his works to operate as self-­reflexive and self-­disciplining diagrams of visual communication. But these works were not without theoretical complication. Cordeiro’s adamant embrace of the objectivity and rationality of “thinking by images” meant that the workings of the mind as clear and distinct actions had to be articulated in specifically visual terms.41 The most efficient way to do this was to employ the convention of figure and ground. The pictorial field of the paintings thus acts as a receptor or slate against which visible ideas appear as defined shapes, in accordance with the perceptual tenets of Gestalt psychology and information theory alike. Yet within the history of painting, the figure-­ground device is closely linked with representational art and the illusion of spatial depth, conventions Concrete art wanted to destroy by insisting on the independent, objective reality of the work. Furthermore, the works’ dependence on graphic marks neutralized the active potential of the ground. As Gullar noted in his review of the 1° Exposição

32

Nacional de Arte Concreta, “In Cordeiro’s canvases, the ground has no function . . . [It] is used, as in industrial designs, as a simple support for the line, and fails to establish a dialogue, a fertile interrelation, between the two.”42 If the inert character of the ground facilitated the presumed portability of a visible idea across mediums, sizes, and applications, its presumption of an objective and preexisting pictorial space nevertheless undermined the integrity of the work of art as a “concrete” whole. Finally, although Cordeiro effectively dynamized Bill’s one-­way transmission through a strategy of superimposition, his works remained essentially messages. Once the viewer understands the logic of their compositional development, they tend to lose interest as either perceptual mechanisms or autonomous works of art. Abraham Palatnik, an artist working in Rio in the late 1950s, described the problem with this communicative paradigm this way: The work of art should not transmit messages because the message, we could say, is a telegram. You receive a telegram, read it, understand it; but the telegram can be thrown in the trash afterwards. Only the message remains; the telegram can be discarded. I thought that the work of art should not have the same destiny. I thought it should have a life of its own. 43

* Both Clark and Oiticica participated in the 1° Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta, Clark with a number of works titled Superfície modulado (Modulated ­Surface) from 1955–­56, Oiticica with a series of small paintings completed under the tutelage of the art educator Ivan Serpa and the Rio-­based artists group Grupo Frente. Two works from shortly after—­Clark’s Planos em Superfície ­Modulado No. 1 (Planes in Modulated Surfaces No. 1) (1957), and one of Oiticica’s Metaesquemas (Metaschemes) (1958)—­mark a significant departure from these earlier examples and suggest possible rejoinders to problems implicit in Cordeiro’s notion of the visible idea. Both Clark and Oiticica utilized graphic marks and Gestalt forms. Yet their manipulation of these techniques engendered a ­spatiality that moved away from the Concrete paradigm of flatness and towards a model of folded information. This new spatiality entailed the incorporation of external space within the surface of the canvas for Clark, and compositional ­operations that undermined the predictability of Gestalt behavior for Oiticica. Clark’s Planos em Superfície Modulado No. 1 consists of white industrial paint applied to a wooden board that is selectively incised such that the flat surface of the painting is physically ruptured by a series of linear fissures (fig. 1.7). These lines of space—­what Clark called “the organic line”—­carve the plane into four discrete planar shapes that, stacked and inverted against one another, resemble the folded back of an envelope. Yet once the viewer concentrates on either endpoint of the central diagonal, the two-­dimensional composition warps to produce a virtual three-­dimensional environment that swells

33

Chapter One The Folded and the Flat

Fig. 1.7 Lygia Clark, Planos em Superfície Modulada No. 1, 1957. Industrial paint on wood, 87 x 60 cm. Courtesy of Associação Cultural “O Mundo de Lygia Clark.”

f­ orward or collapses back. This perceptual buckling creates concave and convex pockets of space that draw the viewer’s eye along the painting’s structuring diagonals and out to its edges, where the lines of space meet the exterior space that surrounds the canvas. As Clark observed in a 1959 article in the Suplemento Dominical, these lines are not merely graphical or visual (as are those in Cordeiro’s compositions).44 Rather, they are constructive in that the actual, external space that courses through them animates the spatiotemporal behavior of the painterly object as it is perceived. Clark had discovered this “organic line” in 1954 while making a maquette for a work subsequently titled Quebra da Moldura (Breaking the Frame) (fig. intro.3). But whereas this earlier series integrated external space within the canvas, Clark attempted to use the “organic line” in her 1957 works to integrate the space of the canvas with that of the world.45 The composition of Planos em Superfície Modulado No. 1 is as logical and transparent as any other Concrete work. The paired triangles and quadrilaterals are symmetrical, inverted, and reciprocal. But Clark’s integration of space within and beyond the canvas decisively undermined the Concrete work’s neutral pictorial space and bounded field of operations. Since both were necessary for the internal legibility of an artistic idea—­and consequently its portability to the world at large—­Clark’s porous space dissolved the isomorphic structure at the heart of Concrete art. While Clark undercut the protocols of Concretism by a recasting the graphic line, Oiticica’s Metaesquemas did so through an investigation of Gestalt form. Only nineteen when his early works were shown in the 1° Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta, Oiticica began the Metaesquemas in 1957, just months after the exhibition opened in Rio. He continued to work on the series throughout 1958, producing several hundred studies and paintings—­effectively his first mature works.46 Although he did not number the Metaesquemas in sequence, their play of repetition, development, and variation indicate a sustained engagement with formal problems and constructs. Almost all of the Metaesquemas follow a similar format: horizontal in orientation, gouache on cardboard, and often scored along the sides to designate a visual field without recourse to a frame. They are also

34

the artist’s first works to use the raw surface of the support as an active element. While Concretists in both São Paulo and Rio frequently deployed oscillating figure-­ground motifs in order to demonstrate the Gestalt reversibility of form, Oiticica rarely used such reversibility as a structuring method. Rather, his Metaesquemas often exhibit an idiosyncratic principle of rotational symmetry in which shapes appear to slip or slide against one another in a floating lateral space. In an untitled example from 1958, for instance, four large rectangles anchor the corners of the pictorial field at right angles to the cardboard support, while a profusion of thinner slats and inclined squares resolve into three abutting columns (fig. 1.8). The two outer columns are identical: the six rectangles on the left match those on the right in size and angle. Internally, however, each column consists of two sequences of three rectangles each, identical but pivoted 180 degrees. The entire composition can therefore be generated by virtually twisting the lower half of the design along the work’s midpoint in order to retrace its shapes on the upper half of the field. This operation exceeds mirrored reversal in order to enact a three-­dimensional folding of the flat surface of the plane.47 The work’s center thus acts as a point of spatiotemporal torsion rather than stability.

35

Chapter One The Folded and the Flat

Fig. 1.8 Hélio Oiticica, Metaesquema (MET 252), 1958. Gouache on cardboard, 55 x 63.8 cm. Image courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and Christopher Lindhorst Photography. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

The result is a composition that refuses both the bilateral symmetry of the viewing body and the Gestalt reversibility that Concretism prioritized as the viewer’s cognitive prompt. The self-­differing symmetries of Oiticica’s Metaesquemas do not reiterate the balance and predictability of normative perception. Instead, the viewer oscillates between a vertiginous, queasy, and profoundly corporeal sensation of jostling forms and a recognition of their idiosyncratic symmetries. These works never settle into a persisting schema of forms arranged against an empty ground. Instead, forms are made radically equal with their field. The eye must therefore encompass the whole of the field and simultaneously imagine this field as a series of dynamic spatiotemporal behaviors. Space neither vibrates nor stands still: it contracts, expands, warps. If Cordeiro’s works disciplined the viewer’s perception by means of an enduring, organizing idea, Oiticica’s works assumed perception to be the means by which such an idea was continually destabilized—­ reformulated as other to itself each time the work was viewed. Oiticica’s and Clark’s works refuse to be cordoned off within the purely pictorial space of the canvas. They mobilize external space: literally in the case of Clark and virtually in the case of Oiticica. Likewise, the works insist upon situated and experiential responses. The viewer is not the terminus of a pre-­existing message, but rather the locus at which visual content self-­differentiates—­the point of an informational fold. The spatiality instigated by these works is produced in concert with the viewer and routed through his or her embodied perception. The works thus move away from flatness and towards folding in two ways: first, at the level of composition (the twisting of Oiticica’s rectangles, the warping of Clark’s planar field); and second, at the level of the viewer’s perception, which is yoked together with the work in order to construct space within and beyond the canvas. This shift provided the foundation for a mode of communicative folding fully developed in Neoconcrete works of the next few years.

* In painting, the fold is an informational procedure that results in a self-­ differentiating spatiality. In order to chart its function with sculpture—­a spatial medium by definition—­let us return to Max Bill’s Tripartite Unity, based on the mathematical model of the Möbius strip (fig. intro. 2). The Möbius loop is a single continuous surface with neither inside nor outside. Because it privileges surface rather than shape, it demonstrates how a substance can be submitted to extreme change without altering its basic continuity. According to Bill, the artist discovered the figure accidentally while designing a sculpture in 1935.48 It subsequently appeared in his works frequently as a symbol of the integration of art and mathematics. Any viewer who encounters Tripartite Unity can quickly apprehend the complex nature of its geometry—­its visual idea—­without reference to external referents or texts. And just as the sculpture provides an enduring physical model of this geometry, Bill aimed for a certain constancy as to its reception. In this sense, the work is informationally flat and its objecthood concrete, literal,

36

and didactic. Yet by illustrating the Möbius strip in solid, unchanging form, the sculpture paradoxically fails to enact the fluidity of its topological geometry. After all, the truly radical potential of the loop as an epistemological model lies not in its constant form but in its constantly shifting behavior.49 For Bill, the Möbius strip offered a way of maintaining informational flatness in three-­ dimensional form. (His first sculpture, tellingly, was called Endless Ribbon.) For Brazilian artists such as Oiticica, Clark, and Lygia Pape who took up the Möbius strip over the course of the 1960s, by contrast, it became a guarantee of the continuity of complexity—­the very figure of the fold.50 As the Möbius strip demonstrates, folding in sculpture can tend to either the folded or the flat. How would such tendencies impact sculpture as a communicative device? Consider two works by Luís Sacilotto and Amílcar de Castro, the former a São Paulo-­based artist associated with Concretism, the latter a Rio-­based artist who signed the “Manifesto Neoconcreto” (Neoconcrete Manifesto) in 1959 and directed the layout of the Jornal do Brasil from 1957 to 1961. Both artists began with simple planes that were subsequently cut and folded. In Sacilotto’s relief Concreção 6045 (Concretion 6045) (1955), three squares are cleaved into alternating strips but then optically recuperated in the work’s final form (fig. 1.9). Solid squares give way to squares that are implied by the concatenation of solid and void.51 The work reflexively develops an idea—­the Platonic persistence of the elemental form— in accordance with its “internal facts,” as Maldonado put it. But it is the viewer who visually reconstructs the originating shape by completing the Gestalt forms within space. The work does not simply present information, in other words. It is a message that is transmitted and, once the viewer optically reconstructs the square, successfully received. By co-­opting external space for the communication of this message, the work presumes a normative perceptual response. Physical folds are thus used in an evidentiary manner to uphold a communicative model that is perfectly flat. By contrast, consider de Castro’s untitled sculptures of the mid-­to late 1950s (fig. 1.10). In these works, the fold sustains the disturbance of the original form. Constructed from heavy iron slabs, these sculptures often began as regular shapes that were cut and bent so as to alternately envelop or slice through their surrounding space. Confronted with these highly unwieldy forms, the viewer is tempted to recreate the original two-­dimensional plane by imagining the rejoining of their edge. Yet the virtual fusing of this plane is blocked by the obdurate

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Fig. 1.9 Luís Sacilotto, Concreção 6045, 1955. Painted iron, 31.1 x 90.2 x 39.4 cm. Image courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Permission courtesy of Valter Sacilotto.

Fig. 1.10 Amílcar de Castro, Sem título, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, late 1950s. Iron, 83 x 158 x 121 x 0.7 cm. Images courtesy of Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro. Licensed by Inarts.com

physical presence of the work before the viewer, who must circumambulate it in turn.52 Whereas Sacilotto’s work is dependent on the convention of the relief, de Castro’s works have no privileged orientation—­no base, no front, no back. And unlike Concreção 6045, in which the viewer harnesses the external space between the sculpture and the wall to complete an implied geometric form, de Castro’s cut-­and-­folded works open form to space, refusing to settle into any single Gestalt shape. As Sérgio Bruno Martins has observed, negative space thus remains negative, rather than contributing to the positivity of the plane.53 For this reason, the sculptural procedure of folding phenomenologically activates the viewer while derealizing subsisting Platonic form. Situational, subjective, and destabilizing in effect, it does not regulate the viewer’s perception but renders it palpable as a mediating force mobilized in the process of encounter. Much like the relation between Bill’s Fifteen Variations on a Single Theme and Cordeiro’s Ideias Visíveis, Sacilotto’s Concreção 6045 suggests the assimilation and critical elaboration of the informational flatness of Bill’s Tripartite Unity. Bill’s work treats the space that surrounds it as an empty container. Concreção 6045 likewise assumes that external space is fundamentally neutral in character. Yet by soliciting the viewer to complete the work’s animating idea by perceiving its implied Gestalt forms, Sacilotto’s relief establishes a communicative flatness over and above the purely informational flatness of Bill’s sculpture. Like Clark’s Planos em Superfície Modulado No. 1, it mobilizes external space within the work. But it does so to stabilize perception according to the principles of “good form.” Cordeiro later, and quite aptly, described Sacilotto’s work as a “visual ideology.”54

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By inviting the viewer to utilize external space to complete—­and hence ­re­inforce— a work’s message, Sacilotto produced a structure in which the delivery of information and the process of its internalization cannot be disengaged. In de Castro’s sculptures, the coherency of a work’s animating idea—­the internal relation between its form and generating plane—­breaks apart under the phenomenological pressure of the viewer’s encounter. The viewer can no longer separate the sculpture from space. Nor can he or she subsume space within the sculpture. The two mutually articulate one another through temporal displacement rather than instantaneous combination. To fold in sculpture is therefore not to simply bend in form, but to generate and texture time through the process of spatial perception. The folding exemplified by de Castro’s sculptures functions as an extreme counterexample to Sacilotto’s communicative flatness. However the great number of works produced within the rubrics of both Concretism and subsequently Neoconcretism fall between these poles. Franz Weissmann’s cut-­and-­fold sculptures require durational rather than instantaneous viewing yet reiterate enduring ­geometric forms. Judith Lauand’s studies of curves deploy serial operations yet are experienced as the scattering of dispersal of graphic lines. In short, while Concretism aimed at flatness, it did not always achieve it. And any time the process of perception interferes with—­and thus differentiates—­a message, there is always the possibility of a fold. Likewise, artists who explicitly pursued communicative folding often began from a position of flatness. Flatness therefore exists in their work in residual form. One type of object, however, embodies flatness and folding in equal measure—­the newspaper—­and it is to this entity that I now turn.

The Folds of the Book and the Form of the News On September 28, 1958, a small item titled “O Descoberto do Tempo” (The ­Discovery of Time) in the Suplemento Dominical indicates that time was quickly becoming a defining characteristic of what would soon be termed Neoconcretism. As Gullar wrote there, “The sculptor Amílcar de Castro . . . discovered that ‘time’ and not ‘space’ is the fundamental element of concrete sculpture, or at least, his sculpture.” Clark, too, had “arrived at a similar conclusion in relation to her painting,” the critic continued, and “if you’ll allow me to speak of myself, I have also discovered that concrete poetry is ‘temporal’ and not ‘spatial,’ as it has been described.”55 In this brief notice, the poet and critic spoke to a theoretical fissure that had appeared following the second run of the 1° Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta in Rio and, specifically, to its implications for his poetry (fig. 1.11). In the months following the exhibition, protagonists from the São Paulo and Rio groups sought to establish distinct interpretations of the Concrete idiom in a series of polemics published in the Suplemento Dominical and the magazine Arquitetura e Decoração. In one, Haroldo de Campos described the concrete poem as a recursive structure with a radically reduced notion of content, writing, “the content of the poem will always be its structure.”56 In contrast, Gullar, together with poet

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Chapter One The Folded and the Flat

Fig. 1.11 “O ‘Rock n’ Roll’ da Poesia,” O Cruzeiro, March 2, 1957, showing “The Night of Concrete Art” at the National Students Union on occasion of the opening of the 1° Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta in Rio de Janeiro. Haroldo de Campos (left) and Ferreira Gullar (right) standing; Hélio Oiticica in front row at far left.

Oliveira Bastos and poet and editor-­in-­chief of the Suplemento Dominical Reynaldo Jardim, argued that the poem was a living thing. The concrete poet should not aim for rapidity and opticality but for expression, subjectivity, and duration.57 Whereas the São Paulo poets sought to align the Concrete poem with the speed and informational efficiency of commercial solicitation, the Rio poets noted that the poem should be a “durable object” in explicit contradistinction to the advertisement, which aims only for immediate effect. To this end, over the course of 1958, Gullar explored various ways of distributing words on the surface of the page so as to temporalize a given poem’s signification. One version of his Verde Erva (Green Herb), for example, offset a block of twelve repetitions of the word “verde” (green) with the single word “erva” (herb) (fig. 1.12). Gullar intended the reader’s silent repetition of “verde” to ­magnify and intensify the solitary instance of “erva,” as if it was a unique stalk emerging from a rectangle of grass. Yet as Gullar later recounted, a friend who had seen the poem published in the Suplemento Dominical noted that once he recognized the poem’s repetition, he stopped reading it word by word.58 According to the terms of Concrete communication, the “message” had already been received. In response, Gullar began to create Livro-­Poemas (Book Poems), which deployed the front and the back of the page in order to pace the reader’s absorption of text. In works such as Livro-­Poema No. 2 (Osso Nosso) (Our Bone) (1958), single words are printed on the back of each page, which in turn are cut so that the text gradually accumulates and is obscured within the reader’s field of vision (fig. 1.13). “The page is pause, duration, silence,” Gullar wrote of his experiment. “Cutting it, juxtaposing it, I attempt to make audible the mute side of language, its verso.”59 While Gullar’s early Concrete poems appeared in the

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Fig. 1.12 Ferreira Gullar, Verde Erva, Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, February 23, 1958. Courtesy of Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação do Jornal do Brasil and Ferreira Gullar. Fig. 1.13 Ferreira Gullar, Livro-­ Poema No. 2 (Osso Nosso), 1958. Courtesy of Ferreira Gullar.

Fig. 1.14 Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, 1897. Image courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library.

newspaper as individual informational entities within a given page, these ­Livros-­Poemas appropriated the very folds of the newspaper’s structure—­now conceived as an autonomous book—­in order to forestall the delivery of the poetic message. Paradoxically, the very structure of the Livro-­Poema became its content over the course of this process, just as de Campos had argued of the Concrete poem. But whereas Concretism comprehended a poem’s structure as bounded, logical, and instantaneous, Gullar transformed this paradigmatic flatness into a literally folded object manipulated by the reader over time. Significantly, by seeking recourse to the fold of the book rather than the flatness of the newspaper page, Gullar upended Concrete poetry’s literary touchstone, Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés (fig. 1.14). In a 1956 article in the Suplemento Dominical, Augusto de Campos noted the importance of Mallarmé’s poem within the genealogy of Concrete poetry. Paraphrasing the French poet’s preface to his 1897 work, he highlighted its four key formal innovations: the manipulation of diverse fonts; the position of typographic lines; graphic space; and the use of the book’s page. The latter, de Campos noted, resulted in “two unfolded pages, where words form a whole and at the same time separate themselves into two groups to the right and left of the central crease.”60 Mallarmé’s radical innovations were rooted in the newspaper’s disjointed layout and amalgam of textual sizes and styles. Yet while the Concrete poets celebrated this “critical synthesis” of modernist poetry and mass-­cultural ­phenomena, Mallarmé’s own relationship to the newspaper was riddled with ambivalence, if not contempt. For him, the crass commercialism of the news­ paper—­particularly its spread-­out, flat format—­represented the degeneration of

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literature. In his 1892 essay “Displays,” he wrote of poetry as an eternal “outside” that is merely parodied by the “vast page of the newspaper we hold in our hands.”61 In his 1895 “The Book, Spiritual Instrument” he further contrasted the “silent tomb” of the book with the “rag” of the newspaper—­an open “sea” into which all literature flows. Un coup de dés thus recuperated the graphic structure, spatial innovation, and typographic juxtaposition of the newspaper for the purposes of pure literature. The book signaled this material purity. Its fold was a sacred, sensual cleft that preserved the slowness of poetry and provided respite from the world. It was thus a figure of autonomy—­the antithesis of the spread pages of the newspaper and its cacophonous public. Or rather, it was the means by which such autonomy might be secured, since the fold allowed one page to close over another, thereby separating the work from the external world. The opening of the book set the stage for autonomy by delimiting a bounded field. With its closure, the fold became autonomy’s vanishing point—­its virtual void. In essence, Mallarmé’s fold functioned as a frame. These poetics of the fold are in direct opposition to the message that is at heart of the Brazilian Concrete idiom. Mallarmé’s fold evokes the expansion and contraction of time: revelation, density, layering. In contrast, Concretism sought speed, efficiency, and through the isomorphic principle of portability, a visible idea that would find application in the world at large.62 Yet there is an inescapable parallel between the bounded field of autonomy established by Mallarmé’s fold and the closed systems of Concretism’s flat communicative forms. As information theorists have observed, the communication of a message is only possible when a potentially infinite number of informational units are reduced to a restricted field.63 The Concrete poets acknowledged this in their “pilot plan” for Concrete poetry by citing both cybernetics and Mallarmé.64 For them, the page provided an ideal site for communication, modeling the purity of language and its functional utility at one and the same time. Augusto de Campos lauded the double-­page structure of the book, while Gullar described the pages of his Livro-­Poemas as “pause, duration, silence.” In so doing, the poets invoked two different Mallarmés: one who recognized the radical potential of flatness, another who nevertheless took refuge in the fold.

* It was extraordinarily apropos that both veins of Concrete poetry claimed the legacy of Mallarmé’s complex relationship to the newspaper, since it was there, specifically in the Suplemento Dominical, that polemics about the communicative character of poems and works of art were launched between 1956 and 1961. Over the course of the 1950s, Brazilian newspapers regularized, stabilized, and rationalized the production and transfer of information. Newly liberated from the country’s pre-­WWII censorship and flush with urban working-­class readers, the national press adopted models of information delivery such as the lede (an article’s headline or opening sentences) and the clear differentiation between opinion sections and current events.65 The shedding of subjective and literary

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Chapter One The Folded and the Flat

Fig. 1.15 Ferreira Gullar at typewriter in editorial offices of Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, date unknown. Courtesy of Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação do Jornal do Brasil and Ferreira Gullar.

inflections gave the newspaper an objective and impersonal journalistic tone. At the same time, major newspapers instituted weekend literary supplements that became the primary vehicle for dissemination and debate amongst Brazilian intellectuals.66 Nowhere were these dynamics more complexly intertwined than in the Suplemento Dominical (fig. 1.15). Here, Concretism’s communicative ­flatness was actualized in the layout of its pages just as Neoconcrete folding became a privileged aesthetic form. In 1956, Countess Pereira Carneiro invited poet and journalist Reynaldo Jardim to create a literary supplement for Jornal do Brasil. Having previously run a Sunday radio program associated with the newspaper, Jardim gradually transformed the resulting supplement from an eclectic offering of society and cultural notices to a serious literary journal with lengthy articles on philosophy, semiotics, and media theory as well as literary and art criticism. The translation and dissemination of the latest international texts and intellectual currents were key elements of the Suplemento Dominical’s profile—­activities buttressed by in­dependent columns devoted to such burgeoning fields in Brazil as information science, bibliography, book publishing, graphic design, and translation. The Suplemento Dominical was therefore both an exemplar of the modernizing imperatives of the Brazilian press and a space for reflection on the news­ paper’s broader communicative character. Calling attention to the supplement’s “pedagogic role” and “mission of cultural agitation,” Jardim and his editorial staff cast the Suplemento Dominical as a cultural “tool” for the “orientation” of the public at large.67 This ideological confluence with Concretism was hardly surprising, as several leading protagonists of the movement were regular contributors to the supplement, in addition to Jardim and Gullar. In the months leading up to and following the opening of

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1° Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta, the supplement published a number of theoretical texts on Concrete poetry, and actual examples of Concrete poems beginning in February of 1957. Concrete poems literally changed the look of the newspaper by opening up new white spaces within its spreads. But this treatment of empty space as an active surface also indicated a larger shift in the design of the newspaper as a whole. In the early 1950s, the Jornal do Brasil was largely a classifieds newspaper with little journalistic depth and minimal interest in design. Pejoratively nicknamed the jornal das cozinheiras (“the cooks’ newspaper”) in reference to its profusion of commercial solicitations and help-­wanted ads, it was a graphic hodgepodge of dense columns of text punctuated by irregular fonts, sizes, and styles (fig. 1.16). In February 1957, Amílcar de Castro, who worked as a graphic designer as well as a sculptor, was hired to redesign the newspaper’s layout.68 Once installed, he used the pages of the Suplemento Dominical as a design laboratory for ideas subsequently incorporated in the rest of the paper. By March, he had begun to streamline the look of the paper by stripping away the multiple fonts, frames, rules, grisaille, and illustrations of the older, artisanal layout. He often applied Gestalt principles in order to maximize legibility and clarity. For example, he systematically removed vertical rules between columns, since flush text separated by a strip of space can already be perceived as a rectangle. Trading the heavy, static balance of the old pages for dynamic asymmetry, he also used photographs—­now increased in size and narrative capacity—­to guide the reader across the page. This modular layout allowed pictures, text, headlines, and logos to become mobile. In so doing, his reform exploited graphic elements as a “relational field of functions,” just as Augusto de Campos had written of the Concrete poem.69 But de Castro’s most important innovation was his use of blank space as an active element within the page, a practice continued to great effect by Jardim, who oversaw the Suplemento Dominical’s layouts during de Castro’s hiatus between 1958 and 1959. Prereform, the page was treated as a neutral support: a transparent receptacle for information. Postreform, space became a structuring element, creating hierarchy, directing the eye, organizing blocks of text, and acti-

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Chapter One The Folded and the Flat

Fig. 1.16 Front page of Jornal do Brasil, September 12, 1956. Courtesy of Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação do Jornal do Brasil.

Fig. 1.17 Fred Jordan, “Nova Teoria das Cores,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, July 9, 1960. Courtesy of Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação do Jornal do Brasil.

vating the surface of the page as a dynamic ground (fig. 1.17). As the layouts grew bolder, space began to act as a figure in its own right. Now reversible, text and void were equal partners in the newspaper’s perceptual whole. By bringing space to the surface of the visual plane as figure, however, de Castro’s reform also revealed that this space had financial as well as perceptual value. This was no laughing matter, considering the skyrocketing price of newsprint paper in Brazil at this time.70 De Castro’s lavish use of white space was a constant source of tension between management and Suplemento Dominical staff, with the director often complaining of its “waste” of empty space.71 For de Castro, Jardim, and Gullar, however, this space was not empty but blank, and it was as important as any other element on the page. By insisting on the aesthetic value of blank space, de Castro inadvertently illuminated the internal economic relations of space within the newspaper, since of course it is advertising that determines the price of space per inch and advertising that allows empty space to remain blank. Indeed, at the same time as de Castro highlighted blank space as a compositional figure within the experimental pages of the Suplemento Dominical, he also rendered advertising space as figure on the front page of the Jornal do Brasil. In June 1959, just months after the publication of the “Manifesto Neoconcreto” that formalized the Concrete and Neoconcrete break, de Castro redesigned the newspaper’s front page so that classified advertisements, previously lumped together with news items, were

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now grouped into a distinct “L” on the left-­hand side of the page (fig. 1.18).72 This configuration became the longstanding visual identity of the newspaper. The redesign made clear that while space can be put to many uses, its common denominator was price. By formally revealing the economic space of advertising and the blank space of aesthetics as figures of equal value, de Castro starkly visualized the economic structure of the news.

Chapter One The Folded and the Flat

Fig. 1.18 Front page of Jornal do Brasil, April 21, 1960. Courtesy of Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação do Jornal do Brasil.

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Here, in short, was an actual diagram of the Concrete principle of iso­ morphism, with its declared equivalence of external socioeconomic phenomena and internal aesthetic facts. If the Concretist paradigm conceived of the work of art as a bounded perceptual model whose ideational content might project a future application in the world at large, the paradigmatically reproducible object of the newspaper offered a realized product for mass consumption in which aesthetics was a cipher of economic value. To perceive the communicative flatness of the Jornal do Brasil is therefore not merely to attend to its graphic organization of space; it is to read the relational dependence of aesthetics and commerce embedded in its design. Indeed, this relationality was not simply a formal fact of the newspaper’s layout, or even an isolated instance of the Jornal do Brasil’s generous patronage of Concrete and subsequently Neoconcrete art. In Brazil, the very institutes—­and institutionalization—­of modern art were inextricably linked to the media business. Major museums of modern art were closely affiliated with media moguls such as Assis Chateaubriand, owner of the conglomerate Diários Associados, who founded Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in 1947.73 This institution—­ Brazil’s first modern museum—­operated within the Diários Associados building until 1968. The Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-­SP) was also ­headquartered in this building between 1949 and 1958.74 In Rio, MAM-­RJ was founded in 1948 by Paulo Bittencourt, owner and director of the newspaper Correio da Manhã. In 1952 his wife, journalist Niomar Muniz Sodré Bittencourt, became the museum’s executive director. In 1955 its cinema program began operating out of the auditorium of the national press association in downtown Rio. Nascimento Brito, nephew of Countess Pereira Carneiro and director of the Jornal do Brasil, was also closely linked with MAM-­RJ and later became its executive director. In 1957 Cordeiro wrote that the Concrete artists occupied an independent position free from the constraints of the “dominant class” and its control over Brazilian museums.75 What he ignored was the fact that this same elite was an instrument of Concretism’s dissemination as visual communication to the public at large. As with Concretism, the allegiance between Brazil’s modern museums and the media industry was premised on a mutual interest in shaping new consumer-­citizens through modern communication and design. In 1951, Chateaubriand’s MASP inaugurated Latin America’s first industrial design school (Instituto de Arte Contemporânea), alongside a school of advertising (Escola Superior de Propaganda).76 Building upon the recent presence of major domestic and international advertising agencies in Brazil, this advertising school used the same rhetoric of art, beauty, and “good form” that framed the founding of the museum to make a claim for the cultural responsibility of the “advertising man.” In the words of the school’s director, [T]o sell is our principal objective. To sell products, to sell ideas, to sell services, political parties, government programs, men and even nations. But, it is one thing to sell, destroying principles, infringing on laws, deteriorating

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the artistic taste of the people, and it is another to sell constructing good habits, motivating the general culture, elevating and beautifying life.77 Although the advertising men evoked in this passage equalized all products in the name of profit, they nevertheless subscribed to a distinction between good and bad design. And while the Marxist political orientation of Concretists such as Cordeiro and Maldonado meant that their desire to train the viewer’s perceptual habits aimed towards a larger program of socioeconomic change, their treatment of this viewer as a “new type of consumer” overlapped with the very bourgeoisie whose interests they decried. The Concrete principle of iso­ morphism allowed the work to act as a bounded entity operating according to purely internal laws. The interlocking forms of art and the media industry thus remained largely invisible to Concretism’s chief protagonists, even as it was, as we see in the layout of the Jornal do Brasil, diagrammed within the pages of the newspaper itself.

Non-­Objects In 1958, a peculiar amalgam of institutional and aesthetic investments in flatness and folding occurred at the Galeria das Folhas, a commercial gallery that operated out of the offices of the São Paulo-­based newspaper Folha da Manhã between 1957 and 1961. An initiative of Isaí Leirner, board member of MAM-­SP and owner of the newspaper conglomerate Grupo Folha, the Galeria das Folhas emblematizes the larger imbrication of art and industry in Brazil. In Portuguese, folha refers to both the leaf of a tree and a folio or leaf of paper, hence the respective names, “The Morning Page” and “Gallery of Pages,” for the newspaper and gallery. A commercial gallery for art occupying a physical space within a newspaper’s business headquarters, the Galeria das Folhas analogized its space to that of the newspaper page. In so doing, it inevitably put forth art as an advertisement within that page. As in the redesign of the Suplemento Dominical, the figure of art and the ground of the informational market form a “visible idea” rendered imperceptible by ideology: the flattened message of a concise Gestalt pair. In September 1958, Lygia Clark was preparing for a solo exhibition at Galeria das Folhas, and Gestalt relations of figure and ground were a key concern. In her latest works—­black square paintings called Unidades (Units)—­lines of white bisected and outlined the plane, disrupting the Gestalt perception of a single uniform shape (fig. 1.19).78 Refusing to stabilize as figure against ground, these lines instead produced the sensation of shutters or panels that cracked the black planes open into surrounding space. Her subsequent work, Ovo Linear (Linear Egg), consisted of a simple black tondo ringed with a white line that is broken on one side (fig. 1.20). Viewing the work against a white wall suppresses the perceptual tendency to complete the circle: on one side, the white ring bleeds into the wall, while the tondo’s interior black plane spills into external space on the other. Clark likened the behavior of the work to the folding and twisting of a

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Chapter One The Folded and the Flat

Fig. 1.19 Lygia Clark with Unidades (No.1 -­No.7), 1958. Courtesy of Associação Cultural “O Mundo de Lygia Clark.”

Möbius strip, as both the white line and black plane move from inside to outside, and vice versa.79 In contrast to the circumscribed field of Concrete paintings, the line acts as a virtual hinge between pictorial and environmental space (even though the work hangs flat against the wall). Further, this hinge is solely perceived in the temporal duration of encounter. Clark’s painting thus uses the metaphor of an egg to rewrite the opticality of Concretism’s flattened Gestalt schemas in favor of a phenomenological model—­an egg that is simultaneously an eye whose retina is the tactile interface between work and world. With Ovo Linear, Clark posited the work of art as a space of gestation. In the resulting encounter, Concrete art lost purchase as a mode of communicative exchange. For in conceiving the work as a body (or a bodily organ) not unlike that of the viewer, Clark imputed all the contingency, subjectivity, and instability that Concretism had sought to excise from art by treating it as an objective device. Yet as we saw in the redesign of the Jornal do Brasil, the Concrete schema of figure and ground describes not only an optical phenomenon of Gestalt relations but also the interlocking nature of aesthetic, economic, and institutional form. In other words, while Concretism depended on a virtual frame to isomorphically project its content beyond the work, it failed to acknowledge the degree to which

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this work was already imbricated in the world at large. The opening of the plane in Clark’s 1958 paintings thus troubled not only the work’s spatial autonomy, but also its social autonomy. Writing in relation to her Galeria das Folhas show, Gullar recognized, if obliquely, the social implications of Clark’s ruptured Gestalt forms. As he wrote:

Chapter One The Folded and the Flat

The frame is precisely the middle-­term, the neutral zone which is born with the work, and where all the conflict between virtual space and real space, between the “free” work and the bourgeois world, is erased . . . When Lygia Cark attempted in 1954 to “include” the frame in the picture, she began to invert this entire order of values and agreements, reclaiming for the artist, implicitly, a new situation in the world.80 In this remarkable observation, Gullar comprehended that Clark’s work fundamentally challenged the autonomy of the work of art as an entity separate from the social, “bourgeois” world. This was a world in which the economic mechanisms of industrialized communication kept art afloat by means of the news—­ a world literalized in the very gallery in which Clark’s works were shown. It is therefore doubly significant that in March 1959, when Gullar penned the “Manifesto Neoconcreto,” he described her work, along with his own and several others, as constituting a new form of autonomy no longer dependent on an implicit frame. In so doing, Gullar held off (if temporarily) precisely the social and economic relations Concretism had inadvertenly given visible form.

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Fig. 1.20 Lygia Clark, Ovo ­Linear, 1958. Industrial paint on wood, 30 cm in diameter. ­Courtesy of Associação Cultural “O Mundo de Lygia Clark.”

Gullar’s manifesto was released alongside the group’s first exhibition at the Ministério da Educação e Cultura, temporary headquarters of MAM-­RJ, and immediately republished as a double-­page spread in the Suplemento Dominical (fig. 1.2.).81 The tract distinguished Neoconcretism from Concretism and the “mechanical relationships” posited by Gestalt psychology. As Gullar wrote: We conceive of the work of art neither as a “machine” nor “object,” but as a quasi-­corpus, that is, a being whose reality is not exhausted in the exterior relations of its elements; a being that can be broken down for analysis, but which only gives itself over to direct, phenomenological apprehension.82 He likewise made recourse to phenomenology and the metaphor of an eye, thereby recalling the provocation of Clark’s Ovo Linear: By robbing the work of its spontaneous, intuitive creation, reducing it to an objective body in an objective space, the rationalist Concrete artist merely requires of his works and their viewers a reactive stimulus and reflex. They speak to the eye as an instrument, not to the eye as a human mode of being in the world; they speak to the eye-­machine and not the eye-­body.83 Gullar further argued for the work’s autonomy, no longer in the formal, optical sense of Concretism’s bounded field of operations but in terms of “non-­transferable qualities” that could not be externally applied.84 In this new formulation Gullar was explicit that the Neoconcrete work was not an isomorphic entity. Rather it was a uniquely expressive “organism” that “continuously makes itself present” over the course of the viewer’s encounter.85 In a preview published in the Suplemento Dominical a week before the exhibition’s opening, Gullar underscored the insufficiency of Gestalt psychology for apprehending the work of art. Noting that that the new stance was a response to the limitations of Gestalt laws rather than a negation of their validity, he argued that the “causalist” nature of Gestalt psychology “obliges it to make recourse to the concept of ‘isomorphism’ in order to re­ establish a unity between the exterior world and interior world, between the subject and object.”86 The significance of the Neoconcrete work, by contrast, emerged from the copresence of these entities and was thus dependent on their permeability rather than their separation into distinct realms. Suddenly Goethe’s aphorism—­ “What is inside is also outside”—­could be read anew.

* As we have seen, in order to insure the equivalence of the message—­or idea—­sent and received by a work of art, the Concrete paradigm of communicative flatness presumed a circumscribed pictorial space in painting and a neutral physical space in sculpture. Meanwhile, communicative folding, as it began to develop in works by Oiticica, Clark, and de Castro between 1957 and 1958, entailed a dimensional amplification that impeded the efficient and instantaneous transfer of information

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by the work of art. This delay and dispersal rendered the work continually emergent as a perceived form. In paintings such as Oiticica’s Metaesquemas and Clark’s Unidades, folding resulted in a new spatiality, while folding in ­sculpture resulted in a new temporality. In that the new spatiality was experienced bodily (the sustained sensation of shifting and warping planes) rather than purely optically (as a pictorial schema of forms), painterly folding also took place through lived temporal duration. Such works still functionally conformed to normative designations of painting and sculpture. Soon, however, the synergy of “time, space, form, structure, color” propelled the Neoconcrete work to take the form of objects—­or, as Gullar termed them, “non-­objects”—­that sought out blended structures of address.87 According to his own account, Gullar first recognized this new type of object in relation to one of Clark’s reliefs—­perhaps an intermediary experiment between her Contrarelevos (Counter-­reliefs), which consisted of two or more layers of painted wood, and her Casulos (Cocoons), painted aluminum reliefs that physically folded into space, both of 1959. A sketch Gullar made from memory depicts an empty construction—­schematically a frame—­made of double bars such that interior and exterior space interpenetrate the work’s residual “pictorial” space as well as its actual physical structure.88 This composition appears to recall a no-­ longer-­extant work Clark submitted to a 1954 salon consisting solely of wooden frames (fig. 3.5). Since the relief in question was neither an art object such as a painting or sculpture but also neither a quotidian object such as a table or chair, Gullar contended that it was a “non-­object.”89 In December 1959, he published “Teoria do Não-­Objeto” (Theory of the Non-­Object) in the Suplemento Dominical and declared that “current painting and sculpture are converging towards a common point, ever more distanced from their origins. They become special objects—­non-­objects—­for which the denominations of painting and sculpture perhaps no longer apply.”90 In this statement, the critic decisively recast the implications of Concretism’s isomorphic logic for both artistic media and the work’s identity vis-­à-­vis the world. The declared equivalence of interior and exterior information meant that a Concrete work could remain—­indeed needed to remain—­a conventionally bound painting or sculpture in order to project its informational content into the world as logical idea. In contrast, the non-­object dispenses with the categorical designations and behaviors of normative mediums by eliminating pedestals and frames. The non-­object therefore does not reject medium-­specificity so much as the attendant fictions of representational, metaphoric space upheld by such mediums’ mediating devices. The non-­object gains its significance in relation to the “real space” of the world. But it does so neither as an applied phenomenon (per design) or an ordinary object (per the readymade) but as a phenomenon “free of all meaning other than its own emergence.”91 For Gullar, the non-­object thus reactivated an originary expressiveness of the work of art even as it dissolved the formal conventions by which art was held distinct from its environment. Consequently, autonomy could no longer depend upon the work’s spatial isolation. It would have to be established by means of the work’s engagement with exterior space.92

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Chapter One The Folded and the Flat

In a subsequent article, “Diálogo Sôbre o Não-­Objeto” (Dialogue on the Non-­Object), published in March 1960 as a mock interview, Gullar returned to the foundation of Gestalt perception—­the relation between figure and ground (fig. 1.21). This opposition had proven problematic for many practitioners of geometric abstraction due to its lingering evocation of representational space. In mid-­to late-­1940s Argentina, artists associated with Arte Concreto Invención and Arte Madí began to use cutout frames and shaped canvases in order to abolish the illusion of depicted space retained in conventional rectangular formats.93 Such irregular frames were intended to ensure a motivated, or causal, relationship between a painting’s pictorial content and its edge. While these works initially appeared to resolve the issue of residual illusionistic space, it soon became apparent that a shaped canvas could be perceived as a figure against the ground of the wall, thereby reinstating conventions that had long plagued representational art. Although various splinter groups wrestled with this issue by hanging works in groups, incorporating space and articulated shapes within a single work in order to disrupt figure-­ground hierarchies, and even painting walls as a way to create “co-­planal” environments for the shaped planes of the canvases, the problem of the background of a work of nonrepresentational art was never fully resolved.94 Gullar tackled the problem head on, arguing that “at the level of perception, [the figure-­ground contradiction] has no solution, for the background is the condition of perception itself: everything that is seen is seen against a background.”95 Rather than control this ground or treat it as empty, Gullar argued that the Neoconcrete work engaged the real space of the world directly by radically “inserting” or “enfolding” itself within this space.96 This “enfolding” deserves comment. While the critic’s phrasing initially locates the agency of this operation with the work, it soon becomes clear that the non-­object’s engagement within space entailed a specific relation with the viewer. The non-­object invites use, not simply contemplation, argued Gullar. “In front of the spectator, the non-­object presents itself as incomplete, offering to him the means of its completion.”97 The spectator was therefore no longer a “passive witness.” Rather, he or she was the “very condition of [the work’s] making.”98 “Enfolding” was thus the process by which the viewer and the work together generated an organic non-­object in space. Prominently illustrated alongside “Diálogo Sôbre o Não-­Objeto,” Clark’s Bichos concisely demonstrate the non-­object’s status as a “quasi-­corpus” with which a viewer might engage.99 Yet Clark had hesitations about Gullar’s terminology, feeling that the non-­object failed to account for organic, emergent qualities in non-­geometric painting such as informel.100 Oiticica, by contrast, enthusiastically adopted the term to describe his new suspended reliefs.101 Although he was not among the seven artists and poets who signed the original “Manifesto Neo­concreto,” his precocious practice and writing quickly positioned him at the center of the group. In 1958 he began his Série Branca (White Series), white-­on-­white works that explored the relationship between temporal duration and tonality. Although several of these works (particularly those on cardboard) conform to conventional rectangular formats, Oiticica soon began to investigate

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the ­phenomenological effects of shaped paintings hung back to back. This created a double-­planed structure suspended in front of the viewer in space (fig. 1.22). While these twinned paintings, called Bilaterais (Bilaterals), were equal in shape, Oiticica used varying paint mixtures to demarcate distinct fields of white upon each paired plane. The resulting delineations of a given recto surface closely relate to those of its verso but never replicate its treatment. As in the Metaesquemas, an initial semblance of symmetry gives way to complex differentiation. While those earlier works performed differentiation by means of a virtual compositional folding on the surface of the plane, the Bilaterais transferred this behavior to the viewer’s physical circumambulation of the work over time. It is therefore the viewer moving around the work in order to “complete its orbit,” as Oiticica wrote, who produces the enfolding of the non-­object within space.102 The fold is therefore a fully phenomenological affair integrated with the viewer’s perception at the same time as it integrates work and viewer with external space.

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Fig. 1.21 Ferreira Gullar, “Diálogo Sôbre o Não-­Objeto,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 26, 1960. Courtesy of Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação do Jornal do Brasil and Ferreira Gullar.

Fig. 1.22 Hélio Oiticica, Bilateral Teman, 1959, two views. Oil on wood, 120.5 x 122.5 x 1.5 cm. Photo by César Oiticica Filho. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

We begin to see how radically the non-­object recast Concretism’s mode of communicative address. Gestalt psychology posited a simple isomorphism between the optical perception of a visual field and the viewer’s mental cognition. In contrast, the Bilaterais’ structural dependence upon the viewer to unleash their “potential” as emergent aesthetic phenomena produced, as Gullar wrote, “a synthesis of sensory and mental experiences.”103 The non-­object does not communicate a preexisting idea to the viewer. Instead, the viewer actualizes the work through temporal duration. In so doing, the work necessarily becomes other to itself at every instant. What is “communicated” is therefore not a content extractable from this experience but rather the very process of actualization and differentiation—­in short, a communication that communicates its variability over time. Oiticica took up this play of self-­reflexivity and divergence between the viewing subject and the “quasi-­corpus” of the work in his series of hanging ­Relevos Espacias, exhibited in November 1960 at the 2° Exposição de Arte Neo­concreta. Here the perceptual folding produced by the Bilaterais in concert with the viewer via the tonal differentiation of the plane is doubled back as a literal fold within the physical structure of work. In his article “Côr, Tempo, e Estrutura” (Color, Time, and Structure), published in the Suplemento Dominical the same month, Oiticica noted that color has a relational aspect. He wrote that “a pure orange is orange, but if placed in relation to other colors, it will be a light-­red or dark-­yellow, or another shade of orange; its sense changes according to the structure which contains it . . .”104 In the Relevos Espacias, the chromatic modulation of the work’s planar shapes and edges interact with the light and shadow of the work’s cavities to produce a highly variable experience of surface, fold, and edge. The resulting clusters of porous interior and exterior spaces impel the viewer to pivot around the works in order to make sense of their structural anatomy. Yet unlike the Bilaterais, exterior space—­the inevitable “background” of perception noted by Gullar—­is functionally integrated within the work and is continuous with the space of the viewer’s encounter. The Relevos Espacias thus draw on procedures of informational folding in both painting and sculpture in order to produce a secondary communicative operation. This communicative folding epitomizes—­indeed embodies—­the phenomenological process of viewing. In this light, it is not surprising that Oiticica would later stage photographs of his Relevos Espacias with Mosquito, a young boy he befriended in the favela of Mangueira in 1964 (fig. 1.23). Recall the 1957 image of a visitor attempting but apparently failing to “attend to” a painting at the 1° Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta. If this image belied the certainty and universality of the Concretist perceptual process, Oiticica’s photograph of a young viewer enthralled with a perspective upon a work foreclosed to the viewer of the actual photograph (and vice versa) indicates that the potential of the Relevos Espacias lay not in their disciplinary or organizational power. Instead the works’ radicality lay in their ability to render each subject’s perception contingent, specific, and quantifiably distinct. That Mosquito—­young, black, and only informally named—­would have been a highly unusual viewer of such an avant-­garde work in early 1960s Brazil

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Fig. 1.23 Mosquito with Hélio Oiticica, Relevo Espacial, 1960. Oil on wood, 63 x 148 x 15 cm. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

underscores this point. For, in positing Mosquito as an ideal viewer of his Relevo Espacial, Oiticica broke with the fiction of the aesthetic, political, economic neutrality of the subject that had inevitably sutured Concretism’s social ideology to the economic power of Brazil’s dominant class. And while it was not until the mid-­1960s that Oiticica explicitly acknowledged the social implications of experience as a field of creativity and conflict, this photograph of Mosquito with his Relevo Espacial demonstrates that the perception of form and the construction of social subjectivity cannot be disengaged.

Artist as Producer As Ronaldo Brito argued in 1975, Concrete art formulated and formalized the notion of art as an informational process.105 It established a closed communication system, a transparent logic of composition, an economic means to transmit information, a stable viewing condition, and a carefully delimited object. This is what I have called flat. In Neoconcretism, this closed field was pried open through an in­version of the fold first theorized by Mallarmé. Whereas for Mallarmé the fold functioned as a kind of frame with which to demarcate the book from its environment, Neoconcrete works dispensed with the frame and used the fold to open the work into the world. In Clark’s Ovo Linear, de Castro’s folded sculptures, and Oiticica’s Relevos Espacias, the frame was ruptured, the pedestal eliminated, and the work sprung into space. The opposite of closed systems, such works dialogue incessantly with their surrounds. They are inefficient carriers of messages because their systems allow for too much noise. The viewer’s body provides the most noise of all. It enfolds the message within situated experience, reconfiguring it through an embodied succession of nows. In opening up to the world, however, Neoconcrete art also made an ambitious claim for artistic autonomy, thereby distinguishing itself from the Concretist dream of integrating art and industry.106 Whereas Concretism’s isomorphic logic retained the frame—­paradoxically, the spatial marker of art’s separation from the social—­Neo­ concretism displaced the work’s autonomy onto the phenomenological relationship it constructed with the viewer within external space. In so doing, it staked out a new role for the work of art as an alternative kind of communication, one that differed from the communication of the everyday. Here we return to the trope of the newspaper, for it is in relation to its ­quotidian information—­its multiple notices and heterogeneous structure of address—­that the movements’ competing claims for a “new type of communication” came to a head. Concretism imagined the utopian integration of art and industry through isomorphic structures of address. Yet by allowing for a comparison between the “figure” of aesthetic space and the “figure” of advertising, de Castro’s reform of the Jornal do Brasil demonstrated that art was already integrated into industry—­the industry of information—­and, further, that treating art and industry as the same kind of information was essentially a zero-­sum game. Like the interlocking figures of reversible Gestalt forms, each was figure to the other’s ground. By contrast, Neoconcretism argued that the task of art was not

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Fig. 1.24 Willys de Castro, advertising design for Laca Industrial Paint, 1958. Courtesy of Walter de Castro.

to integrate itself with industry, as it already was, but rather to develop a new function as a highly particularized sphere of knowledge. In this sense, the Neoconcrete artists did not abscond from the communicative function of art staked out by Concretism. They embraced it with fervor. De Castro’s graphic reform of the Jornal do Brasil has largely been understood as a continuation of Neoconcretism’s aesthetic concerns with spatiality.107 When viewed against the larger ideological configurations of art and industry in Brazil, however, it becomes clear that his redesign exaggerated and therefore differentiated the types of information things like newspapers and art objects were imagined to provide. An exemplary application of Concrete art to an industrial form, the redesign employed a flat communicative paradigm. Paradoxically, as the split between Concretism and Neoconcretism grew deeper, the art debated within the pages of the Suplemento Dominical grew increasingly folded in both conceptual and physical form. Indeed, this communicative split between the folded information of art and the flat information of industry was not unique to de Castro’s graphic design and sculptural practice. We also see it in contemporaneous experiments by Willys de Castro and Lygia Pape, Neoconcrete artists who likewise worked in both commercial and artistic realms.108 A São Paulo-­based artist and musician who joined the Neoconcrete movement along with Oiticica in November 1959, de Castro supported himself with an inventive graphic design practice. In his 1958 advertisement for Laca Industrial paint, for example, alternating red stripes form a Gestalt figure of a circle, which establishes an indexical relationship between the color red and the “figure” of the product being sold—­colored paint (fig. 1.24).

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These stripes orchestrate a perceptual equivalence between figure and ground that is made significant by the product’s use, since of course paint can be applied as either figure or ground. On the left-­hand side, advertising copy provides instructions for the paint’s application, noting that it offers “the best coverage and uniformity on all surfaces.” Flatness thus establishes an ideal iso­ morphic symmetry between the product’s identity as paint and the perceptual means by which the “message” of its application and desirability are conveyed to the consumer. The opposite occurs in de Castro’s Objetos Ativos (Active Objects), begun in 1959 and described by critic J. Leonicio as having “parceled information” that required viewers to walk from side to side in order to “collect the necessary facts for the apprehension of [its] message” (fig. 1.25). 109 In these works, de Castro stretched a canvas over a wooden plank and positioned it so that its broadest width was perpendicular to the plane of the wall. The coloration of the various painted surfaces results in the perceptual sensation of a notch unhinged from the central plane. This sensation increases as one walks from side to side. Yet as Leonicio observed, because it is impossible “that we directly perceive, unfolded, the three faces at the same time,” the viewer must mentally reconstruct the occluded view, “provoking in us the sensation that we are in front of a living work, an organism.”110 Far from the flat and instantaneous logic of the paint advertisement, the Objetos Ativos both obfuscate and reveal their structure in time. Pape’s Neoconcrete woodcuts of the mid-­to late 1950s, Tecelares (Weavings), and her product designs for the cookie company Piraquê, starting in 1960, likewise invert informational strategies. The Piraquê designs innovatively maximize the information provided upon the limited surface of a given wrapper (fig. 1.26). Because the machines that cut the wrappers were imprecise, Pape staggered elements to allow for any cut of the patterned sheet to include the necessary product information—­barcode, trademark, illustration, company address—­without disturbing the integrity of the design.111 Here commercial and perceptual information are fully integrated, instantaneous, and complete. Pape’s magisterial woodcuts, in contrast, are structured according to a logic of duration, absence, and optical ambiguity (fig. 1.27). Pape began each series with a single wood block that was gradually “excavated,” as she

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Fig. 1.25 Willys de Castro, ­Objeto Ativo, ca. 1960. Oil on canvas mounted to wood, 68.9 x 2.3 x 6.9 cm. Image courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Permission courtesy of Walter de Castro.

Fig. 1.26 Lygia Pape, designs for ­Piraquê cooker wrappers, mid-­1960s. Courtesy of Projeto Lygia Pape. Fig. 1.27 Lygia Pape, Tecelar, late 1950s. Woodcut, 60 x 45 cm. ­Courtesy of Projeto Lygia Pape.

described her process of carving, to reveal white space or “light” in the corresponding print.112 The virtual space of the printed surface dialogues with the real space opened up within the wooden matrix itself, with the final work acting as a register of this temporal process. Pape further employed the natural texture of the wood to create a series of optical disjunctions in which an apparently continuous surface of wood grain appears to ripple or crease. These visual pleats force the eye to linger on the translucent surface of the print, slowing down the process of its comprehension and disturbing figure-­ground oppositions. While Pape created the Tecelares to be viewed from multiple orientations (much like the informational vectors of her wrappers for Piraquê), the space generated within and through her prints does not result in instantaneity, completion, and equivalence but, rather, slippage.113 These prints offer up art as a form of knowledge whose “use” is simply, and quite radically, the process of perceiving itself.114

* What, finally, does it mean to conceive of the work of art as a form of knowledge? And how do such a work’s patently artistic qualities sit with an ordinary object such as the newspaper, whose use, paradoxically, might be described in similar terms? In theorizing the Neoconcrete non-­object, Gullar made explicit recourse to the concept of use, writing, “The spectator is solicited to use the non-­object. Mere contemplation is not enough . . . The spectator moves from contemplation to action. But what this action produces is the work itself.”115 This emphasis on use was key in distinguishing the non-­object from ordinary objects that existed in the same space as the Neoconcrete work, as well as readymades, which of course are ordinary objects suspended from use. For Gullar, the readymade was problematic because it could lapse out of its status as art as easily as it had been inserted into it. The readymade thus marked the work of art’s “defeat,” since its meaning was directed from outside to inside—­from the contextual frame towards the object—­rather than from inside to outside, per the immanent meaning assumed of non-­representational art. Gullar resolved this problem by suggesting that the non-­object’s ontological character arose from its use or, to ­render it more precisely, its use-­without-­aim. Whereas the use of a readymade would simply return the object to its normative function, the non-­object’s lack of normative function meant that its use would simply reveal the work of art as a work of art. In “Diálogo Sobre o Não-­Objeto,” Gullar attempted to transpose the perceptual process of distinguishing figure from ground onto the conceptual process of distinguishing non-­objects from ordinary objects—­art from non-­art—­ when both existed in the same space. “The ground against which one perceives the non-­object is not the metaphoric ground of abstract expression, but that of real space—­the world.”116 Yet Gullar was unwilling to accept the contradictions

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of his own claim, since figure and ground are not only reversible but depend upon one another in order to be seen at all. As Gullar’s own perceptual analogy revealed, there can be no non-­object without ordinary objects against which to establish a relational field. Therefore, it is the work’s epistemological character that arises from the non-­object’s use—­not its ontological one. In short, the work comes into focus as a relation between work and world. Paradoxically, then, the autonomy of the non-­object depends upon all that is not art: the objects and environments of the everyday. In their competing interpretations of the legacy of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés, Gullar and the Concrete poets identified two of the most remarkable aspects of the French poet’s thought: the autonomy of the fold, as symbolized by the book, and the radical potential of the flat, as realized in the newspaper page. Yet a third aspect of Un Coup de dés proceeds from both of these interpretations. That is, as Barthes recognized, the degree to which Mallarmé’s formal experimentation in nonlinear verse imagined the possibility of the poet disappearing behind his work and, conversely, the birth of the reader in his place.117 In staging this birth from within the fold but across the spread surface of the page, Un Coup de dés conjured a possible public rather than a sole reader, a social body catalyzed from within the radicality of autonomous art rather than the commodification of the word. In that the newspaper was necessary in order for Mallarmé to transformatively conceive of such a public, the newspaper, too, is an object whose use might be separated from its aims. As Amílcar de Castro’s reform of the Jornal do Brasil aptly demonstrates, the aim of a newspaper is both to transmit information and to solicit sales. The interlocking character of these two aims—­their relationship as figure and ground—­allows us to see how the informational flatness of the newspaper diagrammed an economic structure writ large. But, a newspaper does not remain flat. It also folds. Indeed, the opening, folding, and rearranging of a newspaper’s pages allows the reader to scan, select, and even ignore the messages contained within it. Folding provides the physical means to connect narratives that are split into multiple parts. Each time a reader reestablishes an informational link, a message continues as pure content, restoring flatness to the field. The fold suspends the message. An interval and hiatus, it substitutes the flat information of the message with the phenomenological experience of the viewer, an experience constituted by way of the connective tissue of the newspaper’s pages and their possibilities of recombination. Paradoxically, this folded interval—­this ­use-­without-­aim—­is also the moment of a newpaper’s greatest social potential. For as its multiplicity and disjunction transform a multitude of pages into a malleable informational object, the newspaper also becomes a public space open to reader participation and reconfiguration.118 In 1960, critic José Guilherme Merquior noted that the “great generosity of Lygia Clark’s Bichos is to make us feel that we are authors as well.”119 This invitation to participate in the realization of the work—­and thereby differentiate the work from itself—­was Neoconcretism’s most radical proposition. But it was

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brokered on a theoretical formulation of autonomy that would ultimately collapse under its own weight. In his last article as art critic for the Suplemento Dominical, Gullar argued that having successfully eliminated all figuration and external reference in order to become a non-­object, the Neoconcrete work of art gains significance solely by virtue of the inner tension produced in its self-­reflection as art. In so doing, however, the work “consumes” itself and is “exhausted” of all meaning, resulting in a situation in which “the work will not speak of anything prior to itself.”120 Gullar later conjectured that this attenuated form of autonomy resulted in the “absorption” of the viewer’s action within the non-­object, and consequently the aestheticization of action as pure reflexivity rather than outward orientation “towards the social” and external space.121 For Gullar, who renounced his affiliation with vanguard art and embraced a form of leftist populism the following year, this theoretical impasse ultimately “offered no path forward, no way out.”122 Yet as the newspaper demonstrates, the fold is not simply a guarantor of autonomy. It is a vehicle of heterogeneity, flux, the production of sociality and public space. Considered through this lens, the Neoconcrete non-­object constitutes not simply an attenuated form of autonomy but a path towards the social by way of the fold. It is in relation to this possibility that I conclude with Oiticica’s NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1, a work that opened this book and forms an apt coda to the transmutation of flatness into folding I have traced here (fig. 1.28). Made in late 1960 in the wake of the second Neoconcrete exhibition, NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 builds upon Oiticica’s earlier hanging reliefs, specifically the way in which color animates structure by means of the concatenation of fold, plane, and edge. Like the Bilaterias and the Relevos Espacias, it was constructed from a number of painted wooden plaques whose relations were undoubtedly worked out by way of a folded cardboard maquette. In the 1960 work Oiticica multiplied and aerated the tightly nested anatomy of the Relevos Espacias so as to create a cluster of four semifolded box-­like units suspended around a central square. While each unit appears to have been generated from a single shape—­a hooked arrow with a rectangular tab protruding from one side—­differences in the angle and direction of the subsequent folds result in two distinct pairs of units that mirror one another, pivoting away from the work’s center in space. Recalling the rotational symmetry of the Metaesquemas, one unit reverses, but also inverts, its reciprocal counterpart. Whereas the Bilaterais extend this idiosyncratic principle to planar surfaces whose back-­to-­back presentation require the viewer to “orbit” around the work, NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 transposes this logic to a complex sculptural form, making it difficult to apprehend the precise relations of the four units independently from the synthetic whole. As in the Relevos Espacias, the play of sameness and difference is temporalized and spatialized in the viewer’s trajectory around the work. Unlike the Relevos Espacias, in which the viewer’s perception is doubled back in the work’s form, NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 triangulates this reflexivity by way of an actual

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reflection in a mirror placed on the floor beneath the work. This mirror forms a flat image of the work’s folded structure. Within the mirror’s bounded frame, nested cavities and voids become legible as pattern and shape while clusters of colored planes are purified into simple Gestalt forms. In so doing, the mirror provides a synoptic idea of the work to the viewer, in accordance with the informational flatness first performed by the Concrete work. Indeed, only by inspecting this image of the work’s internal organization is the viewer able to decipher its discrepant symmetrical structure. This discovery, however, propels the viewer back to the folded materiality of the object, where its spatial density is only reinaugurated, rather than clarified. For if the mirror provides an instantaneous and flat image of the work’s folded units, the physical object swells into a full dimensionality that can only be comprehended over time. In this, the mirror’s capacity to act as a device of logical elucidation is upended. By repeating but simultaneously inverting the work’s structure in its image, the mirror anticipates the operation of folding and twisting enacted by the work’s rogue pair. Paradoxically, then, flatness is a means to folding at each level of image, structure, and form. By automatically reflecting all that is above and around it, the mirror also produces an image of the viewer within the work: an image of the viewer seeing, an image of the act of perception itself (fig. intro.1). As the viewer’s attention moves back and forth between the work’s elements, information garnered from the work’s three-­dimensional form is doubled and differenced by the mirror’s two-­dimensional reflection, and vice versa. If the compositional rotation and reversal that generates the units’ paired relations models the behavior of the Möbius strip (as first anticipated in the virtual twisting and folding of the Metaesquemas), the doubling and differencing enacted by the viewer in the process of deciphering these relations likewise produces a linked perceptual loop. The Möbius strip is thus present not simply as a form but as a behavior felt by the viewer in concert with the work. The mirror returns this experience to the viewer as an image: a real-­time index of the “new type of communication” heralded by Gullar in the pages of the Suplemento Dominical. By virtually incorporating the viewing subject within the work of art, NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 also orchestrates a radical irruption of representation within the space of abstraction. Heretofore an invisible, if highly theorized, entity, the viewer is suddenly pictured as a literal figure against the ground of the work and the space of its encounter. What was outside the work—­the viewing subject, the institutional apparatus of art—­is now enfolded within it. If Gullar sought to safeguard the immanent meaning of the non-­object by refusing its contextual frames, NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 incorporates these frames within the work by means of the virtual space of the mirror. In encountering his or her own image sutured together with the work in the mirror’s reflection, the viewer also encounters the space in which such an incorporation becomes possible. And if this space is still neutral—­comprised of the ostensibly empty environment of the gallery—­the transformation of flatness into folding traced across this chapter

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Fig. 1.28 (opposite) Hélio ­Oiticica, NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1, 1960. Synthetic resin on wood fiber board and mirror. 5 pieces: 52 x 37 x 37 cm / 53 x 60 x 35 cm / 52 x 36.5 x 37 cm / 52 x 36.5 x 36.5 cm / 52 x 36.5 x 36.5 cm. Mirror 110 x 110 cm; wood structure 110 x 110 x 5 cm. Photo by Claudio Oiticica. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio ­Oiticica.

Fig. 1.29 3° Exposição de Arte Neoconcreta, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1961. Courtesy of Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo.

suggests that neutral space, once rendered into the thickness of perception, becomes a materiality in and of itself. Indeed, a viewer attuned to such a thickness might encounter not only his or her own image in the mirror beneath NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 but also those of other viewers enfolded within it. Separated in actual space, the reflection joins such viewers in a temporary commons imagined through and against the folds of the work. This is a public that is imaged but not actualized: a public that emerges by way of the mediation of art. As in the photograph of Mosquito with Oiticica’s Relevo Espacial, each view upon NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 and this temporary public is individualized, conditional. Seeing oneself seeing within this intersubjective, interobjective space, a viewer might recognize the radical contingency of perception: that the folds of the work of art bring viewers together, but necessarily differentiate what they can see. By establishing the fold as an aesthetic operation, Neoconcretism inaugurated an autonomous art devoid of a frame. However, as Oiticica’s NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 makes visible, it also opened up the possibility that this folded hinge might bring the world—­with all its social rather than simply phenomenological consequences—­within the work of art. For the critical moment between 1959

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and 1961, this possibility remained latent, balanced carefully along Gullar’s ­theorization of the non-­object and its use-­without-­aim (fig. 1.29). But this balance began to shift. As the locus of my analysis moves from the discursive sites in which Concrete and Neoconcrete art were debated to the physical ones in they were seen, the historical conditions against which Neoconcretism emerged are increasingly thrown into relief. As I will argue in the following chapter, the social consequences of the fold were worked out upon the grid.

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Fig. 2.1 Hélio Oiticica, undated sketch. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Brazil is a country condemned to modernity. Mário Pedrosa

2 The Cell and the Plan Consider a piece of graph paper divided into identical squares (fig. 2.1). Squares are traced in pencil upon these squares—­one box square, two boxes square—­the absent-­minded perambulations of a hand drawing to take up space on a page. Undated and found loose in Hélio Oiticica’s personal papers, the drawing does not appear to refer to an existing or projected work of art. Nor does it sketch a work in ground plan, suggesting a physical construction in space. Rather, it seems to document a drawing with no particular purpose. A geometric doodle of the simplest sort: squares upon squares, each form the same as any other. How different this constellation of shapes is from another set of squares marked upon a photograph and canted on a diagonal to recede illusionistically in space (fig. 2.2). These squares do not reiterate the repetitive units of a given grid. Instead, they map a grid upon preexisting space. This is the virtual matrix of a construction site drawn in dotted lines with yellow pen around 1953. It plots the slated location of the Museu de Arte Moderna of Rio de Janeiro (MAM-­RJ), a building complex whose construction began in 1954 and was only completed in 1967. Unlike the first, this grid conveys the sheer potentiality of construction and the innate optimism of “the plan.” From the floating, birds-­eye vantage point of the photograph, lines mapped out as schema will become foundations; foundations in turn will give rise to walls, galleries, classrooms, and libraries; and from these spaces, a modern institution will be born. Hindsight often breeds cynicism, as in many ways does the plan. But in 1954, the notion that modernity could be institutionalized and thus realized seemed eminently plausible in Brazil. The country’s so-­called era of optimism was ushered in with a postwar industrial boom and epitomized by the 1956–­61 presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek, who campaigned with the promise of “fifty years of progress in five.” Kubitschek was the political force behind Brasília, the futuristic capital built in just three years in Brazil’s central plateau as an emblem of the country’s aspiring modernity and developmentalist aims. In mid-­century Brazil, then, construction was a material analogue to historical progress. It was the tangible enactment of the terra do futuro, or land of tomorrow, as Brazil is

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Fig. 2.2 General view of the Aterro before construction of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro architectural complex, ca. 1953. Courtesy of Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro.

often called. And it was riddled with the contradictions of a utopia willed into being against the imperfect realities of the everyday: barefoot workers trans­ porting supports for reinforced concrete, towering office buildings overlooking wooden construction shacks, a museum sign brought in on a tractor in the absence of any physical museum (fig. 2.3). In this historical context, building was the singlemost powerful metaphor for a modernity that was at hand but just out of reach. As Mário Pedrosa declared in 1959, “Our epoch is one in which utopia transforms itself into plans.”1 It would seem that the projective qualities of such metaphors of construction have been excised from the loose-­leaf drawing that opens this chapter—­ repetitive squares traced doggedly upon other repetitive squares, length equal to width, size and shape predetermined by the elemental unit of the grid. Bereft of indications of scale or purposeful aim, the penciled squares have no other referent than the grid upon which they appear. They invoke a virtuality of form, but not as a projection of what will materialize in “real” space. Rather, the virtuality of these squares is coextensive with their materiality upon the page.2 They are simultaneously literal and abstract, each modality diagramming the other as if discrete edges of a single line. They neither picture nor plan. They are squares upon squares, each form the same as any other.

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Fig. 2.3 Preparation of the plot for the construction of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de

Each form the same as any other, true. But each square is not the same size. This makes a difference. For it is ultimately the variations in the size of the penciled squares that prevent them from exactly recapitulating the grid upon which they appear, even as they repeat, over and over, its single constitutive element. Upon closer reflection, what first appears to be a random distribution of different-­sized squares strains towards a notion of pattern. A 1 x 1 box square gives way to a 2 x 2 square, then 3 x 3, 4 x 4, 5 x 5, 6 x 6, 7 x 7, 8 x 8. Radiating outwards in the clockwise configuration of a Nautilus shell, the developmental progression of these squares adds yet another virtuality to the page, replacing the aleatory repetition of rectangular units with the continuous curve of a spiral. Just as the logic of the grid entails its infinite extension, so too does the incremental growth of this spiral, even as it is curtailed by the physical limits of the sheet. Plano (plan, plane) becomes planta (plan, plant). Static form moves into time. Despite the fact that the grid resists development through the inexorable repetition of the same, this set of squares upon squares diagrams development even while it projects nothing but the continuation of its elemental shape. In Portuguese, the concept of “the plan” is conveyed both by the terms plano and planta. The first refers to an abstract notion of a project or scheme to be realized, as well as to the plane and that which is planar or flat. The second has the specific meanings of an architectural matrix or a biological plant. Nested within this etymology is a set of contradictions and potentialities that animate practices of building in the heady context of developmentalist Brazil. This chapter is about the virtualities of form that emerged from this field of possibility and constraint. It traces the relations between documents like the drawing on graph paper and the photograph of a construction site and works of art by Oiticica and

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Janeiro, 1955. Courtesy of Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro.

Fig. 2.4 Helicoid stairway, Bloco de Exposições of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro,

contemporaneous artists that took the notion of building as their base. As I will argue, such works responded to the metaphoric mobilization of construction by two key organs of the Brazilian modern project in the late 1950s and early 1960s—­the museum and the state. The political and social collapse of their utopian aspirations over the course of the mid-­to late 1960s, in turn, left artists with the complex problem of how to recuperate modernism’s formal aims. At the heart of this historical dynamic is a problem concerning the referentiality of abstraction—­the specter of representation that hovers at the edges of abstract form even as it asserts its status not as a sign but as the thing itself.3 This problem was central to Concrete art, whose tenets, as we saw in chapter 1,

ca. 1961. Photo by Aertens ­Michel. Courtesy of Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro.

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provided the foundation for advanced art in 1950s Brazil. But it also plagued official mobilizations of modernity that took projection as their rhetorical key. The adoption of developmentalism as the official ideology of the Brazilian state brought the imperative to represent modernity as an imminent reality. Yet the state’s extraordinary success in representing this imminence frequently failed to coincide with the realities it was designed to bring about. This problem is condensed in the architectural maquette. Intended as a scaled spatial model of a building (itself a set of fully abstract forms), it cannot help but simultaneously function as representational image of that building, thereby losing its status as a “concrete” thing. This paradox, negotiated over the course of several years by artists, institutions, and the Brazilian government alike, finds culmination and reprise in Oiticica’s Ready Constructible of 1978–79, a maquette without scale that models a principle of growth rather than form. Ready Constructible’s diagrammatic modality functions in contrapuntal distinction to the legacy of modernism symbolized by institutions such as MAM-­RJ, whose vision of modernity was complexly knit together with state-­ sponsored developmentalist mandates of the time (fig. 2.4). Spanning the critical years of Oiticica’s own artistic development, the museum’s physical erection provided the immediate backdrop for key debates about Concretism and the larger constructive legacy. An account of Oiticica’s historical encounter with the problematic of the plan logically starts here, with an institutional body that was a literal and figurative laboratory of construction and a set piece for the promise of modern Brazil.

* The roots of MAM-­RJ can be traced to 1946, when a group of intellectuals and patrons came together to discuss the possibility of an institution based on the Museum of Modern Art in New York.4 Two years later, the institution was founded and held its first exhibition, of contemporary European painting, at a temporary location in January 1949. The institution settled into another temporary headquarters at the Ministério de Educação e Saúde (Ministry of Education and Health, subsequently the Ministry of Education and Culture) in 1952. With its towering rectangular mass, lofty piloti, and prominent brise-­soleil, the building was an icon of modern Brazilian architecture, counting among its advisors the famed Swiss architect Le Corbusier, Brasília’s future planner Lúcio Costa and its chief architect Oscar Niemeyer, as well as Affonso Eduardo Reidy, who designed the museum’s permanent headquarters in 1953. The Ministry’s ties to education made it an appropriate temporary location for the museum, which conceived of its artistic purpose as “an organ of democratic education for the masses.”5 The museum offered art classes beginning in 1952, and Oiticica enrolled in an experimental art course for adults taught by Ivan Serpa soon after. Meanwhile, trustees explored a more expansive design curriculum designed by Tomás Maldonado and based on Max Bill’s Hochschule für Gestaltung. In 1958, Maldonado presented a scheme to the museum’s board

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of directors for an “Escola Técnica de Criação” (School of Technical Creation), which would teach information, industrial design, and visual communication in order to “confront the problems that are brought about with the country’s growth.”6 From the beginning, then, the institution’s pedagogic functions were tied to Brazil’s industrializing prerogatives, a link President Kubitschek underscored in 1958: “A technical-­industrial civilization that does not grow hand-­in-­ hand with intense artistic activity would be threatened with deformation.”7 For critics such as Pedrosa who fiercely defended the efficacy and historical importance of geometric abstraction, MAM-­RJ provided a laboratory where the constructive foundations of Brazilian modern art might translate into the country’s developmental growth. The associations between developmentalism and this constructive legacy were so strong that in 1967, long after the aims of state-­ sponsored industrialization and Rio’s avant-­garde had diverged, Oiticica evoked the “constructive will” of Brazilian art, mapping avant-­garde practice onto the country’s social conditions of underdevelopment.8 Oiticica’s essay was the central statement of the exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira (New Brazilian Objectivity), opened just months before the in­auguration of the final gallery spaces of MAM-­RJ after thirteen years of construction.9 Building had commenced in 1954 when the city donated a plot of land to the museum within the Aterro do Flamengo, an artificial landmass recently created from the pulverized rock of the nearby Morro de Santo Antônio, site of some of Rio’s very first favelas. Demolished at the hill and transported in trucks twenty-­four hours a day for several months, this raw material was itself a monument to the planning prerogatives of the state, wiping out the squalor of underdevelopment in order to build a gleaming new modernist park. The local press enthusiastically followed the museum’s construction and the newspaper Correio da Manhã, whose owners had deep ties to the museum, even ran a weekly column devoted to the building.10 So framed, the museum’s construction became a visible measure of the establishment of modern art as a social, intellectual, and pedagogic enterprise within the city. For artists and intellectuals such as Oiticica who were intimately involved with the museum’s activities through classes, exhibitions, and discussions, it likewise provided the institutional context for debates about modern art. By January 1958, when the museum inaugurated the institution’s first dedicated permanent space, artists and poets in Rio had already begun to imagine a new constructive avant-­garde of their own. As discussed in chapter 1, the 1° Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta sparked controversy amongst the poets and artists of Rio and São Paulo centering on the interpretation of Concrete art. These positions were debated in the Suplemento Dominical, where polemics involving contemporary Brazilian art appeared side-­by-­side with articles concerning artists associated with concrete, neoplasticist, and constructivist art such as Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Antoine Pevsner, and others. Both Concrete and Neoconcrete practitioners agreed on the central principle of Concrete art: the work of art expresses a “concrete” rather than metaphoric reality and thus must expunge figurative, illusionistic, or otherwise representational space. For Mondrian, to whom both groups

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saw themselves aesthetically linked, one method of establishing such a non­ illusionistic space was through the use of stepped-­out frames. These frames forcefully established an autonomous space for the canvas without resorting to the recessed picture window of a traditional frame.11 Neoconcrete artists’ adoption of such formal strategies as the fold meant that the space of the external world and the internal work of art were no longer held apart by mediating devices such as pedestals and frames. For them, this dialogue between the objective reality of the work and that of the world was a decisive step within the larger battle against illusionism. As Gullar wrote in December 1960, “The death of the canvas . . . is the death of fictitious space.”12 Yet if the work of art’s autonomy had once depended on its demarcation from the external world, what were the implications of this move into the space of the everyday? Gullar’s response was to formulate the non-­object as an object distinct from ordinary things. In response to a critic who declared that Lygia Clark’s Bichos reduced the work “to its condition of objecthood,” Gullar countered that they “vertiginously approach the condition of the object, but not in order to affirm this condition, but rather to . . . transcend it.”13 This vertiginous quality reveals the contingency of the non-­object’s mediation between aesthetic and quotidian space. In Neoconcrete works created in the early 1960s as the movement began to dissipate, the simultaneous drives for aesthetic autonomy and what Gullar described as Neoconcrete art’s need to “act directly within space” resulted in new kinds of virtuality.14 As the fold opened into the world, these new kinds of space—­neither fictitious nor entirely real—­came under increasing pressure from social concerns the frame once held at bay. In one of his final articles for the Suplemento Dominical in 1961, Gullar acknowledged the potential for this imbrication, noting that the rupture with the frame positioned the artist in an indisputably proximate relationship to society.15 Yet, seeking to distinguish the Neoconcrete position from earlier avant-­gardes that sought to integrate the work of art with its environment, Gullar sidestepped the full social implications (as he had likewise done in 1958). He instead argued that the work generates an aesthetic space of its own creation that is distinct from the objective reality in which it sits. The result is a contra­ diction: “in order to negate immediate reality the work is obligated to affirm this reality with all its might.”16 For several Neoconcrete artists, this paradox was often condensed in a tension around the concept of scale. Gullar construed such scalar pressures as animating forces that ultimately secured the work of art’s autonomy. But as we shall see, they also chart a complex set of relations in which aesthetics comes to function as a vehicle of social analysis and critique. This critical potential became explicit in Oiticica’s works of the mid-­to late 1960s. But it stemmed from the formal and rhetorical problematics of scale that emerged earlier in the decade, as he, Clark, Amílcar de Castro, and others negotiated the limits of Neoconcrete strategies. During this time, Neoconcrete artists and critics eschewed the narrow confines of the Brazilian Concretist debate to contextualize their

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Fig. 2.5 “Neoplasticismo VII,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, February 20–­21, 1960.

work within a wider history of avant-­garde production that stretched back to prewar European movements.17 Frequently published in the pages of the Suplemento Dominical as part of Gullar’s column “Etapas de Arte Contemporânea” (Stages of Contemporary Art), many of these projects—­Malevich’s Architectons, Georges Vantongerloo’s Volume-­Constructions, Theo van Doesburg’s axono­ metric projections—­were scaleless, utopian, and further derealized by photographic reproduction (fig. 2.5). At the same time, institutions such as MAM-­RJ and the Brazilian state more broadly struggled to realize the vision of modernity

Courtesy of Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação do Jornal do Brasil.

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anticipated in the host of maquettes, photomontages, and planning documents that accompanied their building projects (fig. 2.6). Both the transmission of one form of modernity and the projection of another, in other words, suffered a loss of, or ambivalence about, scale. Soon after moving to Brasília in 1961 in order to become director of the Fundação Cultural de Brasília, Gullar renounced formalism and his ties to Neoconcretism. In its place, he advocated a populist idiom of politically engaged art that would interpret and intervene within the social field in ways that the Neoconcrete non-­object (according to his own reading) could not. Yet social fields also have form, dimension, and shape. As we shall see, several of the formal and rhetorical devices that emerged in response to Neoconcretism’s spatial tensions—­the primary cut that defines de Castro’s sculptural process; an un­ resolved relationship between spectator participation and monumental form in Clark’s “fantastic architectures”; the system of internally-­calibrated, differential scales in Oiticica’s Nuclei—­were likewise at work in the construction of the utopian and ultramodern capital Brasília (fig. 2.7). Built between 1957 and 1960 and hailed as the ultimate realization of the country’s developmentalist aims, Brasília’s form (in particular, its emphasis on the plan) came into striking conflict with the social, economic, and political space that it produced. To suggest a causal relation between these late Neoconcrete works and Brasília would be to yoke the two together in a specious relation of mimetic reflection. But to excavate the tensions that mutually ground both experiments

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Fig. 2.6 Maquette of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, July 30, 1956. Photo by Foto Jerry. Courtesy of Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro.

Fig. 2.7 Marcel Gautherot, view of Brasília’s monumental axis from television tower, 1967. Marcel Gautherot/Instituto Moreira Salles Collection.

in Brazil’s complex experience of projective modernity is to conceive of how the virtuality of the non-­object, by opening into social space, began to operate as an epistemological model for thinking about that space at large.

Chapter Two The Cell and the Plan

Scale as Content Although the fold was employed by a number of Neoconcrete artists to incite spatial engagement and participatory action, the social consequences of its resulting scalar tensions were not consistent. Consider the cut-­and-­fold iron works that Amílcar de Castro initiated in the mid-­1950s and continued to produce over several decades. Generated from preparatory drawings composed with a compass and ruler, the final sculptures invoke Platonic geometries that appear to ignore if not negate the contingencies of physical production and embodied reception (fig. 2.8). For de Castro, this idealization was part and parcel of his conception of the artistic process as an originary, even mythic, gesture. As he later described it, “I start from a drawing on the plane. I cut it, fold it, and thus the third dimension is born . . . Sculpture for me is this: the birth of the third dimension.”18 De Castro often ­realized single compositions in multiple sizes, sometimes at a distance of years. Each sculpture thus functioned as a prototype of another sculpture (or another drawing-­as-­sculpture) and, more essentially, of the expressive act. As a result, the actual sculptures often convey a curiously scaleless quality in which form is indifferent to the context in which it is encountered.

Fig. 2.8 Amílcar de Castro, ­Escultura sem título sobre ­desenho, ca. 1960. Photo by ­Eduardo Eckenfels. Image ­courtesy of Eduardo Eckenfels. ­Licensed by Inarts.com.

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Fig. 2.9 Production of Amílcar de Castro sculpture, showing process of fold, date unknown. Photo by Eduardo Eckenfels. Image courtesy of Eduardo Eckenfels. Licensed by Inarts.com.

Yet realized in thick iron slabs ranging in height from thirty centimeters to over two meters (and, eventually, monumental architectural size), the works’ physical heft displays neither the spontaneity nor scalar flexibility of de Castro’s compositional process (fig. 2.9). The business of folding iron slabs through the application of heat and force is time consuming and labor intensive, and both variables mount with the size of the individual piece. Apprehending the obdurate materiality of the actual sculpture, as Rodrigo Naves has observed, the viewer cannot help but register the exhaustive labor embedded within it.19 Relegated to the domain of material specialists and dependent on the economics of manual work, this labor is temporally and physically divorced from the artist’s process of composition. Thus, while the scalelessness and idealized geometry of the work’s form encourage the viewer to imaginatively recreate de Castro’s act of conceptualization, the sheer weight of the resulting sculpture insists upon a distinctly bodily dimension of physical effort and toil. As de Castro’s works grew objectively larger, the materiality of the fold was hard-­pressed to function as a purely abstract formal operation. It was increasingly routed through a laboring body in turn absented from the final work. The fold functions quite differently in Lygia Clark’s Bichos, which initiated a new vein of fully interactive sculpture within Neoconcrete art. In contrast to the

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fixed formal configurations of de Castro’s iron works, they employ the fold (articulated as a hinge) as a mechanism of viewer participation and structural transformation. Between 1960 and her 1963 solo exhibition at MAM-­RJ, Clark experimented with constructing the metal sculptures at various scales. Once produced at tabletop size, the Bichos grew to new dimensions that demanded their viewers manipulate them with their whole body rather than simply their hands. Clark further imagined the Bichos as a kind of “fantastic architecture” realized at colossal scale. For her 1963 exhibition, she conveyed this proposition with a photograph of a small doll placed beneath an existing sculpture in order to suggest its monumental projected size (fig. 2.10). However, if the Bicho’s fundamental formal dynamic was its manipulation by the user, these new “fantastic architectures” left the question of participation unresolved.20 Was the individual user to be replaced with a participatory collective that would maneuver its hinged panels into new monumental shapes together? Or was the Bicho’s movement destined to ossify into static form, leaving the individual powerless in the face of its gigantic scale? Like de Castro’s cut-­and-­fold works, Clark’s “fantastic architectures” gesture to the limits of the non-­object’s virtuality—­its ability to both engage and stave off the social and historical pressures of external space. By directly invoking the promise of participation but refusing to solve the resulting dynamics of individual and collective agency, the “fantastic architectures” throw the contemporaneous ambitions of the Brazilian state into relief. Tasked with delivering modernity to its citizens, it equivocated on how these citizens were to be integrated within its economic and political texture. During much of the exhilarating discussion of Brazilian modernity of the 1950s, the rhetorical and iconic predominance of the plan—­projective, schematic, and infinitely malleable to the vagaries of utopian imagination—­deferred such uncertainties. By the mid-­1960s, however, plans had become realities riddled with contradictions born of the inconsistency between experienced and represented space. As with de Castro and Clark, Oiticica’s projects of the early 1960s negotiated spatial virtualities complexly related to contemporaneous modernist aspirations. As he transitioned from pictorial to embodied, three-­ dimensional space, however, both scale and

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Fig. 2.10 Lygia Clark, Arquiteturas Fantásticas, ca. 1963. Courtesy of Associação Cultural “O Mundo de Lygia Clark.”

the plan became explicit contents within his work. Oiticica’s experiments did not resolve the conflict between aesthetic space and the social field. But the twin concerns that emerged from these negotiations—­scale as content and the plan as generator—­were later taken up in Eden (1967–­69). In this project, scale itself functioned as a social intervention from within the purview of the plan.

* Fig. 2.11 (opposite, top) Hélio Oiticica, Nuclei and Relevo Especial at White­chapel Gallery, 1969. Photo by Jorge Lewinski. Private collection © The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth/ Bridgeman ­Images. Courtesy of White­chapel Gallery, White­ chapel Gallery Archive. Fig. 2.12 (opposite, bottom) Hélio Oiticica, PN1 ­Penetrável 1, 1960. Oil on wood, 9 panels of 190 x 73 x 3 cm. Photo by César Oiticica Filho. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio ­Oiticica.

The plan began to play an animating role in Oiticica’s work in 1960, when he inaugurated two new orders of art object, Nuclei and Penetráveis (Penetrables). Each took remarkably different approaches to scale. Likely initiated first, the Nuclei are hanging works suspended from an overhead matrix or ceiling made from wooden bars (fig. 2.11). A tectonic support for a given Núcleo, this matrix also functions schematically as a two-­dimensional plan of the three-­dimensional structure. In 1962, Oiticica identified the relationship between the two elements as the key to his development from painting into space. As he wrote of NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1, “The ceiling reminds me of the structural arcade of certain old works [in terms of] the picture plane (plano). The ceiling is flat (plano). However, the nucleus suspended from this ceiling unfolds in three-­dimensional space, and is projected from this ceiling.”21 In the last interview before his death, Oiticica returned to this reciprocity but shifted his characterization of the overhead matrix from plano to planta, underscoring both its architectonic and organic aspects. As he wrote, the Nuclei “had a ceiling, and the ceiling was marked with where to hang each plaque, all numbered. It’s as if the ceiling were a plan (planta).”22 The relationship between ceiling and projection was also central for PN1, the first of a number of architectural structures called Penetráveis, which consisted of cabins or small labyrinths that a viewer physically entered and explored. Made the same year as NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1, this work consists of a small rectangular cabin made of sliding panels painted in warm shades of orange and yellow (fig. 2.12). Reaching two meters in height, the panels were based on single, body-­ sized units generated by the cabin’s quadratic plan. Installed along a foursquare track, they can be shifted to create variations on individual compartments. Situated literally within the work, the viewer sets the plan in motion by opening and closing its component parts. Unlike the matrix of the Nuclei, which remains suspended above the work, the ceiling of PN1 is “absorbed by the structure,” as Oiticica wrote, resulting in a full reciprocity between ceiling and floor.23 The cabin’s gridded partition likewise echoes the quadratic structure of a traditional canvas stretcher. While the Nuclei charted Oiticica’s departure from the two-­dimensional plane of painting, PN1 rooted his subsequent entry into three-­ dimensional space by way of the body’s size and motility within an actual structure. To grasp the significance of this distinction, we must consider how scale became a formal determinant in Oiticica’s thinking at this time. In a text of August 1961, he referred to maquettes and early realizations of the Nuclei order

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Fig. 2.13 Hélio Oiticica, NC1 Pequeno Núcleo, with maquette of “medium” núcleo in background. Photo by José Oiticica Filho. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

as small, medium, or large: “The difference between these three types of nuclei is not solely in relation to size (as the name indicates) but in relation to the quality and sentido that each presents.” He continued, “Hence, a ‘small nucleus’ might possess more pieces than a ‘medium nucleus’ and be larger than it, since what qualifies it as a ‘small nucleus’ is the sentido that it possesses.”24 In other words, Oiticica’s determinations of size did not refer to absolute standards of measurement, but rather to the compositional arrangement, density, and internal scale of a work’s individual elements. The term sentido communicates this c ­ onjunction of formal concerns, evoking both the perceptual connotations of “sense” and “sensation” and the more abstract implications of “significance” and “meaning.” This complex character of sentido was calibrated according to a given Núcleo’s engagement with external space. For example, Oiticica designated NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 “small,” positing its emergence from the spatial qualities of his origami-­like Relevos Espaciais. In this shift, the tightly folded forms of the Relevos

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Fig. 2.14 Hélio Oiticica, ­maquette of “medium” núcleo. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio ­Oiticica.

Espaciais were prised open, allowing color to expand outwards into three-­ dimensional space. “It was as if the pieces that had cleaved into labyrinths . . . disintegrated,” he wrote of this transition. “Color now unfolds in a more nuclear sense.”25 Despite this expansion of form, the “small” Núcleo retains oblique angles and nested compositional groups. Although a departure from the residually planar structure of the Relevos Espaciais, these characteristics nevertheless convey the sense of a discrete object within space. By contrast, the individual plaques of “medium” Nuclei NC3 and NC4 explode centrifugally into a three-­ dimensional orthogonal grid. Oiticica wrote that in the resulting architectonic structures, space was “completely incorporated as a sign.”26 It no longer functioned as a neutral and transparent medium but took part in the sentido of the structure at large. “Small” and “medium” were therefore qualitative rather than quantitative assessments within Oiticica’s taxonomy. They were intended to cue the viewer to an internal ratio between form and space that, while dependent on the viewer’s perception, bore little or no relation to such a viewer’s normative or embodied concept of size. Thus, although the Nuclei dramatize a progressive engagement with size and scale (elements that normally ground a work to the exterior world), these elements were tied to a purely internal ecology of form. Two photographs of Oiticica’s maquette for a “medium” Núcleo taken around this time test this concept of size. In the first, the maquette is juxtaposed with the realized “small” Núcleo, NC1, which, while physically larger and looming in the foreground, is more object-­like and spatially condensed than the “medium” maquette (fig. 2.13). In a second photograph, the recognizable contours of two chairs give the abstract maquette scale (fig. 2.14). Pressed to the outer limits of the photographic frame, these chairs are a litmus test for the maquette’s aesthetic and spatial autonomy. If the maquette appears manifestly scaleless at the center of the photograph, the quality dissipates as the eye incorporates the peripheral objects at its margins. In both photographs, external objects check the sovereignty of the Nuclei’s scalar relations, highlighting the fact that the abstract space in which the

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Fig. 2.15 Hélio Oiticica and two visitors during the exhibition Projeto Cães de Caça at the Bloca Escola of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, 1961. Image courtesy of Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

­ tructures unfold is continuous with the heterogeneous space in which they s are encountered. The first photograph underscores the quotidian aspect of this space through a backdrop of bookshelves, cabinets, and cans of paint. In the second, the chairs (and their implied bodies) propel the spatial sentido of the maquette into the relational field of lived, phenomenological experience. If ­Oiticica’s designations of small, medium, and large were intended to operate as purely aesthetic categories, these photographs counter that aesthetic experience is created with and through the body of the viewer and, further, that this viewer exists within the decidedly nonabstract space of everyday life. This tension between aesthetic and quotidian space was renegotiated in Projeto Cães de Caça (Hunting Dogs Project), a maquette named after a spiral astral constellation, which Oiticica made and exhibited at MAM-­RJ in 1961 (fig. 2.15). Building off the recently conceived PN1, the project envisioned a public park made up of labyrinthine Penetráveis created out of colored panels, moving walls, nested passageways, and partially enclosed rooms. The complex would incorporate five Penetráveis of Oiticica’s own design as well as Gullar’s Poema Enterrado (Buried Poem) and Reynaldo Jardim’s Teatro Integral (Integral Theater). The former was a “poem-­object” that was to be installed in a submerged cubic chamber; the latter was designed as an experimental theatre for a single spectator. As a whole, Oiticica’s project was intended to defamiliarize quotidian habits of interacting with architectural space by replacing pragmatic use with ludic

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exploration and discovery. As he wrote, “when I realize maquettes or projects of maquettes . . . I want the architectonic structure to recreate and incorporate real space within virtual, aesthetic space and into time, which is also aesthetic.”27 Although designed as a public space, Projeto Cães de Caça therefore set aside a zone within this urban fabric wherein space itself might be rendered wondrously strange. If the hermetic and self-­referential scalar relations of the Nuclei established a space “full of virtualities,” Projeto Cães de Caça sought to expand this aesthetic space to environmental proportions. As in Oiticica’s first Penetrável, PN1, size could no longer function as a purely formal category. It needed to be anchored to the external referent of the human body. In an interview conducted during the exhibition of the maquette, Oiticica noted that Projeto Cães de Caça was to be realized “at human scale, at 2 meters in height, so as to be penetrated by the spectator.”28 The indications of materials to be used—­combed sand for the exterior spaces, white marble for the inner walkways—­suggest Oiticica intended to realize the project if circumstances allowed. Yet even before this exhibition, the project’s unrealized status was understood as a critical aspect of its significance (indeed, one could say, its spatial sentido). Writing in August 1961, Gullar situated Projeto Cães de Caça within a history of visionary architectural projects and suggested that its existence as a maquette indicated the lack of social conditions necessary for its realization: “It is not that the artist . . . isn’t aware of the utopian character of his work, but rather in making such work, affirms the necessity for that utopia to turn into reality.”29 In a text written for the work’s exhibition, meanwhile, Pedrosa framed the project in terms of the experimental functions of museums, which should act as “houses, laboratories of cultural experience . . . the elastic glove into which the free creator might fit his hand.” Oiticica’s maquette, he continued, brought “a new idea to experiential precedents: that of lived time, in the form of spectator participation in the experience of the creator.”30 By dint of Pedrosa’s reverberating associations, Projeto Cães de Caça—­a maquette displayed at MAM-­RJ, itself still under construction within a newly constructed public park—­modeled the ideal experimental function of the museum in abstract form. Thus, although Projeto Cães de Caça was conceived specifically in terms of mensurable, human-­ sized scale and even gestured directly to the social production of space, its historical import as an avant-­garde project depended upon its form as a miniaturized maquette. Projeto Cães de Caça was never realized during Oiticica’s lifetime. Importantly, the significance of its status as a model also shifted over the years. Follow­ing the optimistic 1961 discussions of the maquette as an experimental laboratory, the Projeto was shown again in an exhibition of Oiticica’s works at Galeria Bonino in 1967. On this occasion, the critic Frederico Morais wrote of it as a private sanctuary, referencing Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. ­Projeto Cães de Caça, he wrote, “is not a house-­construction-­of-­bricks-­and-­ plaster, a physical house, but a dreamed house, a poetic shelter, refuge of imagination, hiding place of utopias and evasions.”31 Contrary to previous analyses,

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the work’s utopianism followed here from its privacy and retroactive unrealizability rather than its anticipation of a future public form. Such diverging assessments beg a question: How did the projection of utopia transform into a space for its retreat in the span of six years? In response, we must turn to the new capital Brasília, Brazil’s greatest and most contradictory utopia and emblem of the modernist plan.

Architecture as a Work of Art Like Amílcar de Castro’s creative process, Brasília began with a primary gesture: the crossing of two axes on a blank page (fig. 2.16). In March 1957, architect and planner Lúcio Costa won the competition for the pilot plan (plano piloto) of Brasília, the new capital city that President Kubitschek took up as his signature campaign.32 In July, the architect’s drawing was reenacted on actual ground to mark the center of a city that would be constructed in little more than three years. In a widely circulated photograph of the initial crossing, clean lines are struck out against a dark background of vegetation from the aerial view of an airplane—­the view itself an emblem of the technology of flight that the pilot plan sought to represent (fig. 2.17).33 As in de Castro’s sculptures, mythic gesture replaced the laboring body in this dramatization of the originary act. Nowhere do we see the bulldozers and machete-­wielding workers who cleared these roads through the brush. Rather, we perceive the abstract gesture rendered in material form. As Costa wrote that year, the plan “arose from the primary gesture of one who marks or takes possession of a place: two axes crossing at right-­angles: the sign of the Cross itself.”34 From the beginning, then, Brasília’s plan was explicitly symbolic. It asked its citizens to experience space metaphorically and optically— a national allegory legible from the sky—­even as the production of this space was literal, embodied, and fabricated from the ground up. Both Costa’s initial drawing for Brasília and the famous photograph that recreated these marks are essentially scaleless. Yet scale was central to the city’s plan. Costa designated the city’s two defining axes as “monumental” and ­“residential” and conceived four scales of building along their various parts.35 The “monumental scale” corresponded to buildings and structures that housed key activities and functions of the state. Defined as “symbolic and collective,” it ran from the Praça dos Três Poderes (Plaza of Three Powers) at the head of the city’s plane/bird form to the television tower at its far end, with government ministries stretching along either side. The “residential scale,” which Costa characterized as “quotidian,” pertained to the wings that reach across this central form, where housing was built in low-­rise rectangular blocks. At the inter­ section of these two axes was the city’s “gregarious scale,” its social and economic center. This was marked by an elevated platform for entertainment and gathering, a bus terminal that served as the main transportation artery, and business sectors clustered on either side. Finally, a “bucolic scale” defined the natural setting of the city’s outer regions. There, country clubs and leisure zones surrounded a large artificial lake.

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Fig. 2.16 Lúcio Costa, Desenhos para Brasília, 1957. Courtesy of ­Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal. Fig. 2.17 Crossing of the axes at site of Brasília, 1957. Courtesy of ­Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal.

In the conventional sense, scale requires an external term—­a fixed unit of measure—­that allows for the comparison of form. Human scale suggests the address of the human body in terms of its average size (as in Projeto Cães de Caça’s projected two-­meter height). Costa’s system of scales, however, was differentially calibrated rather than gauged to a single unit of comparison. Despite their reference to function, the four scales therefore operated according to an internal matrix of relations that anticipated Oiticica’s qualitative use of size in the Nuclei. If Oiticica’s scalar matrix was purely formal and Costa’s explicitly symbolic, both matrices nevertheless resulted in an equivocation felt at the level of bodily experience. Critics of Brasília were quick to observe that there were few transition points between the different sectors and that the plan’s rigid separation of function and limited circulation patterns enforced spatial isolation.36 While the city’s scales were internally coherent, in other words, Costa ignored the way in which inhabitants negotiated urban texture as a whole. Anticipating such criticism, Costa insisted that the city was built to a scale of human action rather than naturalized human form. In a 1961 interview, he stated that “so-­called human scale is a relative thing; the Italian of the Renaissance, for example, would feel himself diminished if the door to his house was less than five meters in height.”37 Scale was therefore a measure of the historical ambition of societies and nations, not a proportional byproduct of the human being’s essential size. As the emblem of such historical aims, Brasília imagined the scale of a future Brazil. In this vein, the monumental proportions of the sculptures installed at the Praça dos Três Poderes denoted a human scale in keeping with the powers and aims of the state (fig. 2.18). In 1990, looking back on Brasília after thirty years, Costa reaffirmed the anticipatory character of his design: “It would have been . . . a crime to plan a city measured to a scale still partially in underdevelopment.”38 Scale was the most visible measure of Brasília’s function as a device of symbolic projection. This anticipatory role was enthusiastically debated between the city’s groundbreaking in 1957 and inauguration in April 1960. In September 1959, Pedrosa convened a meeting of the International Congress of Art Critics in Brasília, with Maldonado, Meyer Schapiro, Bruno Zevi, Jean Prouvé, Frederick Kiesler, and many others in attendance. While some expressed concerns about the appropriateness of the planned capital to Brazil’s currently “underdeveloped” state, the majority echoed the state’s own publicity materials and saw the city’s futuristic implausibility as part of its function. As André Chastel remarked, “The enterprise of Brasília must be located between the image of Brazil’s past and its future. It is the culmination of the evolution of city planning in Brazil and the conclusion of its chaotic energies and experiences. It is also the projection into the future of a monumental social ‘utopia’ necessary to Brazilian civilization.”39 While Brasília was an allegory of Brazil’s fully realized modernity, it was also tasked with overcoming the country’s uneven economic development. A 1957 government publicity report on the city underscored a prevailing belief that local rather than global structures were the cause of such economic and infra­ structural inequalities: “From a XX-­Century nation on the seacoast, the west-

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Fig. 2.18 Bruno Giorgi, Os Candangos, Praça dos Três Poderes, Brasília, 1960. Photo

bound traveler goes back through feudal times until he reaches a pre-­historic society beyond the great tributaries of the Amazon.”40 The new capital was therefore “an artificial instrument of the state” that would redirect migration from the coast towards the interior and thereby establish new patterns of industry and the distribution of wealth.41 Yet for critics such as Pedrosa, the new capital only exacerbated such historical paradoxes. In a series of articles published over the course of the capital’s construction, he warned that Brasília might insulate the government from its citizens and democratic debate by replicating the isolation of colonial oases.42 For all its vaunted futurity, Pedrosa argued, the project was fundamentally anachronistic. Costa himself acknowledged this contradiction in his pilot plan by superimposing the technological image of aviation over the colonial figure of the cross.43 For Pedrosa, the problem was not the city’s utopian aspirations but that its dual representation of modernist future and colonial past failed to model the growth required to move between these two states. Threatened with the “ossi­ fication” of contradictions embedded in its own formal program, Pedrosa argued that Brasília was less a planned city than a highly symbolic work of art. In his incisive observation, Brasília’s overidentification with the symbolism of its plan

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by Marcel Gautherot. Courtesy of Instituto Moreira Salles ­Collection.

left no room for the organic growth required of either a sustainable city or a nation seeking transformative social, economic, and political change. As a fixed form, Brasília could not translate plano into planta. Instead, it stabilized as an iconic image whose likeness of modernity failed to address the contradictions of underdevelopment from which it was born.

* If in the early 1960s, the scalar ambiguity of the Neoconcrete non-­object obliquely pointed up tensions manifest in Brasília, both art and architectural projects were generated from a shared engagement with developmental modernity at large. Avant-­garde experiments of the mid-­to late 1960s, by contrast, sought out Brasília’s blind spots and exceptions: its social inconsistencies, representational bias, and suppressed relationship between growth and form. In 1967, the same year the maquette for Projeto Cães de Caça was reexhibited and newly described as a “hiding place of utopias and evasions,” Oiticica introduced his environmental installation, Tropicália, at MAM-­RJ. Inspired by the architecture of the favelas, Tropicália embodied the critical lacunas of Brazilian modernity and ultimately made way for architectural constructions in which growth itself was a generator of form. Although Kubitschek triumphantly left his new government seat in Brasília in 1961, contradictions between the city’s aesthetic program and lived reality had already manifested.44 From the beginning, the city did not account for the laborers who built it. Since Costa’s housing plan only provided for an idealized middle class, these workers commuted from a hastily constructed satellite town, Cidade Livre (Free City), at the limits of the federal territory.45 Brasília’s managers intended to demolish the outpost upon the capital’s completion, as if to replace the workers’ laboring bodies with the government officials of the city’s idealized administrative and political class. As in de Castro’s sculptures, these new viewing subjects might imaginatively recreate Costa’s original crossing of the axes. But they would know little of the physical labor its realization actually entailed. The need for construction workers, however, continued well beyond the capital’s official inauguration. Rather than being demolished, working-­class settlements such as Cidade Livre multiplied around Brasília’s outer contours, creating clusters of habitation subsequently formalized into towns (fig. 2.19). Paradoxically, the organic growth to which developmentalism aspired but which Brasília failed to enact became the defining mode of urban settlement amongst worker-­citizens excluded from the capital itself. This fact did not go unnoticed, and in the months and years following Brasília’s inauguration, attention shifted from implementation of the monumental capital to problems of urban expansion and habitation. In Rio, MAM-­RJ hosted a conference about city planning and an exhibition on the social aspects of pre­ fabricated mass housing, at which Pedrosa noted the need to return the house to “human scale.”46 In April 1960, the same month as Brasília’s inauguration, a major

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Fig. 2.19 Satellite towns outside of Brasília, 1967. NOVOCAP archive, from Norma Evenson, Two Brazilian Capitals: Architecture and Urbanism in Rio de Janeiro and Brasília (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).

study published by the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo focused on Rio’s favelas, which many saw as a viral cancer infecting Brazilian urban space.47 In response, the new left-­leaning presidency of João Goulart redirected the attention of government planners to the urban poor. These new agencies aimed to improve infrastructure within informal settlements. But they also re­located portions of their soaring populations to outlying tracts of standardized housing.48 In Rio, re­ locations began in 1964 but were roundly criticized for their rupture of existing community networks as well as for the mind-­numbing ­aesthetics of repetition of the new towns. Unlike these planned settlements, the favelas were characterized by continuous construction. Accumulation, relational dependence, and ­bricolage thus resulted in richly varied and highly flexible structures at both the micro level of the individual habitat and the macro scale of the favela as a whole.

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Fig. 2.20 (opposite) Desdémone Bardin, “Favela of Mangueira,” 1965, in archives of Hélio Oiticica. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica and the family of Desdémone Bardin.

Oiticica immediately recognized this spatial dynamism when he was introduced to the favela of Mangueira by the sculptor Jackson Ribeiro at the end of 1963 (fig. 2.20). The following year, he commented on the “structural organicism” of favela construction and the patterns of circulation to which it gave rise, noting that “there are no sudden transitions from ‘bedroom’ to ‘living room’ to ‘kitchen’” and that “each part connects to the other in continuity.”49 In other words, the favelas were not characterized by autonomous units but by contingency, syntax, circulation, and change. Oiticica’s first response to this texture was a new order of artwork called the Parangolé, which, as I will explore in chapter 4, staged the body as a form of becoming. But in Tropicália, conceived for the exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira, the favela took explicit form as part of his statement on the Brazilian avant-­garde. Nova Objetividade Brasileira emerged from far-­ranging shifts in the cultural and political landscape of mid-­1960s Brazil. In 1964, a military coup ousted Goulart and installed a repressive dictatorship that lasted until 1985. Although a progressive artistic culture continued to flourish in the first stage of the dictatorship from 1964 to 1968, the military police were quick to shut down explicitly political organizations such as the CPCs (Centers for Popular Culture), a network of leftist cultural organizations that sought to mobilize the Brazilian underclass. In Rio in 1965 and 1966, MAM-­RJ hosted the exhibitions Opinião 65 and Opinião 66, both of which were marked by a return to figuration, a tendency toward participation, and a renewed concern with political and social contexts.50 It was within this vastly changed context that artists and critics began intense discussions about the state of the Brazilian avant-­garde that culminated in Nova Objetividade Brasileira in 1967. Frequently taking place at the bar of MAM-­RJ, these discussions brought together artists who had once belonged to the fiercely polarized camps of Concretism and Neoconcretism in the late 1950s, such as Waldemar Cordeiro and Oiticica.51 They also included younger artists such as Antonio Manuel, whom Oiticica invited to contribute a series of newspaper drawings to be displayed alongside his own work Tropicália.52 Oiticica’s text, “Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade Brasileira” (General Scheme of the New Objectivity), which anchored the catalogue for the exhibition, identified six characteristics of the current Brazilian avant-­garde: “1-­general constructive will; 2-­tendency towards the object as easel painting is negated and superseded; 3-­spectator participation (corporeal, tactile, visual, semantic, etc.); 4-­approach and position-­t aking in relation to political, social, and ethical problems; 5-­tendency towards collective propositions and the consequent abolition of ‘isms’ characteristic of the first half of the century . . . ; 6-­resurgence and new formulations of the concept of anti-­ art.”53 Once primarily associated with the tenets of prewar European geometric abstraction, Oiticica recast constructive art in terms of a Brazilian “constructive will” in which the country’s unique experience of underdevelopment, adversity, and cultural mixture functioned as the explicit motor of its avant-­garde. In his essay, Oiticica contended that this “constructive will” was intimately tied to the notion of anthropophagy, or cannibalism, elaborated by the Brazilian

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modernist poet Oswald de Andrade in 1928.54 De Andrade derived the idea from the primal myth of Brazilian racial contact in the ritual ingestion of Bishop ­Sardinha (Brazil’s first bishop) by indigenous Tupí tribes in 1556.55 For de Andrade and Oiticica after him, anthropophagy provided a model of aggressive cultural incorporation by which outside influences were consumed by the “native” and transformed into a new expression “authentically” Brazilian insomuch as it refused the concept of authenticity itself. Anthropophagy was therefore a strategy for achieving autonomy by virtue of that which was other. But it was also an extreme form of self-­reflexivity, as its taboo lies in the sameness of its two ­parties—­s/he who eats, s/he who is ingested. It thus performs a profoundly corporeal logic of the fold. Anthropophagy’s distillation of the nation was not one of elevation, but of the base processes of ingestion and expulsion. In his 1967 essay Oiticica queried, “how, in an underdeveloped country, does one explain and justify the appearance of an avant-­garde, not as a symptom of alienation but as a decisive factor in its collective progress?”56 That he sought out the deliberately excessive corporeal metaphor of anthropophagy as a means of elaborating a response demonstrates how far notions of progress, development, and modernity had shifted out of the realm of idealist projection since the Neoconcrete non-­object of the early 1960s. Oiticica described Tropicália as “the very first conscious, objective attempt to impose an obviously Brazilian image on the current context of the vanguard and national art manifestations in general.”57 The installation consisted of two Penetráveis: PN2 A Pureza é um Mito (PN2 Purity is a Myth), a square cabin stenciled with the text “Purity is a Myth” and accessed via a single, outward-­ swinging door; and PN3 Imagétical, a small labyrinth made from the printed fabric and wooden frames typical of favela construction (fig. 2.21). A connected television was situated at the center of this second Penetrável, and the two structures were surrounded by sand, gravel paths, plants, and a cage with two live macaws. Like Brasília, Tropicália employed a symbolic repertoire of forms in service of elucidating Brazilian identity: the sand of the beach, the gravel and uneven topography of hills and construction sites, the tropical plants of the jungle, the bricolaged architecture of the favelas. In contrast to Brasília’s emblem of the airplane, which posited identity from the province of technology and instantaneous optical control, Tropicália’s synecdochal fragments constituted a “condensation of real places” that accumulated over time.58 This accumulation, further, was intimate and bodily, as the labyrinth’s passages were large enough for only one person at a time. Yet the image, too, was central to Tropicália. Allegorical in nature, the installation deployed representation and reference in equal measure, acting in complex tension with the nonrepresentational axioms of constructive art. Most dramatically, Tropicália placed the networked entity of the television at the center of its symbolic repertoire, where the continuity of the viewer’s embodied experience was displaced by the technology’s spewing images. For Oiticica, who described these fragmented images as coming out “as if they were sitting on your lap,” the television’s metaimage of vision became a palpable, tangible

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Fig. 2.21 Hélio Oiticica, Tropicália, Penetráveis PN2 and PN3, 1967. Oil on wood, printed and unprinted plastic, wool fabric, wood, TV, burlap. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

­ ensation. It “devoured” the viewer by appropriating and reproducing his or s her sensory capacities, thereby creating a perceptual division from the self.59 As a national allegory, this anthropophagic core was Tropicália’s logical fulcrum. Not only was Brazil’s first television station, TV Tupí, named after the same indigenous peoples who had supposedly ingested the Bishop Sardinha in 1556, Brasília’s pilot plan also traced a straight line from the powers of state at the head of the monumental axis to the soaring television tower at its far end. As its planners recognized, television was a potent tool of ideological dissemination that might integrate the country’s heterogeneous regions and large disenfranchised populations while producing a reliable consumer base. In the hands of the new military dictatorship, television offered an ominously efficient means of propaganda and self-­regulating disciplinary control.60 If the physical architecture of the television tower provided an image of the planned city from above—­ reiterating Brasília’s coincidence with the pictorial logic of its plan—­the tower’s capacity for transmission incorporated all those who had been physically and symbolically excised from the capital itself.61 Oiticica’s Tropicália involuted this intensely problematic figure of integrative communication deep within a labyrinthine favela construction. By lowering it from sky to ground, it acted as the anthropophagic implosion of Brasília’s national allegory and an experiential inversion of its developmentalist aims. In a penetrating 1970 article assessing culture in the first four years of the military dictatorship, the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz evaluated tropicalismo, a music and fashion trend loosely inspired by Oiticica’s 1967 work, in strikingly similar terms to Pedrosa’s analysis of Brasília’s juxtaposition of the modern plane and colonial cross.62 For Schwarz, the “tropicalist” effect depended on a montage of old and new: the ultramodern technology of the television seated in the “underdeveloped” construction of a favela shack, for example, or the mixing of rural Brazilian folk music with the latest electronic pop. Whereas developmentalist ideology held that modernity would eventually overcome such anachronisms, Schwarz countered that they were in fact the result of modernity—­specifically, Brazil’s historically unequal integration within the global market as suppliers of raw material and cheap labor. The resulting social and economic backwardness, Schwarz argued, “reproduces itself, instead of canceling itself out.”63 In submitting the resulting anachronisms to “the white light of modernity,” the cultural trend of tropicalismo transformed Brazil’s “failed attempt at national modernization” into an allegorical emblem.64 Viewed through this lens, Tropicália’s piercing analysis of underdevelopment offered little in the way of egress or emancipatory release. Unlike the centrifugal expansion of the spiral drawing that began this chapter, Tropicália swallows the viewer and curls inwards towards its anthropophagic center, where consumption by the technological image is the only relief. If in the early 1960s the Neoconcrete non-­object posed the possibility of engaging with social space through such strategies as the fold, this social space was firmly lodged inside the work of art by 1967, troubling it from within. Although MAM-­RJ continued to host a number of exhibitions and activities associated with experimental Brazilian art through the late 1960s and 1970s,

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Nova Objetividade Brasileira was arguably the last moment in which the legacy of constructive art—­with its specific reverberations with Brazilian develop­ mentalism—­served as the basis for the museum’s alliance with the avant-­garde. As the military dictatorship took up the mantle of development and industrialization, the museum’s foundational tenets were increasingly difficult to extract from the propaganda needs of the repressive, nationalistic state. Shortly after Nova Objetividade Brasileira, Oiticica and several others closely associated with the exhibition released a statement entitled “Declaração de princípios básicos da vanguarda” (Declaration of the Basic Principles of the Vanguard) in the news­ paper Jornal do Comércio. Among other items, they declared “the necessity to denounce all that has become institutionalized, as such a process implies the very negation of the vanguard.”65 Implicitly rejected in this statement was the version of developmental modernity that conceived of Brazilian avant-­ garde art as itself an institutional aim.

The Cell and the Plan In his 1958 essay on Brasília, “Utopia—­Work of Art,” Pedrosa noted two kinds of utopia: the critical utopia and the positivist utopia, the latter of which creates “a world in miniature, although complete.”66 Doubtless, Brasília was a positivist utopia. Although it was not in miniature, its scale was internally calibrated, its borders closed, and its forms permanently tethered to the iconographic symbolism of its plan. To “construct following a plan,” Pedrosa wrote, is a “distinctly modern pleasure” that embodies the capacity for human action, aesthetic realization, and social collectivity.67 Yet, as he warned, plans do not always transform into living entities and can instead calcify into armatures that are static and dead. Looking back on the project of Brazilian modernization, it is clear that utopias can also be plans paralyzed by their future tense. In 1969, Oiticica created an ambitious environmental work for his retro­ spective exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in London titled Eden (fig. 2.22). Eden was a critical utopia: a temporary paradise that responded to the social and political failures that modernist projects such as Brasília had come to represent. It neither created a world in miniature nor modeled a finished utopia. Instead, it hypostatized the plan, that representational figure most implicated in the modern project of developmentalism. Rather than referring to a project to be realized, Eden’s plan was self-­reflexive, thereby short-­circuiting the problem of referentiality that plagued official projects such as Brasília as well as Oiticica’s own Tropicália. Unlike those projects, Eden refused overt iconographies such as airplanes, crosses, or even favela shacks that imputed allegorical meaning upon form. Instead, it invoked the abstract concept of utopia directly by virtue its name.68 Not surprisingly, the Biblical Eden’s idyllic and paradisiacal qualities have often been read onto the work, commencing with Oiticica’s own casting of Eden as an “experimental campus,” a “mythical place for feelings, for acting, for ­making things and constructing one’s own interior cosmos.”69 For Oiticica, who was reading Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization at the time, Eden was an

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Fig. 2.22 Hélio Oiticica, “The Eden Plan,” published in catalogue for Whitechapel Experience, April 1969. Courtesy of White­ chapel Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery Archive, and Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

en­vironment for the reawakening and discharge of creative energies suppressed by contemporary society.70 With its tented wading pools, mattresses, incense, and clustered nests, it offered barefoot participants a haven for “creleisure and circulations.” “Creleisure,” a neologism formed from the Portuguese words criar (to create, to raise), crer (to believe), and lazer (leisure) and the English words “­ create” and “leisure,” was Oiticica’s nonrepressive, noninstrumentalized notion of play (fig. 2.23).71 Against the backdrop of Brazil’s increasingly brutal military dictatorship and the exile of many intellectuals and activists (Pedrosa, Gullar, and soon Oiticica, among them), Eden’s artificial paradise thus functioned as a critical utopia whose behavioral freedoms threw their repression at home into sharp relief. Yet alternate worlds have their limits as modes of political and theoretical intervention, not least because they are temporary and coherent only so far as they remain sequestered within a real or imagined frame. Indeed, to understand Eden purely as a bounded utopia is to revert to the paradox of Mondrian’s stepped-­out frames and their truncated dream of a total environment.72 Yet if Brasília and Brazil’s larger experiment in developmental modernity offered a lesson to modernists such as Oiticica, it was that anticipation itself was a weighted ideological device. As Marcuse argued, it was part and parcel of a ­structure of deferral innate to the notion of progress and thus inextricable from the repressions imposed in its name. What would it mean, then, to construct a utopian environment that did not evoke “a possible future world” but, as the poet Waly Salomão wrote of Eden, presented “a perceptive filter on the existing world” that was affective and effective at the same time?73

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Fig. 2.23 Hélio Oiticica, Visitors in Eden, Whitechapel Gallery, 1969. Photo by John Goldblatt. Courtesy of Whitechapel Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery Archive, and Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Excavating Eden’s “perceptive filter”—­its epistemological intervention, its ability to fold inside worlds around the pivots of outside space—­demands that we treat the work neither as an attempt to image utopia, as per Brasília’s iconographic mode, nor as the temporary enactment of such a utopia through iso­lation and containment. It also requires that we dispense with the weary opposition between object and sensation that has calcified around discourses of experimental art of the time. Instead, I want to suggest that Eden’s political critique is cogently and radically located in its form—­specifically, its function as a diagram, that is, a legible matrix of dynamic relations. Diagrams demonstrate, but they also perform.74 As such, their virtuality is distinct from that of the N ­ eoconcrete non-­ object, which negotiated between aesthetic and actual space. Instead, diagrams concern the operational coincidence of the real and the abstract. As a diagram, Eden allowed for that vexed figure of modernism’s develop­mental aims—­the plan—­to be translated into a social field.

* Although Eden was only realized in February 1969 at his retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, Oiticica first conceived of the work in early 1967 while in correspondence with the British curator Guy Brett, whom he had met in Rio in 1965 together with Paul Keeler, codirector of the London-­based gallery Signals.75 Keeler invited Oiticica to have a solo show at Signals soon after their meeting, and works had already been shipped to London when the gallery closed in 1966. Brett subsequently pursued organizing an expanded version of the exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, and discussions between himself and Oiticica continued by letter over the next two years. At the same time, Oiticica was consumed with Tropicália and debates around Nova Objetividade Brasileira. Although Schwarz’s analysis of tropicalismo did not appear until 1970, Oiticica had already begun to distance himself from the pop-­ cultural trend. In a March 1968 statement, he attempted to clarify the experiential aspects of his environment over and above its iconographic images.76 He had also begun to rethink one of the central problems shared by Brasília and tropicalismo: their static juxtaposition of the so-­called “archaic” (or under­developed) and the modern. As a result, Oiticica’s evocation of the architecture of the favelas began to shift from its visual qualities to a principle of organic growth that fixed images could not provide. In early 1967, he had conceived of a communal space for ­creleisure called Barracão (Shack), which was to be constructed according to the aggregate, extendable principles of the favelas.77 With this in mind, Oiticica began his first studies for Eden four months after Nova Objetividade Brasileira closed. The first drawing, from October 4, 1967, is labeled “Células” (Cells) and is a series of studies on the bisection of squares (fig. 2.24). Here Oiticica appears to be interested in how the square can function as both a self-­enclosed and a self-­ generating form. In 1958, Clark’s Ovo Linear had already cast the trope of germination as a zone of contact between interior and exterior space (fig. 1.20). While

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this work brilliantly figured the rupture with the frame, its geometry was not functionally reproductive, and as early as 1961, Oiticica noted that it was a ninety degree rotation of the square that allowed Clark to move from the Unidades and Ovo Linear to spatial works such as her Casulos and Bichos (fig. 2.25).78 In his first 1967 Eden drawing, Oiticica likewise shifted the square’s orientation to a diamond. He further bisected it on the diagonal, thereby endowing the otherwise stable form with the ability to propagate new squares. These bisecting lines create generative stems: triangular fragments that invite completion through the drawing of a new square, and then another and another, according to the principle of cellular growth. Because the diagonal of a square is incrementally larger than the length any of its sides, it likewise injects a possibility of growth within a proliferating structure in terms of absolute size.79 Moreover, since the diagonal is directly proportional to these sides, this measure of growth is motivated, rather than arbitrary. Edge and diagonal are thus self-­same and self-­differing, enacting the fundamental logic of the fold as a play of proportions diagrammed in two-­ dimensional space.

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Fig. 2.24 Hélio Oiticica, “Células” study for Eden, October 4, 1967. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica. Fig. 2.25 Hélio Oiticica, diary entry, August 13, 1961. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Fig. 2.26 Hélio Oiticica, study for Eden, October 5, 1967. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica. Fig. 2.27 Hélio Oiticica, studies for Eden, October 6, 1967. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

2.26

Like the drawing of spiraling squares that began this chapter, the October 4 drawing appears to be a purely formal exercise with no particular work as a reference or aim. This holds too for a drawing from the following day, also marked “Eden,” but now on graph paper (fig. 2.26). The generative fragment identified the day before is now tied to a readymade gridded matrix and functions as the basic module to demarcate a series of rectangular shapes distributed across the page. This technique is repeated in two drawings completed the day after: the arrangement and number of rectangular forms is simplified and reduced in the drawing marked “1st part,” while two new forms appear in the drawing marked “2nd part”: a circle that recalls the initial rupture of Clark’s Ovo Linear and a triangle that replicates Oiticica’s own generative fragment (fig. 2.27). Scale is also introduced into the October 6 drawings—­three squares to one meter—­suggesting for the first time that the drawn geometries imply the projection of physical forms in actual space. Unlike in the maquette for Projeto Cães de Caça on display that same month in Rio, the artist’s early drawings for Eden favor basic geometric forms over labyrinthine structures of nested space. Although the scalar key establishes them as particular instantiations of size, the forms are still generalized, absolute. The fragment established in the October 4 drawing is geometrically equivalent to the large triangle in the second October 6 drawing, just as the single unit of the grid is the same as any square made from its components. Therefore, within the two dimensions of the plan, there is a strong reciprocity between part and whole that binds the projected structures both to the grid from which they derive and to the generative fragment of cellular growth, no matter what their scale. These drawings establish Eden first and foremost as a spatial environment developed out of the conditions of the two-­dimensional plan.

2.27

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In early 1968, Oiticica returned to his ideas to Eden, writing to Brett of his intention to make a series of Penetráveis consisting of “cabins that comport one person at a time.” He also described his idea for Barracão, noting that it would be “a kind of wood house as in the ‘favelas’ where people would feel it were ‘his place’ (or their place).”80 Although Barracão was never realized in Rio, the one-­person cabins Oiticica conceived for Eden are metonyms of this idea (fig. 2.28). Most importantly, these cabins also provided the module by which to translate Eden’s two-­dimensional plan into real, three-­dimensional space. As seen in the October drawings, the initial studies for Eden were worked out using the grid as their base. Adjusting these forms to scale at two dimensions did not alter the basic reciprocity between part and whole that structured the early drawings. But adjusting them to three dimensions was another matter, as it had to take into account the discrepancy between oblong human form and the cubiform space of the grid. The one-­person cabins, which Oiticica began to refer to as “cells” or “nests,” thus established a motivated spatial module that took the body as its elemental unit of size. As a subsequent suite of drawings and notations from 1968 suggest, this roughly 2 x 1 x 1 meter module provided a basis for the majority of other

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Fig. 2.28 Hélio Oiticica, studies for Nest-­Cells, 1968. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica. Fig. 2.29 Hélio Oiticica, study of structures for Eden, 1968. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Fig. 2.30 Hélio Oiticica, Eden, 1969. Installation view, Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, October 22, 2005–­January 8, 2006. Photo by Michal Raz-­Russo. Photo © Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

­ tructures in the final Eden plan (fig. 2.29). The module could be horizontal (as in s the six “nest-­cells” and Bed Bolide); vertical (as in the Cannabiana and Lololiana cabins); multiplied by two on the horizontal but confined to the plan (as in the straw and sand Area Bolides); multiplied by four on the vertical but rising to a pyramid (as in the Caetano-­Gil Tent); or used as the rotating radius of a circle to carve out a cylindrical space (as in the Myth-­Opened Area). In fact, rotating Eden’s plan forty-­five degrees and dropping down a line equivalent to the length or breadth of this basic module—­as per the operation of the generative diagonal in Oiticica’s first “Cells” drawing—­results in an axonometric projection that closely describes nearly all of the prismatic volumes in the realized work.81 ­Subtle variations in the measurements provide visual complexity and enact the incremental growth suggested by Oiticica’s first drawing of generative cells. Nevertheless, Eden is fundamentally a series of spatial containers marked out within a three-­dimensional grid based on rectangular parallelepiped units calibrated to the human body (fig. 2.30). Just as the form of the body provides the content by which to determine the scale of Eden’s plan, the body is quite literally the content of its forms. Nowhere is this reciprocity more evident than in a photo­graph taken during the deinstallation of the Whitechapel show, in which Eden is stripped to a scaffold that nakedly frames the body itself (fig. 2.31).

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In this literalization of the body as content, Eden departs from two earlier formulations of the relationship between the body and sculptural form—­Lygia Pape’s Concrete and Neoconcrete ballets of the late 1950s and Robert Morris’s earliest experiments with minimalist form in the mid-­1960s, both of which revolved around the perception of Gestalt shape. Scored in 1958 to a poem by Reynaldo Jardim, Pape’s first ballet involved eight dancers sheathed within rigid cylindrical or parallelepiped encasements that could be smoothly displaced around the stage with the help of rollers (fig. 2.32).82 Because the dancers’ bodies were completely hidden from view, the play of abstract geometric forms dissolved any sense of bodily scale. The choreographed merging and splitting of simple Gestalt shapes encouraged an exploration of the body as a motor devoid of reference to its figural form. It further pressed on this abstraction to such a degree that the body essentially vaporized as an independent entity. Robert Morris’s first explorations of the reductive shapes that would later characterize his minimalist sculpture, meanwhile, were in dance works such as his 1961 Column (fig. 2.33). For this work, he stood within a rectangular plywood box for three and a half minutes, then forced it to topple onto its side, where it remained for another three and a half minutes before the lights went out.83 If Pape’s ballets animated geometry with organic human motility, Column explored the degree to which implied bodily presence could approximate the inertness of a thing.84 In subsequent sculptural works, Morris’s emphasis on strong Gestalt shapes endowed his forms with the insistent literalness that became the hallmark of minimalism. Yet by calibrating the size of these forms to what he in

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Fig. 2.31 Hélio Oiticica during deinstallation of Eden, White­ chapel Gallery, 1969. Photo by Jorge Lewinski. Private collection © The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth/Bridgeman ­Images. Permissions courtesy of Whitechapel Gallery, White­ chapel Gallery Archive, and Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Fig. 2.32 Lygia Pape, Balé Concreto with poem by Reynaldo Jardim, 1958, illustrated in Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, August 31, 1958. Courtesy of Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação do Jornal do Brasil and Projeto Lygia Pape.

1966 called “the constant” of the human body, Morris established a complex homology that the critic Michael Fried decried as “anthropomorphic” in his classic essay “Art and Objecthood.”85 If Morris’s recourse to Gestalt was intended to underscore the exteriority, uniformity, and constancy of his sculptural form, Fried countered that the works’ scale lent them the sensation of having an “inside” that, laced with a “latent or hidden naturalism,” was both theatrical and regressive in import.86 In Oiticica’s Eden, the body is an explicit rather than latent content. This is evident in both the work’s participatory nature (the constitutive circulation of actual bodies versus the performative witnessing of implied bodies) as well as its structural generation (the pegging of volumetric extensions to the body-­sized nest module). Unlike Pape’s ballets and Morris’s sculptures, Eden depends on the viewer’s ability to physically access the work’s interior spaces. Despite the predominance of simple prismatic shapes, the tight clustering of forms into groups and the reed mats of the “taba division” that enclose and encircle the environment as a whole mean that a participant does not walk around Eden’s forms so much as enter within them. Much like PN1, in which the overhead matrix is “absorbed” by the Penetrável’s sides, perception of Gestalt form occurs by means of internal structure rather than external shape. In Eden, however, this matrix operates from the ground up, rather than from top down, thereby making explicit reference to the graphical and architectural logic of the plan. Herein lies another key distinguishing feature of Eden. Because the body provides the basic scalar unit of Eden’s virtual grid, the work’s full-­scale realization also functions as its own plan at 1:1 scale. This reciprocity collapses the

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Fig. 2.33 Robert Morris, Column (Two Positions), 1961 (executed 1972). Photo courtesy of Castelli Gallery, New York. Photo © Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

plan’s normal projective function inwards. In conventional architectural usage, a plan provides a scaled two-­dimensional footprint of a projected three-­ dimensional form. The three-­dimensional character of this form, however, requires additional drawings (such as sections) or models to indicate the contours and vertical extension of the proposed construction. By contrast, Eden offers what we might call a three-­dimensional plan: a form whose three-­ dimensionality is almost entirely determined by its two-­dimensional footprint. Since the body is the basic scalar unit of projection of Eden’s two-­dimensional plan, its three-­dimensional realization materializes this projecting function by virtue of its minimum constraint. And because its cabins and nests reiterate their formal configuration as three-­dimensional extensions of basic geometric shapes, Eden operates as its own plan. Its viewer, meanwhile, resolves his or

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her sensory experience of these forms into simple two-­dimensional imprints as he or she “penetrates” the plan. The result is a suspended temporality innate to the structure. This temporality departs from the event-­based span of Pape’s ballets as well as the affectless duration that Fried condemned in minimalist sculpture. Most significantly, however, it reconfigures the future tense that shadowed the project of Brazilian modernity at large. “Creleisure,” Oiticica’s practice of “not occupying a specific place, in space and time,” emerges here as a temporal function of Eden’s structure—­a specific and pointed intervention within the historical determinants of the plan.87 In an interview conducted in London during the Whitechapel exhibition, Oiticica noted that Tropicália functioned as a map: “It’s a map of Rio and it’s a map of my imagination. It’s a map that you go into.”88 In Eden, Oiticica adopted this notion of mapping but, importantly, dispensed with its referent. The work no longer operated emblematically, per the metonym of favela construction in Tropicália. Nor did it model a projected form in another scale, as did Projeto Cães de Caça and even Brasília, both of which remained haunted by the promise of future worlds. Instead, Eden mapped nothing but itself and provided no other utopia than its own contingency as a plan. By turning self-­referential a referential medium par excellence, Eden converted the modernist dream of the self-­ presence of the sign into a diagrammatic system.

Diagram In his writings on the sign, Charles Sanders Peirce described the diagram as an “icon of intelligible relations,” as its parts directly correlate to those of its referent despite a lack of visual resemblance.89 A plan is an ideal diagram—­it charts the relations between architectural elements at fully realized scale by way of analogous marks on a page. The drawn plan of Eden included in the Whitechapel catalogue exists in precisely this diagrammatic relation to the realized work. Yet Eden also operates as its own plan in real dimension. In order to unpack the implications, I turn to Haroldo de Campos’s 1977 essay “Ideograma, Anagrama, Diagrama: Uma Leitura de Fenollosa,” in which the poet and theorist wrote of the diagram as “a small map or topological graph.”90 As we shall see, by suturing together the real and virtual constraints of the plan, Eden’s diagrammatic modality also functioned as a map of a social field. De Campos, we will remember from chapter 1, spurred the break of the Concrete and Neoconcrete groups with the 1957 polemic “Da Fenomenologia da Composição à Matemática da Composição” (From the Phenomenology of Composition to the Mathematics of Composition).91 Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, his production ranged from poetry and criticism to linguistic theory and translation, in the last instance translating Ezra Pound’s Cantos into Portuguese.92 An interest in Pound’s “ideogrammatic” method of composition led de Campos to revisit Ernest Fenollosa’s essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium of Poetry,” published posthumously by Pound in 1916. In this much-­ disputed essay, Fenollosa argued that unlike alphabetic writing, Chinese written

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characters derive essentially from pictographs and thus offer a motivated basis for language. Fenollosa’s essay has been heavily criticized for its naïve and exoticizing interpretation of Sinological languages. As de Campos wrote, “In the Fenollosian reading, ideograms fundamentally submerge their roots . . . in a quasi-­paradisiacal arche-­history,” an idealized linguistic utopia in which “words reverberated with the halo of things.”93 Treating language as a “mirror of nature” rather than cultural convention, such an Edenic notion of language is radically at odds with Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the arbitrary nature of the sign, also published posthumously in 1916.94 Yet for de Campos, Fenollosa’s theory of the ideogram had a latent structuralist character. He thus reread the Fenollosian ideogram by way of Roman Jakobson’s distinction between the communicative and poetic functions of language.95 Jakobson argued that poetry foregrounds language’s materiality over and above its instrumentality. Moreover, it does this through syntax—­the paratactic and differential relations between and within words. To use one of de Castro’s ­examples, poetic language allows one to attend to the repetition of the word astro (star) in desastrado (disastrous). This aural and visual resonance—­astro ­desastrado—­in turn produces additional layers of meaning, such as the idea of a star-­crossed fate. Put another way, it is the material relations between words that generate poetic form more than the words themselves. For de Campos, this reading permitted Fenollosa’s argument concerning the ideogram’s motivated semiotic character to be understood in terms of a relational process rather than the strict correspondence between word and thing. Here, Peirce’s formulation of the diagram as an “icon of relations” is particularly relevant, for it locates motivation not in terms of intrinsic identity, but within the analogous operations of what de Campos called “structural metaphor.”96 Such analogies would seem to recall the old isomorphic model of Concrete art examined in chapter 1. Yet in his 1977 essay, de Campos shifted emphasis to the relationality of the linguistic elements at hand. He thus foregrounded trans­ formation and translation rather than equivalence and simultaneity. In so doing, he was able to transpose Fenollosa’s pictorial reading of the ideogram into the phonetic syntax of alphabetic languages. This in turn converted a paradisiacal vision of communication into the materiality of ordinary words and speech. Returning to Eden, we can now understand that the diagram is not a fixed formal configuration but rather a dynamic vehicle of translation between distinct modalities of form (fig. 2.34). Eden’s full-­scale realization reiterates its plan, as its simple three-­dimensional structures are volumetric extensions of their shapes in two dimensions. The scale and shape of these structures are in turn determined by translating the abstract modules of a two-­dimensional grid into real, three-­dimensional space by way of parallelepiped, human-­scaled nest-­cells. A series of simple geometric shapes motivated by the two-­dimensional grid, as we saw in Oiticica’s early studies of the triangular fragment, are transformed into corresponding three-­dimensional structures motivated by the fixed form of the human body. The full-­scale realization of Eden thus diagrams the process of its translation from two dimensions into three. In a procreative act of unfolding,

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Fig. 2.34 Hélio Oiticica, View of Eden, White­chapel Gallery, 1969. Courtesy of White­chapel Gallery, White­chapel Gallery Archive, and Projeto Hélio ­Oiticica.

each shape cleaves away from the surface of the plane as if to torque the generative diagonal of the earliest “Células” drawing upwards. This operation does not dispense with the abstraction of the plan and all of its institutional, historical, epistemological weight. Instead, it indexically ­re­inscribes it in space as a behavioral rather than static structure. Because the body is the means of this reinscription, the abstraction of the plan is routed through its corporeal specificity, rendering plano as planta at each moment of generative unfolding. Here we can also distinguish Oiticica’s Eden from Robert Smithson’s concept of non-­site, a key contemporaneous articulation of three-­ dimensional diagrammatic form. In works in which elements such as rocks from a given physical site were configured in a gallery alongside fragmented maps of that very site, displacement gave rise to what the American artist described as a “three-­dimensional logical picture.”97 Whereas Smithson’s site/non-­site dialectic materialized the absence and incommensurability that lies between analogous relations, Eden’s remarking of the plan within its own three-­dimensional space—­ folding it upwards through the medium of the body—­reiterated the mutual presence of these parts. In this reinscription of the plan’s presence within each of its structures, Eden displaced the single point of origin that undergirds the Biblical narrative of creation, in turn echoed in the symbolic crossing of Brasília’s plan.98 In its place, it inaugurated a multitude of heterogeneous acts of embodied inception at the level of structural generation and visitor experience alike. As a plethora of pencil-­ drawn arrows on Oiticica’s drawing “the Eden plan” indicate, the environment solicits the circulation of its participants within and between its various structures, reactivating and reimagining their formal emergence from within the virtual matrix of the grid (fig. 2.22). Eden thus not only hypostatizes the projec-

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tive tense of the plan and, with it, the plan’s ideological complicity within the developmentalist project. It also diagrams the translation of the plan’s abstract conditionality into an environment determined by human form, exchanging the nonplace of an imagined utopia with an earthly paradise continually remade through its inhabitants’ use. The aggregate structures of human-­scaled modules are thus both containers for the participating subject and diagrams for how he or she enters into community through the group—­becoming two, three, or four subjects, clustering in a group of six, adding, subtracting, circulating, and forming anew (fig. 2.35).

Chapter Two The Cell and the Plan

Fig. 2.35 Hélio Oiticica, Visitors in Eden, Whitechapel Gallery, 1969. Courtesy of White­ chapel Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery Archive and Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

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Indeed, the triangular generative stem first identified in Oiticica’s early drawings resurfaces in the final plan in the form of the cabin door. As an architectural feature, the door initiates circulation when rotated from a closed recti­linear orientation to the open orientation of the diagonal. Once identified, one can see that this generative principle is writ large in the plan, as rectilinear forms cleave away from one another along diagonal forty-­five degree pivots before settling in the gesture of opening itself. Comparing Eden’s plan to ­Oiticica’s Metaesquemas, Relevos Espaciais, and NC1 Pequeno Núcleo, one sees that these openings harness the spatial and communicative complexity of the painterly fold towards a newly social, inhabitable space. Likewise, if Clark’s Ovo Linear modeled the spilling of the pictorial into real space, this threshold between work and world is literalized in the circular Myth-­Opened Area in ­Oiticica’s Eden. The break of the frame is now the aperture by which the subject enters and exits a space of gathering or solitude. It is a hinge that interfaces between the autonomy of the individual and the intersubjective flux of the social world. This internally rotated hinge is repeated in the gently-­arched joints of the “taba division” that encloses the environment as a whole, as if to gesture to the expansion of the work’s temporary aggregates and collectivities beyond the confines of the gallery. This suggests yet another circular enclosure that opens out into an even larger Eden, and then another—­radiating outwards like the spiraling squares described at the beginning of this chapter. The macro, indeed global, scale of this concentric expansion is dizzying, as are the implications of its multiple Edens, each one nested within the other and internally calibrated to its own generative nest-­cell. As a figure of scalar expansion, however, this internally rotated hinge—­like Eden as a whole—­operates diagrammatically rather than pictorially. In this, it is an epistemological model of how a social field behaves rather than an image of its form. Here Oiticica’s title for Myth-­Opened Area is significant, as his conception of myth was indebted to Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. For Cassirer, symbolic forms such as science and myth are modes of worldmaking—­“configurations towards being,” as he put it— ­that form the conceptual building blocks for generating human experience and meaning.99 The worlds constructed by symbolic forms are not alternatives to one single, “real” world. Instead, they are multiple actual worlds that structure and constitute perception as such. In locating Eden’s radial expansion in the zone of contact first modeled in Clark’s Ovo Linear, Oiticica’s Myth-­Opened Area proposed its own social and sensorial porosity as an embodied threshold—­one capable of reconfiguring perceptual topographies well beyond its physical frame.

Sub——— After his Whitechapel show and a series of trips to New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, Oiticica found himself back in London. “i have no place in the world,” he wrote on August 27, 1969, followed by the rhetorical question “Where is Brazil?”100 This statement and its reverberating query articulate the

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complex geopolitics of Eden’s diagrammatic form. Although the statement sounds a melancholic note of displacement while emphatically rejecting the tethering of identity to nation or place, the corresponding query indicates a desire to locate “Brazil” as a conceptual, rather than geographical, site. In these twin utterances, Oiticica negotiated between the historical specificity of his own trajectory—­rooted in the “constructive will” of the Brazilian avant-­garde—­and the increasingly urgent necessity to operate both physically and conceptually outside of the confines of the nation-­state. Eden is situated at the convergence of these two concerns. While its suspension of time and place emerged as part and parcel of its hypostatization of the modernist, developmentalist plan, Oiticica also imputed its contradictory quality of displacement-­as-­emplacement to his newly nomadic status as a global citizen. Tellingly, Oiticica ended his August 27 text by invoking Barracão, the proposal for a cellular structure inspired by the favelas that first gave rise to Eden’s nest-­cells. For Oiticica, who repeatedly returned to questions of propagation and the exportability of his propositions around this time, the cell came to encapsulate both the potentiality of community and the unpredictability of free individual behavior. The former was suggested in the cell’s proliferating form, and the latter in its content. As he wrote on September 18, 1969, “[the] cell, that which self-­ multiplies the unknown, the nonformulated, as how could I formulate individual behavior? . . . I make the cell-­matrix of Barracão; but it is its own behavior and growth that will form the mother cell . . .”101 In short, the cell was the basis for organic growth capable of extending beyond a given matrix. But it was also a formal solution for shifting the agency and character of this expansion to the work’s participants. Viewed through this lens, Eden’s six nest-­cells are nodes of proliferation that condensed the conceptual import of the environment—­with its basic reciprocity between the body and containing shelter—­into an elementarized, generative stem that could propagate in other circumstances. And propagate they did—­in the Nests Oiticica constructed at the University of Sussex in late 1969, at the Information exhibition at MoMA in New York in 1970, and in the Babylonests he constructed in his New York loft in 1971 (fig. 2.36). These subsequent iterations of Eden’s cells demonstrate a fundamentally different relationship to form than earlier experiments such as the Nuclei. Exhibiting a formal and scalar plenitude complete in themselves, these earlier works created a virtual space nominally distinct from the quotidian space of the viewer. By contrast, Oiticica’s cellular matrices proffer real space in a fundamentally virtual form—­one that functions as an open stem or generative fragment but proposes no fixed configuration in itself. By the time the nests appeared in New York in Information, they were immediately legible as a proposal about the construction of social space rather than a discrete sculptural form. Vito Acconci, who also participated in the exhibition, remarked that the cellular structures offered the remarkable sensation of being both alone and together, of imagining a public space out of a series of private spaces and refusing to see those two spaces as mutually exclusive.102 The abstraction of the original cellular matrix in Eden—­its simple grid of nests, the semitransparent curtains that continue this

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Fig. 2.36 Hélio Oiticica, Nests, installation view of the exhibition information, The ­Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 2, 1970 through ­September 20, 1970. Photo by ­Ronald Cultone. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art. Licensed by SCALA /A   rt ­Resource, NY. Courtesy of ­Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

grid upwards (thereby realizing a series of virtual vertical planes), even the netted texture of these curtains, which in turn repeat the grid in miniature—­thus anticipate both the iterability of the concept and the possibility of a public perceiving and sensing itself into being, irrespective of locale. In a telegram of March 1, 1970, to Oiticica concerning his upcoming participation in Information, MoMA curator Kynaston McShine wrote simply “think tropicalia.”103 Oiticica’s choice to forego the iconographic and allegorical aspects of that previous environment in favor of the stripped-­down, highly reductive forms of the Nests indicates the shift in his thinking in these years. His text for the catalogue underscores this point, commencing with the unequivocal statement “i am not here representing brazil; or representing anything else: the

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ideas of representing-­representation-­etc. are over.”104 Yet this is hardly to say that the conceptual entity “Brazil” evoked in his text of August 27 the year before had disappeared. Indeed, Oiticica ended the catalogue text by noting that his ­proposals could be “exported” as a “plan for a practice” as part of what he called ­“subterrania: an open plan that can be expanded, gr o o o ow .”105 This concept—­“subterrânia”—­first emerged in a diary entry of September 21, 1969, that concerned the notion of a Brazilian or Latin American “underground,” a term that had been recently adopted by young Brazilian directors working in marginal cinema.106 In this text, Oiticica recast the importation of countercultural lingo through consideration of a wider set of conditions inflecting artistic production in “sub” (meaning “under” or “less than” in Portuguese) zones like Latin America. Foregoing the English term “underground,” Oiticica wrote instead of “subterrânia,” which he defined as “the glorification of sub activity.”107 As he elaborated, “subterranean” is not “something eccentric or formal: a new kind of vanguard . . . [it] is a condition, just as being here cannot be the same as being over there; the positions are radically different.”108 In short, “subterranean” production acknowledged its historical and geographic specificity not as a limit but as a generating force (fig. 2.37).

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Fig. 2.37 Hélio Oiticica, “Subterrânia,” September 21 and October 29, 1969. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

In an entry of a month later designated “Subterrânia 2,” Oiticica used the prefix “sub” as a generative root for a list of words including subdesenvolvido (underdeveloped), subverter (subvert), subir (ascend), and submergir (submerge).109 In this poem-­list, the prefix “sub” functions much like the triangular fragment in the preliminary Eden drawings. It is a propagating stem for words whose material qualities and meanings reverberate according to the differential, paratactic syntax described by de Campos in his essay on Fenollosa. Analogous to the cabin doors of Eden, whose pivoting hinges open closed modules into space, “sub” acts as a linguistic fold that allows for the potentially infinite modification of content and form. As a proxy for underdevelopment in general, “sub” is here the engine of its recreation. Oiticica’s concept of “subterrânia” is complexly related to the notion of construction that permeates Brazilian modernity. If developmentalism consistently sought out the optical omniscience of the view from above in order to image modernity’s triumphant realization, “subterrânia” proceeds from the ground, indeed, all that is low and lying down, per the horizontal orientation of the nest-­ cell and its solicitation of leisure, laziness, and play. Yet Oiticica’s deployment of the marginal and the subterranean does not enact a wholesale disintegration of meaning.110 It is fundamentally constructive in its epistemological orientation and looks to the “underdeveloped” to produce worlds. In so doing, the abstract and idealized figure of the grid first conceptualized as a generating device in the overhead ceiling of NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 is pulled down to the ground in Eden. Eschewing the virtual realm of the mirror, this newly material and corporeal matrix rises upwards, as if from the roots of a plant.111 “Subterrânia”’s critique of modernity thus radically refigures the developmental, casting it under the sign of organic emergence rather than institutional control. We see this convergence of the subterranean and the constructive in a photograph taken in Eden that shows visitors interacting with Oiticica’s B36 Bólide 19 Apropriação 1 (B36 Bolide 19 Appropriation 1, 1966) (fig. 2.38). This work consists of a handbarrow filled with gravel like those commonly used in Brazil for construction. Its cubic volume literalizes the abstract unit of the plan’s virtual grid: the square matrix that undergirds every (official) act of construction.112 Its animation as an interactive sculpture, meanwhile, requires the participation of at least two subjects who, grasping the object’s handles, lift the unit upwards and shift its location in space. The movement of this unit of matter from the ground and into space by way of two coordinating bodies—­the most elemental unit of a social collective—­plots Eden’s transformation from an abstract plan into an environment constructed through human use. Because it appropriates not simply the material object of the handbarrow but also its corresponding activity of work, it also complexly refigures the act of construction.113 The rough-­hewn materials and rudimentary technology index underdevelopment and the conditions of manual labor. Stripped of its normative function and repurposed within the framework of “creleisure,” this labor becomes legible as a constitutive social performance, a collaborative action whose constructive aspect Brazilian modernity all but ignored.

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Fig. 2.38 Hélio Oiticica, B36 Bólide 19 Apropriação 1, 1966. Wood and gravel, 148 x 32 x 23.8 cm. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

* To conclude this chapter, I want to return to the institution: the effective medium of the Brazilian modern project and, as such, an embodiment of both its aspirations and its flaws. On July 8, 1978, the exhibition block of MAM-­RJ caught fire, burning 90 percent of its permanent collection and all of its temporary exhibitions, as well as its entire library.114 In that forty-­five minute fire, the building returned to the hollow shell of its original construction, its glass façade shattered and contents charred. The effect was deeply traumatic for the city’s artistic community. While artists organized a massive demonstration beneath the museum’s shell to call for its reconstruction on August 16, the vexed question of the institution’s role and identity weighed heavily on subsequent debates. As critic, curator, and one-­time Neoconcrete member Roberto Pontual remarked of the museum, “everyone knows it died of sickness and not fire.”115 Indeed, even before the fire, artists had acknowledged that the museum was in crisis. In April, architect and sculptor José Resende had criticized it as an instrument of domination, his words a far cry from Pedrosa’s optimistic suggestion of 1961, which imagined the institution as “the elastic glove into which the free creator might fit his hand.”116 Meanwhile, the Brazilian art world had begun its first serious reappraisals of the constructive legacy. In 1975, Ronaldo Brito wrote and published the first half of his essay “Neoconcretismo: Vértice e Ruptura no Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro,” the first critical and scholarly appraisal of the movement. In July 1977, a major historical exhibition, Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro na Arte, opened at MAM-­RJ, generating sharp controversy along the old Rio-­São Paulo lines.117 Mounted at the museum at the time of the fire,

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Fig. 2.39 Hélio Oiticica, notes for Ready Constructible, ­August 21, 1978. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

­ eanwhile, were two significant exhibitions: a Joaquín Torres-­García retro­ m spective and América Latina: Geometria Sensível, an influential curatorial effort by Pontual to identify a uniquely Latin American approach to geometric abstraction.118 The museum fire and its aftermath thus came while debates about the constructive legacy were fresh within artists’ minds. A few months before, in February of 1978, Oiticica had returned to Brazil after seven years in New York. In Rio, he took to recording ideas for works on index cards, meticulously dating them, often to the minute. On August 21, 1978, five days after the artists’ demonstration for the reconstruction of the museum, Oiticica noted an idea for a work he had had the night before, named Ready Constructible (fig. 2.39). The index card contains a sketch of a rectangular ­structure made of stacked bricks and a brief note that described the work as a “maquette without scale.”119 Oiticica never mentioned the museum fire in his notes on the resulting work, making overt connections between the two impossible to ascertain. The work’s material specificity and diagrammatic form, however, reveal an incisive analysis of the problems within the Brazilian modern project, as well as an oblique monument to the “constructive will” once so closely associated with the museum. Ready Constructible consists of twenty-­four hollow bricks stacked in six layers of four bricks each. Each layer is arranged in a disengaged rotating square pattern so that the gap between each brick is equal to the brick’s shortest side (fig. 2.40). The resulting plinth-­like form displays a concatenated pattern of solids and voids and is seated in a shallow wooden base. Because the bricks have no internal divisions, each unit is an absolute module. This size, meanwhile, is motivated not by the size of the human body, as in Eden’s nests, but by the grasp of a hand. This in turn is standardized through industrial manufacture. Paradoxically, then, the bricks evoke one of the most rudimentary processes of construction while indexically registering the body within an industrial form. In its stacking procedures and use of repetitive modular units, Ready Constructible recalls Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Spatial Constructions of 1920–­21. In 1922, Rodchenko described his works as showing “a certain universalism, that

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Fig. 2.40 Hélio Oiticica, Ready Constructible, 1978–­79. Wood, bricks, and crushed brick, 47.3 x

from identical forms all sorts of constructions may be constructed of different systems, types, and uses. In these works, as [in] real constructions, I set an obligatory condition for the future constructor of industry: ‘nothing accidental, unaccounted for’” (fig. 2.41).120 Testing the limits of equilibrium and stability through a system of counterbalancing forces, the Spatial Constructions are demonstration devices. They exhibit both the structural solidity and possibilities for variation latent within standardized parts. Summed up in Rodchenko’s slogan “Construction is Organization,” their positivist logic likewise embodies Brazilian modernity’s promise to organize the underdeveloped world.

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55 x 55 cm. Photo by César Oiticica Filho. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Fig. 2.41 Aleksandr Rodchenko, Spatial Construction 26, 1920–­ 21. Art © Estate of Alexander Rodchenko/RAO, Moscow/ VAGA, New York. Image ­courtesy of A. Rodchenko & ­V.­ Stepanova Archive.

While Ready Constructible employs the modular units of Rodchenko’s Spatial Constructions, it does not display the concern for variation and the potential for disequilibrium that drive those earlier works. Instead, it is a resolutely stable ­construction with no dynamic structural elements. Its dynamism derives from the additive principle of its rotating square configuration, which, much like the fragment in the preliminary Eden drawings, invites the addition of another unit, and another, upwards rather than outwards in space. In this sense, the work is perhaps closer to Constantin Brancusi’s various versions of Endless Column (fig. 2.42). In these works, stacked rhomboid forms convey the notion of infinite extension via a basic modular unit, which, sliced at its wide mid-­point at the top and bottom of each column, implies continuation.121 In Ready Constructible, Oiticica translates this additive principle based on the module’s shape into an additive principle ­inherent to the module’s pattern, as per the rotational laying of the bricks.

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Fig. 2.42 Constantin Brancusi, view of the studio at night: Endless Column-­dreams etc, ca. 1930. Gelatin silver print, 39.7 x 29.6 cm. Photo by Jacques ­Faujour. Musee National d’Art Moderne. Image © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-­Grand ­Palais / Art Resource,

The American sculptor Carl Andre, whose work likewise demonstrates a complex engagement with both Brancusi and Russian constructivism, enacted a similar move in stacked works such as Pyre from his Element series, which were proposed in 1960 and realized in 1971 (fig. 2.43).122 Unlike his Pyramid (Square Plan) of 1959, which was constructed with notched elements and whose cross section corresponded to Brancusi’s Endless Column, Andre constructed Pyre by simply placing identical timber units one on top of another. This lent a literalness to the sculpture that had been entirely absent from the earlier artist’s monumental works. Andre’s subsequent brick sculptures, such as Equivalents of 1966, amplified this literalness by using a standardized module of the construction

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NY. ­Permission © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Fig. 2.43 Carl Andre, Pyre ­(Element Series), proposed in New York in 1960, constructed in Minneapolis in 1971. Wood, 8-­unit stack, 4 tiers of 2 t­ imbers each alternating 48 in x 36 in x 36 in. Image courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Art © Carl Andre/­Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

industry. Such units could be easily substituted, as they famously were when the Tate acquired a remade Equivalent VIII in 1972. In so doing, Andre brought one path of the constructivist legacy in the post-­war period to logical and extreme conclusion: the literalization of the revolutionary movement’s emphasis on ­materiality in the form of autonomous art. The results, as critic Barbara Rose observed in 1978, were works that no longer sought to “transform the world” but rather to criticize it: “structures that imply building but cannot house.”123 Oiticica’s Ready Constructible charts an alternate route out of this legacy of avant-­garde construction. Rather than literalizing the materiality of Rodchenko’s demonstration devices, as Andre did, it literalized their function as demonstrations. Here, it is useful to return to Oiticica’s notion of a “maquette without scale.”124 In conventional usage, the function of a maquette is to model the form

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of a projected structure at small scale, where it can be studied and modified before being built. A maquette without scale thus suggests a model that can be constructed at any size, as in de Castro’s cut-­and-­fold sculptures, in which the absence of compositional scale refuses the distinction between maquette and realized work.125 Ready Constructible, however, is based upon a motivated module—­the brick—­that, like the human-­scaled cells of Eden, is absolute in size. To construct it at any other scale would destroy the reciprocity between module and material that drives the notion of a literal “ready (made) constructible” form. But, there is another significance to a “maquette without scale” that entails not the potential size of a projected form but the lack of such a projected form altogether. In this instance, the maquette becomes a verb. It does not provide a model of a future form. Rather, it models; it demonstrates and performs. Within this framework, the modular units of Ready Constructible enact a process—­the one-­after-­another, paratactic placement of bricks that constitutes the activity of construction in its most basic sense—­and picture the behavior by which the structure formed by these bricks develops over time. Ready Constructible is therefore an “icon of relations” in the Peircian sense, or, in Oiticica’s more poetic verse, a “topo-­grapho-­logy.”126 In short, it is not a model of form, but a diagram of growth. In offering up a maquette that operates diagrammatically rather than representationally, Oiticica placed Ready Constructible in direct opposition to the normative architectural models that anticipated MAM-­RJ in the mid-­1950s, as well as his own Projeto Cães de Caça maquette of 1961, which for Pedrosa symbolized the museum in its ideal sense. Conceived on the heels of a fire that destroyed this same museum, Ready Constructible abstained from imagining what a reconstructed museum might look like in favor of an analysis of how such a construction (and such an institution) might behave. Both “ready” and “unfinished,” as Oiticica wrote in a text on the work on November 5, 1979, its growth defined by making in the simplest operation of laying down one brick after the next. By dramatizing the literal making of the construction process, Ready Constructible also returned labor to the legacy of constructive art in Brazil, reminding us that the thirteen years of MAM-­RJ’s construction constituted not simply a spectacle of building but also a spectacle of work (fig. 2.44). By equalizing art-­work and construction-­work in the precise laying of each brick, Oiticica revealed the unstable relations between the two in the history of modern Brazilian art. Establishing a principle of growth based on the most rudimentary process of construction, Ready Constructible also demonstrated the mutual conditions of both the monumental forms of official architectures such as MAM-­RJ and the informal bricolage and sprawl of the favelas—­a phenomenon such official architectures sought to excise. Both constructive principles are implicit in what ­Oiticica called esqueleto (skeleton), a word intended to play off of associations with the favela of Esqueleto, a Rio shantytown demolished in 1964 to make way for a state university.127 For Oiticica, esqueleto conjured neither sculpture nor architecture but instead a structure that was a realized template of growth.

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Fig. 2.44 Construction of the pavement of the Bloca Escola of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, 1955–­57. Courtesy of Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro.

A demonstration device that enacts growth but refuses to project, Ready Constructible suspends the instrumentality of Rodchenko’s Spatial Constructions in their original constructivist formulation in favor the diagrammatic function of the work of art. Rather than “laying down a precise condition for the future constructor of industry,” as Rodchenko declared, the work of art analyzes and enacts conditions of form. This distinction is particularly clear in Oiticica’s use of a shallow box to frame Ready Constructible, which functions much like a pedestal would in a traditional work of art. The inclusion of this base is at first perplexing, as the elimination of frames and pedestals was a key feature of Neoconcrete art.

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In 1960, for example, Gullar had noted that Brancusi’s elimination of the pedestal put his works “on the path to the non-­object.”128 Absorbing the base into the sculpture, Endless Column established the internal autonomy of the work of art and extended the act of presenting as sculpture itself. Yet by reinstating such a mediating device around a structure that itself can be thought of as a kind of base, Ready Constructible’s square box does not delimit the work of art from space. Rather, it frames the notion of framing, thereby acting as a “meta-­ sculpture,” as Oiticica wrote.129 In so doing, the work concretized that highly contingent form of autonomy that Neoconcretism established when it replaced the frame with a fold. This autonomy is not hypostatized as aesthetic form but recast in the distinct modality of the diagram. As a diagram, Ready Constructible’s materiality is both literal and performative. It is both an icon of a dynamic principle of growth and a unique event of making that is delimited in time. The grid falls into history. As Oiticica wrote in his final entry on the work, “last brick placed on nov 6 of 1979 at 5:22 pm.”130

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Fig. 3.1 Hélio Oiticica, Experimento “Terras de cores com líquidos vários,” 1965. Photo by Desdémone Bardin. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica and the family of Desdémone Bardin.

My aim is to trigger states of invention. Hélio Oiticica So man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-­made things like even his own mother and father. Marcel Duchamp

3 Ready-­Constructible Color A suite of photographs taken in 1965 by Hélio Oiticica’s friend, the French photographer Desdémone Bardin, pictures the artist sitting against a blue wall in the midst of an optical experiment (fig. 3.1). A bright light is positioned to his side and a small table is pulled over his lap, upon which an array of glass cups spills out towards the edge of the photographic frame. The cups are filled with vividly colored pigments—­brilliant cobalt blue, rich vermillion, fiery orange, blinding white—­and one by one, Oiticica raises each vessel to his eye, squeezing the other shut so as to isolate his optical field. Leaning forward towards the radiant glow of the lamp, he turns each cup this way and that, maximizing the light’s re­fraction off the pigmentary matter and testing how the resulting colors shift with the addition of liquids. Some dull the colored granules while others enhance their sparkle and glint. In this process, the body registers how material solidity gives way to emergent chromatic phenomena. The fugitive workings of color perception, in turn, are broken down into their constitutive elements: the fact of physical substance, the luster of illumination, the embodied action of the eye. Proffering a cup to the viewer, Oiticica encourages us, too, to think with our bodies—­to make color with matter and light. In the photographs Experimento “Terra de Cores com Líquidos Vários” (Experiment “Colored Earth with Various Liquids”), Oiticica performs the overlapping roles of researcher, inventor, pedagogue, and initiator, in the latter case inviting his viewer to participate in the experiment at hand. While the series of actions are scientific in their procedural trappings, they also exceed the purview of rational laws. Optical in orientation, the tests focus on the contingency of visual sensation: its transience, evanescence, and variability to light and shade. The appearance of color, after all, results from the viewer’s perception of the interaction of matter and light. In this sense, the experiment is pragmatically demonstrative in effect. Yet, the investigation also propels color to the outer limits of opticality, as if to produce a chromatic experience that one might actually touch. Heaped in transparent receptacles, the mounds of pigment gain a

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physical dimension molded by the shape of each glass. By containing the ­pigment’s potential dispersal, these glasses transform disaggregated substance into vibrant, condensed units of color. As Oiticica holds each of these entities to his eye, he overwhelms his optical field, as if to push color into contact with his retinal lens. Color itself develops a body in the resulting concatenation of the chromatic and the haptic—­a vitality and organicism that operates in concert with the body of the researcher himself. In this 1965 experiment, color is a constructive process associated with phenomenal emergence. But it is also a corpus, a being with a structure and behavior of its own. This dual nature—­imminent and actualized, generated by the viewer and rooted in the material substance of the work—­operates in complex relation to Oiticica’s reinvention of the constructive legacy and the modern develop­mental project at large. Chapter 2 revealed how the double inflection of plano and planta allowed Oiticica to convert the institutional logic of the plan into a diagrammatic mode of organic growth, thereby recasting the develop­mental by way of the subterranean, the bodily, and the flux of the social world. Ready Constructible of 1978–79 concretized this diagrammatic operation while equalizing art-­work and construction-­work in a basic act of laying down one brick after the next (fig. 2.40). The sculpture appropriated the industrialized commodity of the brick as well as the action of building upon which Brazil’s developmentalist agenda was based. The industrial is therefore both a material and a conceptual content of the work. As we shall see, it also constitutes an investigation of color in a rather unusual sense. In his notes on Ready Constructible, Oiticica highlighted the material continuity between the coarse earth distributed around the base of the sculpture and its individual bricks. They are “all molded from the same substance,” he wrote, but this substance belongs to a spectrum of material possibilities: it may be “solid and sandy,” or even “liquid mud.”1 What distinguishes the bricks from the earth is therefore not physical makeup as much as the condition of being shaped, gathered, and contained as discrete forms. The “total embodiment (in-­corporação) of that which was previously seen as environmental,” the bricks consolidate and vitalize a substance disaggregated in its everyday state as earth or clay.2 As with the colored earthen pigments of the 1965 experiment, Oiticica suggested that dispersed matter begins to act as a body when it gains solidity and cohesive structure. Yet while the heaped pigments seem to correspond to crude matter dug from the ground or pulverized from stone, bricks are readymade objects either found or purchased from a store. As such, they have already been made, as opposed to raw pigments that await construction. Yet, this temporal distinction soon breaks down. Bricks can be returned to their “environmental” state, to use Oiticica’s terminology, by crushing and grinding them. Natural pigments, in turn, are processed, synthesized, sifted, and sold. The finished units of industrial manufacture, bricks are also raw materials with which to construct. Madeness, then, operates on a material continuum. It is a process to be activated rather than a determined condition or state.

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For Oiticica, this temporal variability distinguished Ready Constructible from the historical precedent of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade. Oiticica described his brick structure as a “ready constructible (made) object,” noting “the directed relation vetoes reference to the invention-­terminology of duchamp (the ready made).”3 Subsequently, he emphasized that the “ready” and the “unfinished” were coeval in the work’s conceptual and material logic, suggesting enigmatically that his work was “a proposal of determined structures in the exercise of the indeterminate.”4 Oiticica here appears to insist that an already-­made, or “ready,” object could simultaneously be yet-­to-­be-­made, or “constructible.” In this temporal shift, potential action is implicit to even an industrial object. Madeness is not a fait accompli but a fluid and potentially reversible vector that encompasses material, phenomenal, and conceptual fields. Art historian Thierry de Duve has compellingly argued that Duchamp’s readymades were a specific response to a historical crisis brought about by the emergence of abstract art around 1912 and 1913 and the industrialization of paint, both of which undermined painting as a skilled and highly individualized craft.5 For de Duve, color was at the heart of this crisis, for while it was closely associated with subjective expression and the possibility of universal aesthetic language, the wide-­scale industrialization of paint manufacturing in late-­nineteenth-­ century Europe meant that color was no longer artisanally made but instead a mere product selected from a commercial spectrum. Duchamp’s so-­called “last” painting, Tu m’ (1918), concisely exposed this commodity condition by depicting an inventory of color samples derived from a commercial oil paints catalogue together with various readymades from his own repertoire of works (fig. 3.2). In the early 1960s, Duchamp elaborated on the provocation of Tu m’ in a number of statements that linked the tube of paint with the conceptual logic of the readymade. As he remarked: Making something is choosing a tube of blue, a tube of red, putting some of it on the palette, and always choosing the quality of the blue, the quality of the red, and always choosing the place to put in on the canvas, it’s always choosing. So in order to choose, you can use tubes of paint, or you can use brushes, but you can also use a ready-­made thing, made either mechanically or by the hand of another man . . . Choice is the main thing, even in normal painting.6

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Chapter Three Ready-Constructible Color

Fig. 3.2 Marcel Duchamp, Tu m’, 1918. Oil on canvas, with bottle brush, three safety pins, and one bolt, 69.8 x 303 cm. Gift from the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier. Yale University Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY. ­Permission © Succession ­Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2014.

For many artists reinvigorated by the readymade in the 1960s, the imperative to engage with color involved extending the consequences this shift from making to choice.7 Andy Warhol’s silk-­screened paint-­by-­number landscapes, Blinky Palermo’s store-­bought cloth paintings, and Gerhard Richter’s color charts all deployed “readymade color” to radically reduce or eliminate the trace of the hand while acknowledging color’s inscription within a commodity field. The artisanal, almost alchemical, scenario of Oiticica’s 1965 experiment, together with its pronounced investment in individual phenomenological experience, seems far removed from these explorations of the Duchampian legacy. Yet, as his notes for Ready Constructible indicate, his thinking about the materiality, fluidity, and “constructability” of color and form implicitly relates to the historical gauntlet of the readymade. As I shall ague, Oiticica’s color practice—­ particularly his Bólides of the mid-­1960s, which comprise brilliantly colored moveable boxes and glass jars, often filled with raw pigment—­redistribute the activities of the artist, the viewer, and the material substance of the work of art (fig. 3.3). This redistribution pairs a shift from artistic making to artistic choice with a far more uncommon transfer—­one in which making also shifts from artist to viewer. This transfer instituted a key participatory dimension within the art historical field of modernist color. It did so, however, by exploiting a unique configuration of Brazilian modernity that hinged on color as physical matter: pure pigment, found product, raw material, and industrial good. Just as Duchamp’s readymade was inscribed within the historical conditions of late-­nineteenth-­ century European industrialism and the broader deskilling of the painter, ­Oiticica’s participatory conception of color intervened deep within the logic—­ indeed the very matter—­of the modern developmental project. In so doing, it activated and rerouted a bodily, metabolic dimension of the industrial, resulting in what I call “ready-­constructible color.” This “ready-­constructible color” emerges from two investigative tracks in Oiticica’s work: on the one hand, a spatialization of painting charted through the phenomenological experience of the viewer, and on the other, the release of what he described as a “body of color” manifested in the work of art itself. While exploring these two tracks, Oiticica reread the purely formal affinities that characterized the art historical legacy of constructive art in terms of specific inno­vations in temporal and chromatic structure. In so doing, Oiticica also inserted himself into this field, opening dialogues with historical figures such as Kurt Schwitters as well as contemporaneous practitioners such as Yves Klein. Yet Oiticica’s relation to modernist practice is more complex than simple incorporation. For in situating his works within this field, he caused it to fold along a point of historical tension inextricably linked to the material conditions of modernity acknowledged by Duchamp’s Tu m’ and uniquely inflected by Brazilian developmentalism. At this point of torsion, the lingering metaphysical character of ­Oiticica’s early approach to color becomes fully subterranean: located literally in the generative matter of the earth and the “underdeveloped” at large.

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Painting-­in-­General In order to chart the significance of Oiticica’s “ready-­constructible color,” we must rewind to 1954, when a new set of coordinates for painting in Brazil emerged from within developmentalism’s discursive and material field. Then aged sixteen, Oiticica began taking classes at the temporary headquarters of MAM-­RJ with Ivan Serpa, who taught experimental art courses for children and adults.8 These experiences were the genesis of Oiticica’s first mature works, as well as his participation in Grupo Frente, the most advanced artists’ collective in Rio at that time and seed of the subsequent Neoconcrete group.

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Fig. 3.3 Hélio Oiticica, B18 Bólide Vidro 6—­Metamorfose, 1965. Glass, pigment, nylon mesh, plastic, vinyl. 30.5 x 28.8 x 22.3 cm. Photo by Claudio Oiticica. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Fig. 3.4 Mário Pedrosa and Ivan Serpa, Crescimento e Criacão (Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, 1954).

That same year, Serpa contributed photographs of student work to a small book by Mário Pedrosa on childhood art education, Crescimento e Criação (Growth and Creation), which drew an implicit analogy between cognitive and national development (fig. 3.4). In this metaphor, the organic, biological character of development cited in chapter 2 as a resistive current within developmentalism’s institutional logic was newly instrumentalized. As the child’s blind motor impulses were regulated through the hand-­eye coordination required by painting, the child’s raw potentiality was converted into meaningful production and free, rational thought: an “evolution,” Pedrosa wrote, that is “as gradual and in­evitable as the growth of a plant.”9 Such training did not pertain narrowly to the cultivation of the children’s aesthetic sensibility but would also serve them in future professions, “whether as artists, craftsmen, industrialists, technicians, doctors.”10 In short, painting was put in service of national development at the cognitive level of embodied perception, indeed, at the precise moment when the hand was disciplined by the eye. The burden of national development was likewise the subtext of the 3° Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna (3rd National Salon of Modern Art), nicknamed the “Salão Preto e Branco” (Black and White Salon), also held in 1954 at MAM-­RJ (fig. 3.5). In a coordinated effort, artists (Serpa, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Aluísio Carvão among them) submitted black-­and-­white paintings to protest the recent imposition of tariffs on imported artists’ paints as part of a new develop­mental policy.11 Because the tariffs rendered imported paints prohibitively expensive and Brazil’s domestic industry had yet to produce adequate equivalents, the black-­and-­white works were intended to demonstrate the aesthetic effects of the economic mandate. In response to this “color strike,” the government moved imported artists’ paints from the “specific” category of nonessential consumer products to the “general” category of raw materials, thereby lessening their import tax and recalibrating their perceived industrial potential.12 No longer conceived as a limited activity confined to an aesthetic realm, painting was now a generalized practice by which to facilitate the development of the nation at large. The potentiality of this painting-­ in-­general, further, was now ascribed to the raw materiality of paint rather than the painter him or herself. In its explicit conjoining of art and industry, the government’s legislation anticipates the aesthetic position of Brazilian Concretism, whose contours were forming at precisely this time. For artists and theorists such as Waldemar ­Cordeiro and Décio Pignatari, art was to be functionally and philosophically integrated within industrial processes—­whether as a prototype for serial production or more abstractly as a “product” that expressed the sensibility of the modern industrial age.13 Many Concrete artists underscored the allegiance between

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art and industry by using commercial materials such as Ripolin enamel paint and Ecuatex particleboard.14 They likewise eliminated traces of the hand in order to mimic the sharp lines and uniform surfaces of machine-­made ob­jects. Concretism thus imagined the path to development in terms of the readymade object. The artist was recast as an anonymous designer and the viewer as a modern consumer selecting from an array of manufactured goods. Of course, not everyone agreed with the burgeoning alignment between art and industry. Within a month of the government’s reclassification, artist, educator, and conservator Edson Motta argued that artists’ paints did not belong to the general category of raw materials but to a distinct one of books, films, and educational materials exempt from the tariff system as a whole. As he wrote in an article, “Perdura o Problema das Tintas” (The Problem of Paints Persists), “with the classification of paints at the same level as books, we would have the possibility to study and produce in a more extensive manner, just like the intellectuals of other artistic sectors.”15 Painters were neither laborers nor industrialists, he argued, but intellectuals, and the materials proper to their practice deserved placement within an elevated sphere. Three complexly overlapping positions thus emerged circa 1954 concerning the relationship between painting and modernization. Pedrosa sought to allegorize the developmental process in terms of the embodied cognition of a maker-­ citizen-­subject. Concretism, meanwhile, attempted to encapsulate the entire industrial process within the “product” of the work of art. And while the government treated paint as a purely material potentiality, Motta held out that it was the raw matter of intellectual rather than industrial production and thus should be exempt from economic dictates of any kind. While these positions all approached painting as research or developmental process, they critically diverged regarding how this developmental process was implicated within the historical conditions of industrializing Brazil. Perhaps most significantly, they also disagreed as to where the efficacy of production was to be located—­with the viewer, the maker, or the actual substance of the work of art.

* It was from within these historical entanglements that Oiticica embarked on his own painterly investigations of making and matter. His initial points of reference were figures of European prewar abstraction: Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian. Oiticica had ample exposure to the work of these artists (the latter two were represented in significant exhibitions at the São Paulo Bienal in 1954), and each provided the young artist with a set of formal and theoretical problems to assimilate and reinterpret in Serpa’s

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Fig. 3.5 “Salão Preto e Branco,” Correio da Manhã, June 2, 1954, showing works by Aluísio Carvão and Lygia Clark.

class. As for many Brazilian artists working in geometric abstraction at the time, the future-­oriented, constructive vision of this history of avant-­garde experimentation seemed more vital and relevant than more recent tendencies such as abstract expressionism or informel, which many critics decried as nihilistic and lacking in rigor.16 While Brazilian practitioners disagreed on the interpretation and application of the prewar avant-­garde tradition to the local context, they generally concurred that working through its formal history was critical for the formulation of a contemporary aesthetic idiom within the country. Thus, while modernization did not surface as an explicit context in Oiticica’s earliest work, the self-­consciousness by which he selected his artistic precedents suggests the degree to which narratives of art historical and economic development were already intertwined. Serpa’s class provided an ideal context to work through these precedents. Although his pedagogic approach was informed by painting’s organizational and self-­disciplinary potential, as advanced in Crescimento e Criação, Serpa famously encouraged individual experimentation and testing.17 The structure of his adult classes, for example, emphasized the serial elaboration of an investigative prompt. Students would complete multiple works of modest size and then analyze their discoveries and observations as a group. The priority was less on ­finished works than on a sustained “study,” as Motta would have deemed it, of a given painterly problem. Thus, in Oiticica’s 1954–­56 gouache on cardboard paintings, known as the Grupo Frente works, we see evidence of his engagement with the dynamic equilibrium of Mondrian’s neoplasticist compositions, the careening forms and virtual atmospheres of Malevich’s suprematism, the chromatic concatenation of Delaunay’s discs, and the intense modulation of Klee’s grids and architectonic fields. While these works are richly colored, color itself tends to be approached stylistically rather than phenomenologically. It rarely disrupts the viewing conventions of the traditional planar support and likewise remains contained within a tightly demarcated rectangular field. Starting in late 1956, however, Oiticica began a new series of gouache on cardboard works titled Sêcos (“dry ones”), in which the vibrantly colored compositional blocks of the Grupo Frente works were aerated and leached to allow for the unmarked reserve of the cardboard to function as a compositional element in its own right. In these works, sparse units of color alternately direct and disperse the eye’s gaze across the plane. In the subsequent Metaesquemas of 1957–­58, this unmarked ground played an increasingly important role. In these works, colored lines or tabs—­often reduced to a single hue—­interact with the support to give rise to various behavioral or perceptual effects such as the virtual folding described in chapter 1. Rather than working through an external prompt or ­historical citation, as in the Grupo Frente series, the Metaesquemas operated largely as their own point of reference, one subgroup or sequence generating another as Oiticica investigated questions of symmetry and systemicity, grid and Gestalt form. Color here is not explicitly material in its orientation. Yet because these works actively harnessed the unpainted support, the materiality of paint became an aesthetic consideration, even if primarily by its absence.

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The Metaesquemas correspond to the years in which Oiticica and his brother César, together with artists such as Aluísio Carvão, helped Serpa form the Instituto de Arte Infantil (Institute of Children’s Art), an art-­education primary school located in the working-­class neighborhood of Meier in Rio. While the Grupo Frente works track Oiticica’s assimilation of central figures of European avant-­ garde abstraction, the Metaesquemas evidence a growing independence as he, in turn, took on the role of pedagogue. Simultaneously, the growing fissure between Brazilian Concretism and what was soon termed Neoconcretism meant that Oiticica’s investigations were increasingly directed towards local debates regarding the affective versus instrumental character of the work of art. Color was a key element of this discussion. In 1957, Cordeiro criticized his Rio-­based colleagues for their “expressive lyricism” and lack of “chromatic rigor,” pointing to Serpa’s use of brown as indicative of the artists’ “disorientation.”18 Rejecting color as a subjective painterly element, Concretists treated it primarily as a supporting device to assert compositional structure (as in the strong contrasts of Carvão’s figure-­ground fields of this period, or the precisely articulated geometric motifs of Cordeiro’s Ideias Visíveis). The contrasting insistence by artists and poets in Rio on the intuitive character of artistic conception was therefore also explored through the expressive capacity of color. The divergence between these two positions is readily apparent in ­Oiticica’s Série Branca (White Series) of 1958–­59, which consists of a number of gouache on cardboard studies as well as oil paintings on canvas or wood (fig. 3.6). In several works, the artist interrupted a white field with a line of colored paint or, in some instances, a mere sliver of unpainted ground. At times this line demarcates a shape, but more often it simply differentiates

Chapter Three Ready-Constructible Color

Fig. 3.6 Hélio Oiticica, Sem título (Série Branca), 1958–­59. Oil on wood, 91.3 x 120.5 cm. Photo by César Oiticica Filho. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio ­Oiticica.

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Fig. 3.7 Advertisement for ­Ypiranga paint, Revista Módulo, February–­July 1957.

the painterly field so as to protract and vary its perceptual absorption. Malevich’s white-­on-­white paintings are a clear point of reference, as are the contemporaneous experiments of Clark, whose black-­and-­white Unidades explored the perceptual possibilities of the “organic line” (fig. 1.19).19 Yet whereas Clark retained the industrially-­ oriented practice of many Concrete artists by using an air pistol to spray the Unidades with automobile paint for a highly finished, smooth, and homogeneous surface, ­Oiticica mixed and applied his own paints for the Série Branca. He frequently combined studio-­made casein, an ancient milk-­based mixture, with commercial alkyd-­ resin-­modified paints such as Ypiranga, a Brazilian ­industrial paint brand advertised as applicable to “all the activities of national life” (fig. 3.7).20 Sourced from across the material spectrum, such paint combinations rendered Motta’s distinction between fine art and in­ dustrial paints moot. The resulting surfaces of Oiticica’s Série Branca are highly variable. The neutral field of cardboard is faintly visible in several gouaches, for example. In oil paintings such as Sem título (Série Branca) (Untitled, White Series) (1959), meanwhile, Oiticica altered the pigment-­to-­binder ratio in discrete sections of the board, at times changing the direction of the brushstroke itself. While the majority of these works are monochromes, the differing application and levels of pigment saturation result in multiple tonalities of white.21 The effect resists optical instantaneity, slowing down the process of perception. These works speak to a curiously fraught relationship between duration and material heterogeneity in Oiticica’s practice of this time. The extended temporality he sought to induce within the viewer’s experience is clearly an affirmation of the organicism espoused in the “Manifesto Neoconcreto” of 1959 and a counterpoint to the mechanical time imputed to the Concrete work. As several scholars have noted, Oiticica’s writings from this period reveal the influence of Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory. In particular, he was informed by the French philosopher’s notion of durée, an articulation of experiential consciousness in terms of subjective, layered duration (itself a critique of the mechanistic causality so prominent in the scientific thinking of Bergson’s own era).22 In Oiticica’s Sem título (Série Branca), this durée corresponds to the viewer’s gradual accretion of aesthetic information. Rather than being perceived instantaneously or sequentially, the multiple tonalities of white shift as the perception of any particular zone of the painting is influenced and nuanced by the recollection of another. For Oiticica, this durational apprehension of color was distinctly meta­ physical, emerging from the depths of aesthetic experience—­from “the inside

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out,” as he described it in December 1959—­rather than from the objective or rational conditions of the exterior world.23 Yet this duration was achieved by virtue of an insistently material practice. He continued, “I had to arrive at a painting of a single color with diverse qualities, or to change the direction of brushstrokes so that the same color might take on two aspects.”24 Material facture—­ what the Russian theorist Nikolai Tarabukin described as the “working” or “treat­ment” of the material in the years of Russian constructivism—­facilitated the desired ­quality of color-­time.25 For the constructivists, facture was a critical strategy for reorienting artistic practice from aesthetics towards production. Oiticica, by contrast, clearly wanted to circumscribe the role of this materiality, as if to stave off any hint of its collapse from the metaphysical realm of aesthetics into crude matter. At the end of the December text, he wrote of the “harmful” quality of texture, which “divides and dilutes the surface . . . into small points that succeed one another associatively” and disrupts the purity of aesthetic duration.26 In May of the following year, Oiticica wrote that “for the artist, ‘the act of making,’ that profound creation which surpasses the conditions of material faciendi, is what constitutes the principal creative condition.”27 As in its original constructivist application, material facture was essential to both the conception and perception of the work of art. Yet Oiticica seemed to refuse precisely the radical materiality of the earlier avant-­garde formulation, retaining a quasi-­ Romantic notion of artistic creation as the aesthetic transmutation of physical matter. The reasons for this rejection, however, are not hard to ascertain. In Brazil circa 1959, Concrete art—­with its advocacy of visual objectivity and quantifiable products—­was most closely aligned with the materialist ideology of the Russian constructivist and subsequently productivist stance (albeit stripped of its political bite). Making as a creative, intuitive, and vitalist endeavor was therefore a specific and targeted response to contemporaneous debates about the relation between the work of art and the world. If Concrete artists sought to deploy the work’s object-­status towards functional integration within the physical and visual environment, Neoconcretists such as Oiticica saw the work of art as generating a world in and of itself. As Oiticica pursued color’s temporality and phenomenological intensity in subsequent experiments, however, the metaphysical “inside-­out” dynamic he described in 1959 began to invert. The act of making increasingly involved a heightened attention to the material properties of the external world. In this process, it was paradoxically pigment, rather than the work of art, that became fully “concrete.”

Invention Oiticica’s notion of “invention” is essential for comprehending how the tension between material facture and chromatic duration became an animating force through the physical qualities of pigment. Possibly his first use of the term is in a June 1960 text, where it is invoked in terms of absence: “The art derived from Mondrian (called ‘geometric abstraction’ or ‘concrete’) has come to lack as much

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in universality as in organicity, creative force, and spontaneous invention.”28 He continued, “Art is the invisible made visible, not by virtue of a magical trick, but by the artist’s very act of making as he transforms the material into the work.”29 “Invention” thus emerged in the process of making. It was a creative becoming that resulted in the “quasi-­corpus” Ferreira Gullar described as the Neoconcrete work of art. This notion of invention was likewise in keeping with Bergson’s idea of élan vital, an animating impulse that transforms inert matter into organized life.30 For Oiticica, it was thus logical that this organic and durational character would be explored through the process of making or inventing color. First and most literally, Oiticica made color by making paint: blending pre­ existing paints for a precise color, leaching medium in order to alter pigment saturation, mixing dry pigment with solvent and binder in order to create a new color. In short, the experimentation that constitutes painterly practice at its most fundamental level. As witnessed in diaries and notebooks, the artist was meticulous in fabricating paints. A notebook entry from around 1960 traces the size of three spoons Oiticica used as measuring standards for proportions of pigments.31 Subsequent pages contain lists of paint combinations, including manufacturer names and codes for each layer of the forty paintings that constitute the Invenções (Inventions), a series completed after the Série Branca between 1959 and 1962.32 In this list, Oiticica designated paints made in his studio with a star and “F. A.” for feito no âtelier. As in the Série Branca, documents for the Invenções suggest Oiticica freely combined artisanal practices with industrial materials such as readymade commercial paints. Whereas the earlier series explored duration through the facture and tonality of a monochrome surface, the Invenções used polychromy to establish what Oiticica called “vertical color.”33 Although each of the forty thirty-­centimeter square panels that make up this series at first appears to be monochromatic, each was painted with three or four independent layers of super­imposed and often-­textured paint (fig. 3.8). “Vertical color” is the sensation produced by the interaction of these chromatic strata, as each layer impacts the others by allowing for varying penetration of light.34 In these works, the durational quality of invention that Oiticica initially associated exclusively with the maker found a new set of analogues. The first was the physical interaction and actual depth of colored matter on the painterly plane; the second, the viewer’s apprehension of this chromatic depth as he or she perceived its “vertical color” in time. The vitalist becoming of the work of art expanded its purview, now encompassing the actions of the viewer and the physical matter of the work itself. While working on the Invenções, Oiticica’s interest in the behavior of pigment in paint, as well as the physical properties of pigment itself, intensified. In a November 1960 article entitled “Côr, Tempo e Estrutura” (Color, Time and Structure) in the Suplemento Dominical, Oiticica synthesized his observations regarding the tendencies of particular colors—­white, gray, yellow, red—­as revealed in his experiments from 1958 to 1960. These works extended the phenomenological intensity of color by dividing the painterly plane into multiple

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Fig. 3.8 Hélio Oiticica, Invenção 10 “Bizet”, 1959–­62. Oil and resin mixtures on wood fiberboard, 30 x 30 cm. Photo by César Oiticica Filho. Courtesy

panels, folded reliefs, three-­dimensional grids, or architectural structures, each of which demanded that the viewer orbit around or within them in space. While orders such as the Nuclei and Penetráveis deployed color as a spatial (rather than simply planar) phenomenon, Oiticica was also interested in acti­ vating color as an autonomous entity. Shortly before the article, he observed, “When . . . color is no longer submitted to the rectangle, nor any representation of this rectangle, it tends to ‘embody’ itself; it becomes temporal, creating its own structure, and the work then becomes the ‘body of color.’”35 In this text, Oiticica remarked that he was working on a series of eight red Invenções, each painted and textured in varying shades of vermillion. His notion of eschewing the rectangle appears to refer to the way in which a layered and textured surface allowed color to disengage from the canvas or planar support. Whereas he had conceived of texture as “disrupting” aesthetic experience just a year earlier, it now appeared to facilitate the emergence of an independent chromatic structure linked specifically to the interaction of pigment and light: red pigment was “open to light,” for example, whereas red paint was dark. For the first time, Oiticica considered pigment independently from paint. Consequently, it demanded a new formulation of making: “To pigmentary color, material and opaque in itself, I seek to bestow a sense of light.”36

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of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

* Oiticica’s attention to the potentiality of raw pigment circa 1960 recalibrated his approach to the nature of physical matter and the history of modernist color. From his documents and diaries, it is clear that he was fully aware of pigment sources and qualities. An undated entry contains a detailed “Estudo dos pigmentos” (Study of pigments) that describes the character, history, and behavior of yellows from alizarin to cadmium—­the latter warranting a long entry that includes its chemical composition, discovery, and industrial use.37 Diary entries from 1961, however, indicate that he was still wrestling with how to conceive of this raw matter vis-­à-­vis the act of making. In March 1961, Oiticica staged an internal dialogue regarding color’s ­“aesthetic” character versus its purely material qualities. An imagined inter­ locutor “A” asks, “In what sense is color a pigmentary element and an aesthetic ­element?,” to which Oiticica as “B” responds: Color on glass in its pure pigmentary state belongs to the world. It becomes an aesthetic element when the artist integrates it into the system of his work . . . An automobile painter, for example, removes color from the world-­ element and integrates it into another system, yet it does not become an aesthetic element . . . since color, here, is always the color “of” something and “for” some aim . . . In the pure work of art color is aesthetic only in itself. It is non-­utilitarian par excellence.38 According to this logic, utilitarian color can never escape the significance of its application (color “of” or color “for”), while aesthetic color can signify itself. However aesthetic color is only able to achieve this autonomy when extracted from an anterior found state and integrated into an artistic, rather than functional, system. Pigmentary color corresponded to this anterior state. It preexisted the aesthetic/utilitarian dichotomy and “belongs to the world.” The complexity and analytic ambiguity of this formulation becomes evident in the last iteration of the Invenções, completed in 1962. As his fabrication notes document, Oiticica added a coffee spoon’s worth of sand to the paint mixture of the final layer of Invenções 37, 38, and 39, presumably to add an additional texture to his “vertical color.” But in Invenção 40, he also added crushed brick. While contributing a significant new texture, the brick’s iron oxide composition also contributed a defining color to the mixture (fig. 3.9). By “inventing” color with a readymade element appropriated from the world, Oiticica’s work posed a new set of questions. Wasn’t the use of crushed brick within the aesthetic system of the Invenções akin to the automobile painter who “removes color of the world-­ element and integrates it into another system”? More importantly, wasn’t the work’s aesthetic color still the color “of” the brick as a functional thing? Although not fully realized in Invenção 40, this new practice of making color with found

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Fig. 3.9 Hélio Oiticica, Invenção 40, 1959–­62. Oil and resin mixtures on wood fiberboard, 30 x

color strained Oiticica’s 1961 distinction between “aesthetic” color and color “of,” providing a fulcrum for further research in turn. Oiticica appears to have explored the possibilities of making paint with found color in the art lessons he gave to a single private pupil, Andreas Valentin, which began while he was at work on his Série Branca of 1958–­59. In weekly lessons that continued until 1966, Oiticica retained the experiential, experiment-­ based pedagogy he had first encountered in Serpa’s class, but with a heightened emphasis on “invention” as a goal.39 He encouraged his young charge to create color and pattern by collaging readymade materials from old magazines. He also taught him to make paints from natural found pigments using PVA glue as a binder, a technique Oiticica’s own father had developed and conveyed to his sons. An undated work by Valentin that Oiticica kept at his family’s studio shows six different tones of brown paint made from unprocessed earthen pigments, ranging from nearly lavender to rust, ochre, and taupe (fig. 3.10). Anticipating the physical variability Oiticica noted in relation to the stacked and crumbled brick of Ready Constructible, the work presented found substances in various states of process or formation. The irregular size and impure composition of the pigment particles gave the painting a highly granular texture. In addition, raw materials

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30 cm. Photo by César Oiticica Filho. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Fig. 3.10 Andreas Valentin, Sem título (detail), ca. 1959–­66. Wood, sand, earth, glue, stones, bricks, 60 x 44 cm. Photo by Irene Small. Courtesy of ­Andreas Valentin.

such as broken brick and granite stones were affixed to its surface. Paramount to a lesson in the tenets of nonrepresentational art, elements of the world were concretely “invented” as the actual substance of the work rather than mimetically reproduced. Further, by using iron oxides as both pigmentary matter (earth incorporated into paint) as well as in a formed and found readymade material (fragments of brick), this painting collapsed the distinction between “aesthetic color” and “color of.” It located both in color that “belongs to the world.” Oiticica’s incorporation of a materialist, vitalist philosophy of “invention” within his artistic pedagogy suggests that making was no longer conceived solely in terms of paint mixtures and facture but in relation to the potentiality of matter drawn from the world at large. He further conceived of making color with found material in terms of synthesis and fusion rather than collage or juxtaposition. As early as 1960, he had written, “The artist does not subjectively superimpose contents . . . . It is in the artist’s dialogue with the material that his creativity can be found, and from there that . . . indeterminate, unformulated content [is born].”40 In 1962, he characterized this dialogue as a “field of development” in which subject and material continuously modify one another over time.41 This interaction propelled the inertia or passivity of raw matter towards the active becoming of life—­the vivência (life experience or vitality) that allowed color to “develop” or “unfold” as an autonomous structure or “body of color.”42 Making, then, catalyzed processes of conversion and self-­differencing wherein inanimate material was vivified through the catalyzing presence of the artist. Invoking “development” as an organic process that occurs between the maker and the matter of the work of art, Oiticica began to reconfigure the historical conditions of Brazilian painting that structured his own entry into the field in 1954. His catholic approach to sourcing paints from across industrial, fine art, and artisanal spheres in early works such as the Série Branca had already cancelled Motta’s distinction between painting as mere practice and as intellectual work. His use of found pigments and color in readily available raw materials such as sand and readymade industrial materials such as brick, meanwhile, rejected the teleology of the Concrete “product.” While Concrete artists used commercial paints to align their work with industry, Oiticica’s practice demonstrated how quickly and fluidly industrial process could be reversed, reducing a finished

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product into something as banal as dirt. Likewise, while the industrial orientation of the Concrete paradigm minimized the artist as maker, Oiticica pushed this subject to the forefront of the artistic constellation through his notion of chromatic “development.” Oiticica was doubtless influenced by Serpa’s experimental, research-­based pedagogy as well as Pedrosa’s model of art as a developmental process.43 Yet in differently conceiving of the character of development, Oiticica also diverged from these earlier models’ goals. In Crescimento e Criação, Pedrosa had criticized pedagogic techniques that treated art as a vehicle of cathartic release for the child through the “cultivation of free brushstrokes” and improvised “exploration of chance.” Left without structure by such libertine methods, such a child would become “rigid,” “egocentric,” and “quasi-­solipsistic.” Casting the child as both raw potentiality and an industrial worker, Pedrosa wrote that “nothing more can be extracted from his productions,” and he becomes “prematurely stagnated in his development, with results contrary to the liberty sought.”44 Although an avowed Marxist, the critic’s notion of development here curiously conforms to a capitalist framework in which the production of value depends on the exploitative extraction of natural resources and labor—­the fundamental disequilibrium that Marx described as capitalism’s “metabolic rift” with the world.45 In contrast, Oiticica’s vitalist conception of development as a dialogue between artist and material as radiant energy in potentia posed development as a collaborative and even biological process. The result of this interaction was not a detachable product or “value” but an emergent “body of color” that was physically and perceptually dependent on its maker and matter. A 1968 recommendation letter for Valentin suggests that Oiticica further departed from Pedrosa’s position by aligning a child’s developmental process with revolution rather than economic extraction: “Children don’t cause revolutions: they grow. The adult artist, yes, he initiates revolution, seeking to transform the society in which he lives. [But] the adult approaches this revolutionary process more organically if he already possesses the habits of the creative ­process.”46 Diverging from the instrumental approach to childhood education in Crescimento e Criação, Oiticica appears to have drawn inspiration from the anarchist philosophy of his own grandfather, José Oiticica. A highly respected educator and philologist, the elder Oiticica published several political tracts that linked the potential for social regeneration with anarchic liberty.47 The individual, further, should cultivate his intellect by living in harmony with nature. Anti-­ state, anti-­church, anti-­private property, José Oiticica’s anarchism treated nature as a ­destination rather than a primitive condition to be surpassed. For the younger ­Oiticica, we must conclude that development did not lead towards the industrial, as it did explicitly for the Concretists and implicitly for Pedrosa. Instead, development led to the conversion and release of energies latent within the material constitution of the work of art.

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Constructing Color Oiticica’s investigations into the nature and phenomenological intensity of color had twofold results. It entailed first a spatialization of painting in which the canvas moved off the wall and into a three-­dimensional space where the viewer circulated in and around a given chromatic structure. Second, it gave rise to the theorization of “a body of color” that emerged in a dialogue with the maker as color was emancipated from its traditional static support. In 1962, Oiticica sought to situate this trajectory within a larger history of the avant-­garde. His rereading ultimately linked the constructive potential of the work of art both to its activation of the viewer as a maker and to its material elementarization or distillation into component parts. As we have seen, Neoconcretism emerged from a discursive environment in which contemporary experiments were contextualized within a history of avant-­ garde production that stretched back to cubism’s rupture with representational art.48 Gullar’s art historical series “Etapas da Arte Contemporânea” (Stages of Contemporary Art) defined the contours of this history. Published in weekly installments in the Suplemento Dominical from March 1959 to October 1960, it evaluated and reinterpreted each art historical “stage” in terms of its contemporary relevance for Neoconcrete art.49 When the Suplemento Dominical ceased publication in 1961, Oiticica continued to use this evaluative approach in his writings in order to clarify and make sense of his own work. Ranging from contemplative to cocksure, his diary entries historicized his own and his peers’ production in relation to the advent of abstraction in Europe in the 1910s.50 As he increasingly focused on color, he likewise began to complicate the largely triumphalist character of Gullar’s previous narrative. A 1962 text, “Notas para um trabalho” (Notes for a work), contains several pointed comments on the materiality of color. Here Oiticica observed that the important modernist painters of the early twentieth century had all experimented with color as a tactile, even sculptural, phenomenon: Kandinsky by mixing sand with paint; Klee with the use of burlap sacks; Picasso with nails, rags, and glued paper. For each, color was no longer “flat” but took on “a body in raw matter.”51 But the “great bomb” occurred in the years just prior to 1920 with Dada and figures such as Jean Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Sophie Tauber-­Arp, and Duchamp—­artists that emerged, Oiticica wrote, “like comets of fire in the anarchic violence of their creative attitudes.”52 He described Arp’s technique of tearing sheets of colored paper and allowing the pieces to fall on the page as a radical extension of collage. But Oiticica appeared to be particularly interested in Schwitters, whose works he would have seen in an extensive exhibition organized the year before at the 6th São Paulo Bienal.53 Schwitters’s color, Oiticica observed, derived directly from his collaged elements: “In the end, he reduced ‘painting’ to ‘gluing’ . . . After all, wouldn’t ‘gluing color’ be another manner of expressing it?”54 As Oiticica noted, Schwitters’s equalization of “commercially fabricated color” (as the German artist put it in 1927) with bits of detritus found in the street

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anticipated the contemporaneous phenomenon of assemblage.55 By calling attention to the readymade aspect of Schwitters’s color—­“glued” rather than “painted” onto the canvas plane—­Oiticica’s observations unknowingly reverberated with those of Duchamp, who in 1961 had observed, “Since the tubes of paint used by an artist are manufactured and readymade products we must conclude that all paintings in the world are ‘Readymades aided’ and also works of assemblage.”56 Yet if Oiticica sympathized with the anarchist impulse of Schwitters’s materialist color, it soon became evident that he found contemporary assemblage inadequate to the vitalist processes he sought to initiate in his own works.57 As we shall see, his subsequent formulation of color as “construction” sought to rearticulate its materiality in terms of phenomenal embodiment rather than juxtaposition.

* In December 1962, Oiticica published a lengthy article in the art and architecture magazine Habitat titled “A Transição da Côr do Quadro Para o Espaço e o Sentido de Construtividade” (The Transition of Color from Canvas into Space and the Sense of Construction).58 The article traces the development of his work from the 1958–­59 Série Branca to the newly participatory dimension of his Penetráveis, in which the viewer becomes “‘the discoverer of the work,’ unfolding it part by part.”59 It then reframes “constructivism” by dispensing with purely formal affinities of geometric abstraction and the reductive narrative that linked the pioneering constructivism of figures such as Vladimir Tatlin and El Lissitsky with the later and largely apolitical production of Naum Gabo and Antoine ­Pevsner.60 Rejecting these contemporaneous associations, Oiticica argued for the need to rethink the “constructive” by way of a broader and explicitly trans­ national spectrum of innovations in chromatic and temporal structure: “I consider as constructive those artists who establish new structural relations in painting (color) and in sculpture, and who open new sensations of time and space. They are the constructors, constructors of structure, of color, of space and of time, those who add new visions and modify manners of seeing and feeling . . .”61 In this sense, “construction” corresponded neither to a style nor a historical movement but to a driving force of modernist innovation at large. Oiticica’s ruminations were inspired in part by Pedrosa’s formulation of “a new constructivism” around this time (in turn informed by the critic’s attempt to stage an exhibition of Russian avant-­garde work at the São Paulo Bienal of 1961).62 The article likewise reflects Oiticica’s response to significant exhibitions of the past few years, including major showings of Joaquín Torres-­Garcia and Schwitters at the São Paulo Bienals of 1959 and 1961, the third (and last) ­Neoconcrete exhibition in 1961, and an exhibition of American abstract expressionism in Rio in 1962 (the latter two both at MAM-­RJ).63 It also reveals the waning of the Concrete-­Neoconcrete debate as the primary polemic through which to articulate contemporary Brazilian practice. Whereas in the late 1950s

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Neo­concrete and Concrete artists alike disdained gestural abstraction, Oiticica’s focus on structural innovations allowed him to set painters such as Jackson Pollock and Wols alongside Tatlin and Mondrian as fellow “constructors” of color, time, and space.64 More importantly, it allowed him to chart new affinities between his own practice and that of Yves Klein and Aluísio Carvão, both of whom had recently arrived at monochromatic structures Oiticica likened to the “body of color” he had begun to theorize in his own work. Although Oiticica would not have seen Klein’s works in person, it is likely that Pierre Restany, the French critic and advocate of nouveaux réalisme, introduced him to the work in 1961. Restany was a close friend of Pedrosa’s and had come to Brazil for the 1961 São Paulo Bienal, which the Brazilian critic organized.65 Pedrosa undoubtedly introduced his French colleague to his cohort of artists at the time. However, in his Habitat article, Oiticica noted that the nouveaux réalistes were not part of his newly defined notion of constructive art. Echoing his previous criticism of the juxtapositional logic of contemporary assemblage, he stated that they “do not tend towards ‘construction’ but towards the ‘transposed displacement’ of the objects of the physical world to the field of expression.”66 Klein was another matter, however. Oiticica termed him a ­“constructor of color-­light,” further noting that Restany had drawn similarities between Klein’s monochromes and his own works (fig. 3.11).67 The monochromes Restany had in mind were probably those exhibited in Klein’s January 1957 exhibition at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan, which inaugurated his famous “L’Epoca Blu,” the era of IKB (International Klein Blue), his personalized and soon-­to-­be-­trademarked paint mixture. Hung unframed on stands that allowed them to project several inches off the wall, Klein’s matte ultramarine monochromes moved directly into the viewer’s space. This echoed the painted mounts Oiticica attached to the backs of his Invenções in order to disengage them from the flat surface of the wall. In Habitat, however, Oiticica noted that the Invenções had a “structural character” and “tend to three-­ dimensional space.” Klein’s works, in contrast, were “a half-­term between the monochromatic will of space and the tendency to three-­dimensional space.”68 This distinction, itself unclear in Oiticica’s prose, can be explicated by reference to the “vertical color” of the Invenções. As noted earlier, this sensation arises from the physical layering of chromatic strata, each of which modifies the perception of adjoining layers. The Invenções thus move out from the wall into three-­dimensional space as a result of their projecting mounts but also by means of their material construction at the microscopic level of chromatic matter itself. Klein’s monochromatic surfaces, by contrast, depend on the entirely consistent character of their ultramarine blue. As the French artist wrote in 1955, “No drawing and no variation of hue appear: there is only uniform color.”69 While Klein exploited infinitesimal variations in the topography of the surface plane for perceived texture and dimension, the actual color of his monochromes is intensely homogeneous and lacks the literal chromatic depth of Oiticica’s Invenções.

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Fig. 3.11 Yves Klein, Untitled Blue Monochrome (IKB 67), 1959. Dry pigment and synthetic resin on gauze laid down on panel, 92 x 73 cm. © Yves

Perhaps in relation to this treatment of the monochrome, Oiticica noted a parallel between Klein’s works and Carvão’s Cubocor (Colorcube) of 1960 (fig. 3.12). A Grupo Frente member and fellow Neoconcretist, Carvão also taught with Oiticica at Serpa’s Instituto de Arte Infantil. His works from the mid-­to late 1950s intentionally subordinated color to composition, as per the dominant Concretist paradigm. But in 1959, Carvão began to work on Cromáticas (Chromatics), a group of paintings that juxtaposed two monochromatic or near-­ monochromatic fields—­often similar in hue—­on an unframed canvas. In these works, color was no longer used to demarcate shapes but to saturate or “expand,” as he put it, the painterly field as a whole.70 Pedrosa wrote that the paintings constructed color “by quality and not by quantity,” upon their exhibition at

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Klein/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, 2014.

Fig. 3.12 Aluísio Carvão, Cubocor, 1960. Pigment on concrete, 17.3 x 16.8 cm. Photo by Leo­ nardo Ramadinha. Courtesy of Leonardo Ramadinha and Aluísio Carvão, Jr.

MAM-­RJ in January of 1961. He further noted that this color was “pigmentary color, in itself, like clay or earth in that the more one digs or scrapes, the more earth or clay [it becomes]; it has a certain physical, concrete reality.”71 This vivid description establishes immediate affinities to Oiticica’s burgeoning investigations into the pigmentary qualities of color. But it was Carvão’s Cubocor that was most relevant to Oiticica’s retooled concept of “construction,” for unlike either the Cromáticas or Klein’s monochromes, it no longer relied on a two-­dimensional painterly support. Cubocor was quite literally a cube of color: a 16.5-­centimeter cube of cement painted a single, intense, pulsating red. Although the original is lost, it is possible to surmise from an existing replica made by the artist that the work was fabricated by mixing pigment with cement before the form was set in a mold. Color is thus identical with form. The work is at once elemental, Platonic and material, literal—­“an image of physical color.”72 Its “ten kilos of compressed color,” as Gullar would later ­characterize the work, recall the sponge sculptures Klein began to make in 1960, which deploy a three-­dimensional structure to absorb color rather than merely support it.73 In both instances, the monochrome is spatialized and physicalized, suggesting (although not fully realizing) a newly haptic chromatic experience. As Oiticica wrote in his 1962 article, “Carvão . . . tends to a tactility of color . . . arriving in­tuitively at the sense of the ‘body of color,’ liberating it from the implication of the structure of painting . . .”74 Whereas Oiticica had rooted the materiality of color in Schwitters’s techniques of collage and assemblage, Carvão provided a new way to reconceptualize chromatic materiality by way of a monochrome that was a phenomenal, even tactile, entity unbound from the canvas support. We can identify four key strands in Oiticica’s conception of the “construction” of color in his Habitat article. The first is an imminent participatory dimension. Along with highlighting Clark’s Bichos as a pioneering innovation within the “constructive” impulse, he underscored the importance of the viewer moving from contemplation to action through the newly spatialized painting of his Penetráveis. The second is an emphasis on temporal duration as a result of physical structure—­in other words, how the material, chromatic depth of the Invenções translated into the perceived duration experienced by the viewer. The third is a desire to articulate construction as an emergent principle that arises from an organic rather than mechanical structure. This diverged from a model based on the mere juxtaposition of discrete parts. Finally, there is a disengagement of color from the traditional two-­dimensional support through an intensification of its “pigmentary” qualities. This resulted in a “body of color” that began to express a structure of its own.

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In 1963, Oiticica began to make wooden box structures painted in brilliant shades of yellow, pink, red, or orange fitted with shutters, slits, apertures, and moveable parts to allow for the variable penetration of light. As if in ecstatic response to Malevich, who wrote in 1915 of his brain “burning” with color, O ­ iticica named the new series Bólides, an astronomical term that refers to meteors that explode in the atmosphere, emitting energy and light (fig. 3.13).75 In the first six iterations of the series, the spatialization of painting enacted in his first Penetrável was scaled down to a hand-­held size and recast as an intimate ­“structure for inspection,” as Oiticica would later describe it, to be manipulated and transformed.76 These early Bólides combined and extended three central currents that formed his “constructive” approach to color: the potential for tactile, bodily participation; a structure that allowed the new participant to literally unfold color over time; and the integration of material and phenomenal elements within an organic entity that functioned more like an corpus than a machine. However, it was not until Oiticica’s seventh work in the series, B7 Bólide Vidro 1 (B7 Glass Bolide 1) (1963), that he fully explored the fourth element of his “constructive” formulation—­the “body of color” he had anticipated in 1960 and identified in proximate form in Carvão’s Cubocor.

Chapter Three Ready-Constructible Color

Fig. 3.13 Bólides in Hélio Oiticica’s studio, Rio de Janeiro, mid-­ 1960s. Photo by Desdémone Bardin. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica and the family of Desdémone Bardin.

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In B7 Bólide Vidro 1, Oiticica used raw pigment for the first time as a sculptural rather than painterly material. In doing so, he gave pigmentary color an entirely new haptic reality. Paradoxically prepainting and postpainting at once, this pigmentary color reconfigured the field of modernist color, forcing into inspection the specter of development that conditioned Oiticica’s practice and haunts the modernist project at large.

Pure Pigment B7 Bólide Vidro 1 consists of a glass jar of vermillion pigment nested within a larger glass bottle of crushed brick or earth, its reddish-­brown hue formed from the natural pigment iron oxide (fig. 3.14). Lifting the lid to the jar reveals the spatial interstice carved out by the glass boundary of the inner jar and the resulting concentric circles of color. This allows the viewer to compare the two pigments. The inner red is a finely ground and synthesized commercial pigment that corresponds to the numerous cadmium-­based reds Oiticica used in his vermillion Invenções.77 The outer red is a natural pigment in a coarse, un­­ processed state that reiterates the crushed brick of his last Invenção as well as the fabricated paint and appropriated bricks of Valentin’s student painting. This outer earthen pigment furthermore anticipates the “environmental” color of Ready Constructible. Although ostensibly sculptural, the material genealogy of these pigments links B7 Bólide Vidro 1 to Oiticica’s painterly experiments but reconfigures their chromatic exploration in terms of pigment unbound from paint. What is the significance of pigment unbound from paint? To begin, we might note that it amounts to an elementarization of painting.78 Employing raw pigment in powder form allowed Oiticica to purposely move away from the convention of paint as the primary vehicle for color and thus the painterly support as a prerequisite for its construction. Pigment unbound from paint thus ­mobilized a material state prior to the physical making of paint—­be it artisanal or ­industrial—­in order to conceptualize an art historical position that self-­ consciously superseded painting as such. As an abstract work, B7 Bólide Vidro 1 is postrepresentational and postpictorial. As a spatialized investigation of other­wise painterly color, it is also postmedium and postplane. In this recourse to painterly elementarization, Oiticica’s raw pigment Bólides dialogue with Alexandr Rodchenko’s 1921 trio of paintings, Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color, each of which consists of a panel painted a primary color (fig. 3.15). These works emerged from the immediate context of the laboratory phase of Russian constructivism and its injunction against traditional art. They record Rodchenko’s abandonment of painting through a process of rational deduction. As he wrote, “I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: It’s all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane, and there is to be no more representation.”79 By eliminating composition, taste, skill, and symbolic significance, the works dispensed with all that anchored painting to the realm of aesthetics, revealing it instead to ­

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Fig. 3.14 Hélio Oiticica, B7 Bólide Vidro 1, 1963. Glass, pigment, wood, 38 x circumference 63 cm. Photo by Claudio Oiticica. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Fig. 3.15 Alexandr Rodchenko, Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color, 1921. Oil on canvas, each panel measuring 62.5 x 52.5 cm. Image ­courtesy of A. Rodchenko & ­V.­Stepanova archive. Art © ­Estate of Alexander Rodchenko/RAO, Moscow/ VAGA, New York.

be a composite of conventions: a rectangular support and the application of color to a flat plane. Indeed, by demonstrating painting as a series of protocols, ­Rodchenko’s materialist elementarization paradoxically “reduced painting to its logical conclusion” by merely naming the works Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color. In other words, it was less important that the colors were perceived as “pure” than that they were acknowledged as primary colors as they are conventionally known. Elementarization for Oiticica, by contrast, involved a materiality oriented explicitly towards the viewer’s perception and was thus overwhelmingly phenomenological in approach. The consistently varied surface of his monochrome paintings thus recast Rodchenko’s 1921 “logical conclusion” by way of the facture the Russian artist had previously explored in his black-­on-­black paintings of 1918.80 In a triangular red painting from his Série Vermelho (Red Series) of 1959, for example, Oiticica changed the direction of the brushstroke along a central dividing line. Although appealing to an elementarist logic of primary colors, Oiticica dissolved the notion of “pure” or absolute color into the contingency of the viewer’s encounter with the work. As his subsequent trajectory indicates, however, he did not harness this phenomenological intensity towards the recupera­tion of traditional painting—­the very category that Rodchenko’s 1921 trio of paintings aimed to extinguish. Instead he sought to mobilize it towards a re­configured notion of “construction” and in this sense aligned his experiments with Rodchenko’s own movement into space. For Oiticica, painting as a historical category—­and specifically, materiality as a product of painting’s elementarization—­was to therefore be mined for its chromatic, experiential capacities. Paradoxically, this meant that he was more interested in pure pigment than pure color.

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At this juncture, the historical dialogue between Rodchenko and Oiticica must be triangulated with that of Yves Klein, who developed a complex and often bombastic relationship to his avant-­garde predecessors between the early 1950s and his death in 1962. Like Oiticica, Klein was attracted to the perceptual qualities of pure pigment. In 1957, he displayed a tray of ultramarine pigment on a gallery floor as part of Pigment Pur (Pure Pigment), one half of a two-­part exhibition titled Yves, Le Monochrome (fig. 3.16).81 Although it does not appear that Oiticica knew about this work, the two artists’ nearly contemporaneous exploration suggests the significance of raw pigment as a vehicle for working through the possibilities of a postpainterly color practice, as well as the postwar legacy of the avant-­garde. Although both Oiticica and Klein were drawn to raw pigment as a way to access color in its most saturated form, the function of this pigment for each artist inverts the viewer’s role in relation to the work of art. This in turn radically alters the work’s status vis-­à-­vis the industrialized commodity. Whereas Oiticica conceptualized his newly “constructive” sense of color through the notion of “the body of color,” Klein consistently formulated his chromatic exploration by way of the “immaterial.” The heightened physicality of raw pigment was a quality to be marshaled towards decidedly dematerialized phenomena such as “sensation” and “sensibility.”82 Meanwhile, the aesthetic experience as a whole was conceived as a result of a transcendent pictorial event rather than the dialogue or developmental emergence of two actualized bodies,

Chapter Three Ready-Constructible Color

Fig. 3.16 Yves Klein, Pigment pur bleu (Pure Blue Pigment), facsimile of 1957 and 1961 presentations of pure pigment, 120 x 100 cm. Photo by Janet Woodard. Image courtesy of The ­Menil Archives, the Menil Collection, Houston. Permission © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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as it was for Oiticica. Curiously, Klein often spoke of raw pigment in vitalist terms similar to Oiticica’s organicist discourse. Describing his early encounter with such pigments while shopping for materials in Paris in the mid-­1950s, he noted: I had no affection for oil paint. The colors seemed dead to me. What pleased me, above all, were pure pigments in powder form, such as I often saw at the wholesale paint suppliers. They had a brilliance and an extraordinary, autonomous life of their own. This was truly color in itself. The living and tangible matter of color.83 The 1957 display of raw pigment in a horizontal tray recalls this original encounter with color. The horizontal, binderless presentation allowed Klein to preserve the original, saturated glow of the pigment—­its “living” quality—­while the ­rectangular dimensions of the tray effectively tied the work to the conventions of easel painting.84 Interestingly, Klein opened up a brief participatory dimension by positioning a rake in this tray of pigment.85 Yet while Oiticica, like Rodchenko, sought to dispense with the pictorial associations of painting, Klein’s contemporaneous works and texts indicate that he aimed to generate aesthetic experience by way of the pictorial and thus remained invested in a specifically contemplative mode of art. In a 1959 lecture, he noted that one could not leave the horizontal tray of pigment on the ground simply bound by the “fixative medium” of gravity, for “man naturally stands upright and his gaze naturally fixes on the horizon. The painting should be presented at his eye level in a position perpendicular to the earth, like a screen.”86 From this perspective, the pictorial nature of Klein’s works does not derive from residually figurative elements but from their capacity to act like a picture, to image a world distinct from that of the viewer. Employing sufficiently pictorial supports required Klein to find a way of immersing raw pigments within a medium that would allow them to be affixed to a vertical surface. For Klein, this capacity to bind individual grains of pigment together without losing their autonomous, vital quality was the metaphorical enactment of utopian social cohesion. He wrote repeatedly of creating a work titled “France” in which each citizen would function as a grain of pigment held together by artistic “sensibility.”87 He further imagined this proposition in his “planetary reliefs” of 1961, in which casts of raised relief maps from France’s National Institute of Geography were spray-­painted his trademark blue (fig. 3.17). In his lecture, he further suggested that the artistic “sensibility” symbolized by this blue would act as an alternative to the existing social fixative—­“the monetary principle”—­which “mummifies” citizens and dulls their capacity for “imaginative and free responsibility.”88 The synthesis of raw pigment and medium in paint was nothing short of a national allegory. Yet Klein took a leading and deeply contradictory role within this allegory. In the late 1950s, he was introduced to Rhodopas M, a synthetic polyvinyl acetate resin that is an extremely stable binder and virtually clear when dried.89 With a

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Fig. 3.17 Yves Klein making Planetary Relief “Region of Grenoble” (RP 10), 1961, Yves Klein’s atelier, 14 rue Campagne-­Première,

minimal refractive index, light does little to alter its appearance. By sifting his pigments before mixing them with the binder, Klein was further able to control the chromatic consistency of the resulting paint. Rhodopas M allowed him to retain the saturated, matte quality of raw pigment while producing the same sensation of color on virtually any surface—­whether monochromes, sponges, folding screens, or naked breasts. In May 1960, Klein registered a patent at the French National Institute of Industrial Property for this combination of binder and synthetic ultramarine pigment, calling it International Klein Blue (IKB).90 In so doing, the artist did not trademark color (natural ultramarine dates to the sixth century and its synthetic version to the nineteenth) but the chemical combination that allows this color to be gathered as physical matter and fixed to a particular effect, transforming any support into a picture. While Klein proposed artistic “sensibility” as an alternative to the monetary principle of economic exchange in 1959, his registration one year later declared that this “sensibility” was to be legitimated specifically in terms of industrial proprietary. By 1961, when Klein recreated his 1957 tray of pigment for his retrospective exhibition in Krefeld, he could therefore validly state that his paintings were merely “the ashes of my art.”91 For, ironically, he had surpassed art for the legal mechanisms of the industrialized commodity sphere. Thus, while Oiticica conceived of the

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Paris. Photo © Gilles Raysse. Permission © Yves Klein/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, 2014.

relationship between the artist and material as a “field of development” whose result was an emergent “body of color” physically and perceptually dependent on its maker and matter, Klein’s trademark rendered the phenomenal effect of color a fully detachable product anchored in the commercial conventions of economic exchange. The implications for the viewer are stark. The elementarization of painting that culminated in raw pigment Bólides such as B7 Bólide Vidro 1 constituted a process in which a chromatic “field of development” was gradually transferred from the artist to the viewer. The viewer now constructed the “body of color” in concert with the work. This “body of color” was contingent and dependent. It was making, by contrast, that structurally expanded beyond the author as such. Tethering commercial proprietary to artistic “sensibility,” IKB re­instated a traditional hierarchy of artist and viewer while allowing color to float free as a commodity. IKB did not transfer making to the viewer, in other words, but rather the fetishistic power of color as commercially legitimated by the author. Hence Klein’s habit of calling his sponge sculptures portraits of the “reader” or “observer” after he or she had traveled into the immaterial depths of his ultra­ marine blue. Color was the material residue of this transmutation. Like the sponge, the viewer was an absorptive surface impregnated by the artistic act. Klein, like Oiticica, sought a key form (the monochrome) and a key strategy (elementarization) of the historical avant-­garde in order to isolate color as a vital, experiential entity intimately connected to the viewer’s perception of the work of art. For both Klein and Oiticica, the materiality of raw pigment provided the means to purposefully diverge from Rodchenko’s abandonment of color, exceeding the limits of easel painting while remaining insistently chromatic in orientation. Yet through a series of conceptual gambits culminating in the industrial patenting of IKB, Klein retained three of the most entrenched qualities of painting as an institutionalized aesthetic operation—­the mystification of the author, the pictorialism of the traditional canvas, and the contemplative passivity of the viewer—­even as he baldly mapped these qualities onto the economic sphere. If Rodchenko abandoned painting for space and an idealized sphere of technology and industry, Klein’s work illustrated the ease with which that revolutionary impulse could be absorbed by market forces. In the process, however, he also demonstrated that a postpainterly practice in the wake of the historical avant-­ garde had to be routed through the commodity. Failing to acknowledge its structuring influence would be to simply hide one’s head in the sand.

Trans-­Objects What would it mean to confront the commodity in a postpainterly practice ­elaborated in developmentalist Brazil? Conditions of economic production were already front and center for the Concretists, who sought to integrate their art with modern industrial processes through shared procedures such as rationalism, mechanization, and the distancing of the artist’s hand. Adopting the role of the designer who provides a prototype or schema rather than a finished work

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of art, Concretism sought to elementarize not painting so much as the division of artistic labor. Indeed, just as Oiticica began his Bólide series in 1963, this paradigm was formalized in the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (Superior School of Industrial Design), or ESDI, whose roots lay in Tomás Maldonado’s 1958 proposal for a technical school for MAM-­RJ. Modeled on Max Bill’s Hochschule für Gestaltung, ESDI trained students to “attend to the two exigencies of our industrial society: the planning of products (Industrial Design) and the planning of the means of Visual Communication (Graphic Design).”92 While the Concretists and subsequent ESDI students had considerable success in the latter endeavor through book covers, posters, and urban landscape design (many of which continue to define the look of the Brazilian environment today), the more ambitious objectives in industrial design proved more difficult to implement. Despite the developmentalist push of the late 1950s, ESDI graduates discovered that Brazil’s uneven integration in the global market meant that the country continued to play a structurally subordinate role in the manufacturing system. Brazil provided raw or semiprocessed materials to external markets, while being forced to purchase finished goods back at a higher price. Conversely, when products were manufactured in the country, they were often at the behest of foreign companies, allowing little opportunity for integrated industrial design processes. As one critic wrote in 1968 of the essential incongruity of the ESDI model, “We [Brazilians] fabricate the product, not the design of the product.”93 Such structural dependencies were legible even within the microcontext of imported and domestic paint. Brazil had a commercial automobile paint industry before an actual automobile industry, as it was cheaper for foreign companies to export manufactured car parts and have them assembled and painted locally.94 Thus while the preference for automobile paint amongst artists working in the Concrete idiom spoke to a generalized affinity with industrial processes and the country’s own fledgling auto industry, the paint itself bears a more complex history of geopower and economic relations. In the context of developmentalist Brazil, the commodity was therefore an inordinately inconsistent object riven with the inequities of the modern global economic system. In this sense, the question of a postpainterly practice was not a purely art historical provocation. It engaged the very contradictions of developmental modernity at large.95 Within this context, it is significant that Oiticica’s first use of raw pigment as an independent material in B7 Bólide Vidro 1 coincided with his first use of a readymade object: the two glass containers in which the pigments sit. In this recourse to readymade objects, Oiticica further distanced himself from traditional notions of artistic authorship and moved towards a concept of appropriation that would inform much of his later work. In his first text on the Bólides, on September 19, 1963, Oiticica described a dual process by which existing connotations of quotidian objects from the “wasted world . . . of our everyday” were stripped away as the object was rearticulated through the “spatial valorization of color.”96 In this transformation of the object into what Oiticica, drawing freely from the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, called a “symbolic form,” the viewer

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re­discovered the object in terms of its primary qualities, “the solid, the hollow, the round, [the object’s] weight, its transparency.”97 Although Oiticica noted that such objects inevitably retained some of their prior associations, he emphasized that their integration within an aesthetic system allowed for “the extraction of new possibilities.”98 The readymade was therefore not a hermetic or fixed entity but rather a matrix of potentiality open to resignification. Within this matrix, the economic connotations of “extraction” were recast in explicitly symbolic and experiential terms. Yet Oiticica was quick to insist that this approach to readymades did not amount to what he called a “lyrification” or elevation of everyday objects to the realm of art.99 He had already dismissed the work of the nouveaux réalistes for falling into precisely this trap in 1962. In a second text on the Bólides on October 29, he set out to distinguish his strategy from these and other works of assemblage. He observed, for example, that Robert Rauschenberg’s combines operated through “a posteriori incorporation,” a process by which a readymade object, once appended to a vertical or horizontal support, functioned as one of several signs internal to the work of art. In such works, a readymade object is “transported from the ‘world of things’ to the plane of ‘symbolic forms’ . . . in a direct and metaphorical way.”100 Assemblaged objects are thus “combined” with other elements such as brushstrokes and photographs upon a preexisting rectangular support without regard to their structural (as opposed to iconographic) character. In contrast, Oiticica sought to use readymade materials to trigger primal identifications with the structure of those same objects. The work and its readymade elements were thus coterminous and mutually dependent. This distinction is most clear in the glass Bólides, in which readymade glass receptacles provide a material structure that gives shape to a formless, pliant, or fluid material such as pigment or liquid. The form and internal relation of the two pigments of B7 Bólide Vidro 1 would entropically dissolve without the containing function of the readymade jars. Similarly, the pigments materialize the structure of the two receptacles—­literalizing their spatial dimensions in a way that would be invisible if left empty. The categories of the work and its readymade elements are reliant upon one another, thereby cancelling the hierarchical distinction between them. Whereas Oiticica’s objection to Rauschenberg’s combines hinged on what he perceived to be the arbitrary character of the appropriated object as it was in­corporated within a work, B7 Bólide Vidro 1 relied upon and revealed the structure of the incorporated object in what Oiticica called the “genesis” of the work. The transparency of the glass jars and their function of containment are thus deliberate, motivated, and generative.

* Faced with articulating a series of subtle but critical distinctions between his new incorporation of appropriated objects and existing practices related closely or distantly to a Duchampian legacy of the readymade, Oiticica coined a new term for his Bólides in his October 1963 text: “trans-­objects.” This concept was

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doubtless in dialogue with Gullar’s earlier formulation of the non-­object, works without frames or pedestals that were inserted directly into the space of the viewer and ordinary objects. Yet because non-­objects did not seek relations to these ordinary things, Gullar argued that they were not readymades—­what he called Duchamp’s “celebrated blague.”101 In formulating this difference, the critic was primarily concerned with the redemptive function of aesthetic experience. An artwork’s formal constitution should prompt a viewer’s heightened phenomenological awareness, which Gullar described as “transparent.”102 Ordinary objects, by contrast, were familiar to viewers and thus characterized by perceptual “obscurity.” Because the readymade was simply a utilitarian object displaced from its usual function, it had no formal capacity to maintain its critical difference from everyday things. Once the authorial effects of selection and nomination subsided, in other words, it could return to its prior state. As Gullar wrote, “soon that obscurity characteristic of the thing returns to envelop the work, bringing it back to the common level.”103 What Duchamp celebrated as “non­retinal,” in other words, was for Gullar the work of art’s “defeat.”104 Oiticica’s works between 1959 and 1962 conform ably to Gullar’s characterization of the non-­object. But with his Bólides, particularly those that employ readymade elements, the term begins to make less sense. Gullar described the non-­object as an entity that refuses to capitulate to “the common level” and that “cannot be classified according to its use and meaning since it fits neither in a category of use nor verbal designation.”105 With the Bólides, however, Oiticica began to incorporate readymade elements that displayed just such functions. Moreover, as I elaborate in chapter 4, he developed a corresponding system of designation in which terms such as box, glass, basin, can, light, and bed describe the functional use of these appropriated elements. In this light, Oiticica’s category of the “trans-­object” was an attempt to ontologically bridge the work of art and the readymade thing, transiting between the categories and collapsing them into a single entity, just as in the glass jars and pigments of B7 Bólide Vidro 1.

To Construct Color with the Readymade In Oiticica’s trans-­object, the structure of an appropriated quotidian object takes on a generative role as a phenomenological, experiential entity within the work of art. As noted in his earliest text on the Bólides, this occurs specifically through the “spatial valorization of color.”106 The use of readymade materials thus revisits and critically reorients Oiticica’s 1961 discussion of raw pigments, particularly his attempt to distinguish between “aesthetic color” and “color of.” As we will recall, whereas the former type of color signifies itself by virtue of its aesthetic transformation, the latter cannot escape the functional associations of its use. Raw pigment, however, “belongs to the world” and preexists either category. At the time of this formulation, Oiticica’s approach was informed primarily by a notion of authorial invention: the maker activates physical matter in a process characterized as a “field of development.” When Oiticica described the trans­ formation of raw pigment that “belonged to the world” into “aesthetic” color, he

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Fig. 3.18 Hélio Oiticica, B12 Bólide Vidro 3 “Em memória de meu pai”, 1964. Oil with poly­ vinyl acetate emulsion on wood,

was therefore invoking a vitalist conception of the artistic process itself. Bólides such as B7 Bólide Vidro 1 challenged this formulation, for they deployed readymade objects with preexisting functional connotations as well as pigment in its raw state. Both uses radically reduced if not eliminated the intervention of the artist’s hand. In this process, however, the Bólides opened up a new solicitation of the viewer’s touch. It is this new participatory dimension that instates what I wish to call “ready-­constructible color.” Oiticica’s practice of making paint with found color such as the crushed brick in Invenção 40 had already pressured the distinction between “aesthetic” color, color “of,” and color that “belongs to the world.” His subsequent use of raw pigment in the glass Bólides further dismantled these hierarchies by suggesting an intentional realignment of aesthetics according to a logic of appropriation. In B12 Bólide Vidro 3 “Em memória de meu pai” (In memory of my father) (1964), for example, Oiticica mixed the natural ochre pigment contained in the glass jar of the sculpture’s base with binder to make the paint that coats the work’s monumentalized lid (fig. 3.18). The two states of color are demonstrative: the “found” color of the raw pigment demonstrates the “made” color of the paint, generating an internal circuit by which each samples the other. But this reflexivity also opens outwards, since at its most fundamental level, the natural ochre pigment

glass, pigment, 75 x 27 x circumference 63 cm. Photo by Alexandre Baratta. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

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is an element “of the world.” The rich red earth pigment of B15 Bólide Vidro 4 “Terra” (Earth) (1964), dug directly from the ground, and the accumulation of white shells in B31 Bólide Vidro 14 “Estar” (To be) (1965–­66) likewise underscore aesthetic color as a found entity situated in raw materials themselves (fig. 3.19).107 If Oiticica felt that color must be incorporated into the aesthetic system of painting in order to “signify itself” in 1961, the introduction of raw pigment in these Bólides suggest that the autonomy of color became paradoxically linked to sources that preexisted paint. Oiticica’s earth and shell Bólides identify such sources in readily available and unrefined natural materials. In so doing, they map the elementarization of painting upon the breaking down of processed materials into more rudimentary, environmental, indeed subterranean states. A 1964 text in which Oiticica noted how color in the Bólides was “‘excavated’ in its totality” and possessed an “expressive primordial quality” supports this impulse.108 Yet Bólides such as

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Fig. 3.19 Hélio Oiticica, B15 Bólide Vidro 4 “Terra”, 1964. Glass, pigment, oil with poly­ vinyl acetate emulsion on nylon mesh, 42 x 28 x circumference 93 cm. Photo by Claudio Oiticica. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Fig. 3.20 Ward’s Natural Establishment Inc., entomology products catalogue from the studio of José Oiticica Filho. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

B7 Bólide Vidro 1 and B12 Bólide Vidro 3 are more complex in their engagement with found color as they incorporate readymade pigments—­ commercial and industrial color products selected and purchased from a store. These Bólides appear to have roots in the jars and vials of paint pigment that Oiticica and his father stored in the family studio.109 Made in homage to Oiticica’s father the year of his death, B12 Bólide Vidro 3 repeats the contour of many of these jars and may even be derived from glass vessels the elder Oiticica used in his entomological research (fig. 3.20). As the conservator Wynne Phelan has observed, the glass container of finely-­ground red pigment that comprises the inner chamber of B7 Bólide Vidro 1 corresponds to a jar of red cadmium pigment labeled “Ferro Enamel” by Oiticica’s father, which the younger Oiticica in turn used for several of his own Invenções (fig. 3.21).110 Oiticica’s October 1963 insistence that his incorporation of such readymade elements was expressive rather than random cements the deliberateness of these associations: “Nothing would be more inappropriate than the word ‘chance’, as if I had ‘found by chance’ an object . . . and from that created the work, no!”111 This position diverges from Duchamp’s well-­known pronouncements that the readymade was “based on a reaction of visual indifference.”112 It was also meant to distinguish Oiticica’s methods from chance operations employed in contemporaneous assemblage works.113 In Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri’s early 1960s Snare Pictures, for example, objects accrued in an aleatory fashion on a horizontal plane (for example, the remnants of Duchamp’s dinner) were affixed and displayed on the vertical as the register of that event. In contrast, Oiticica wrote that “the persistent search for ‘that’ object already indicated the a priori identification of an idea with the objective form which was later ‘found’.”114 Selected for their unique structural qualities and intimately linked to the material practice of painting, the glass vessels of B7 Bólide Vidro 1 and B12 Bólide Vidro 3 highlight the peculiar condition of the bottle of pigment: color that is readymade before it is either found or made by the artist. In this, Oiticica pinpointed an intermediary or “trans” state of color as a commodity form. Duchamp’s early 1960s statements regarding the manufactured status of the tube of paint reframed painting as a series of selections amongst readymade entities, much like the contemporaneous phenomenon of assemblage. This position radicalized Schwitters’s experiments—­specifically, the equalization of

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Fig. 3.21 Ferro enamel pigment from José Oiticica Filho’s studio. Image courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

painted and appropriated materials within the collage logic of Merz. Oiticica found inspiration in this approach to the materiality of color in his attempt to rethink the legacy of “the constructive” but objected to the overarching principle of juxtaposition that underwrote these historical and contemporary works. By isolating the “trans” status of the bottle of pigment from the finished commodity of the tube of paint, Oiticica elaborated an alternate conception of readymade color informed by flows of matter and vital continuity between states. For unlike a tube of paint, readymade pigment must be materially remade in order to function as paint. This mixing of pigment in medium and binder does not alter its chromatic substance, as each grain is chemically insoluble. But it does radically shift the pigment’s material effects. Readymade pigment is therefore neither an origin nor a terminus of production. Rather, it is a site of transit that emblematizes elementarization and transmutation at the same time. By isolating this

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quality in the bottle of pigment—­which in turn generates a “body of color” when activated by the viewer—­Oiticica extracted a specifically bodily and organic reading from the Duchampian readymade. And while Duchamp himself remarked in 1961, “So man can never expect to start from scratch; he must start from ready-­made things like even his own mother and father,” this biological interpretation was largely illegible in color practices of the time.115

* Oiticica’s biological interpretation of readymade objects demands a reconsideration of pigment as a physical material and chromatic phenomenon. Duchamp’s invocation of the commodity status of the tube of paint appears to pinpoint the demise of artisanal painting to the increase in paint manufacturing in the mid-­ to late nineteenth century. Yet the history of processed color indicates a more complex genealogy of commercialization.116 Artists’ pigments were always tied to industry and globalization—­from the mercantile routes that brought lapis lazuli from Afghanistan to medieval Italian workshops to be manufactured into ultramarine, to the synthetic processes that introduced cadmium red into industrial use in the early twentieth century. Many Renaissance artists purchased their pigments in processed form from dealers who in turn sourced their products from manufacturing hubs such as Venice. While the industrially manufactured tubes of paint produced in the nineteenth century significantly regularized the color market, they marked neither the end of material experimentation in the studio nor the historical inception of a commodity-­driven painterly practice. In Brazil, the heterogeneity of color as an industrial commodity form would have been particularly apparent in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the country’s developmentalist agenda led to import substitution policies such as the tariff regulations protested by artists at the 1954 “Salão Preto e Branco.” These regulations were structured around a hierarchical spectrum that ranged from raw materials such as ores to processed consumer goods such as artists’ paints. The 1954 transfer of imported paints from the highly taxed category of luxury goods to the moderately taxed category of raw materials and essential products repositioned the status of paint. No longer a commodity for consumption, it was now considered a material for production. This distributed and deferred its commodity status in relation to any number of potential future artistic goods. In so doing, the new law aligned fine art with industrialization and conceived of artistic labor in terms of processing raw materials into finished commodities. A separate economic logic, however, was applied to pigments, which were assessed according to domestic availability. Those pigments destined for the local paint industry were imported at a low tariff, except for those plentiful in Brazil, such as iron oxides, which were valued as an independent commodity for export and as a raw material for local manufacture. President Kubitschek highlighted mineral exports in his famous Programa das Metas (Target Plan) for just this reason.117 The intermediary position of pigment within a painterly practice therefore coincided with its “trans” status within the industrial spectrum of

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Fig. 3.22 Hélio Oiticica, B34 Bólide Bacia 1, 1965–­66. Plastic, earth, rubber gloves, 15 x 62.8 x 40.2 cm. Photo by César Oiticica Filho. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

commodity production. Whereas the 1954 protest centered on the status of readymade paint as a tool for intellectual and cultural practice—­one that should supersede its commodity condition—­pigment could never escape its dual identity as “mere” raw matter and “mere” commercial good. Ranging from plastic sheeting and rubber gloves to charcoal, gravel, and pouches of raw pigment purchased in bulk, Oiticica’s Bólides employ a wide range of found and readymade materials. In this way, he sourced color far beyond the traditional spheres of artistic production, all the while demonstrating how this appropriated color might “signify itself” as a “body of color.” Yet his practice also consistently returned to the question of a postpainterly practice in Brazil. Oiticica made repeated recourse to iron oxide pigments, frequently emphasizing their inconstancy and variability in material form. In B15 Bólide Vidro 4 “Terra”, pigment exists simply as rich, clay-­like earth piled in a glass jar (fig. 3.19). In B34 Bólide Bacia 1 (B34 Basin Bolide 1) (1965–­66), it consists of coarser dirt to be manipulated with gloves (fig. 3.22). In B12 Bólide Vidro 3 it takes the more processed form of ochre pigment designated for commercial or household use (fig. 3.18). In B7 Bólide Vidro 1, it appears within the crushed or ground form of manufactured bricks, resulting in a material that is nearly identical to the found earth of B15 and B34 (fig. 3.14).118 If Oiticica collapsed the distinction between industrial and artisanal paint in early works such as the Série Branca, these Bólides insist that pigmentary color is both raw and readymade. Raw in the sense that color is extracted in the monist form of pure, indivisible matter. Readymade in that this color is not physically created, but found or selected from a fluid and reversible spectrum of environmental and industrial use. Prepaint and postpaint at once, the Bólides intervene within the normative production of the work of art as both an industrial commodity and an intellectual product. They disrupt the stability of both categories by revealing the material flux at work beneath their regulative laws. Thus when in 1963 Oiticica stated

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Fig. 3.23 Hélio Oiticica, B31 Bólide Vidro 14 “Estar”, 1965–­66. Glass, beach shells, 47.7 x 42 x circumference 133 cm. Photo by César Oiticica Filho. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio ­Oiticica.

that it was the “spatial valorization of color” that allowed for the rearticulation of the readymade object, it was because his raw and readymade color isolated a latent economic inconsistency inherent to the commodity and redirected it in the form of explicit material change within the work of art. Here we can begin to unpack the complex symbiosis between the containing function of the readymade objects that Oiticica incorporated within his Bólides—­ glass jars, wooden crates, plastic basins—­and their chromatic contents. Each appropriated vessel provides a rigid structure that gives form to dispersed matter, which in turn molds itself to the object and articulates its volume and shape. The play is between fixture and flux, the being of the object versus the becoming of its color. The white shells of B31 Bólide Vidro 14 “Estar” poeticize this relation (fig. 3.23).119 The work’s subtitle estar (to be) contrasts with the related verb form ser (to be). While estar indicates a contingent or variable condition (such as the weather, one’s present location, or the provisional state of a thing), ser conveys a permanent state of identity or being (such as one’s name). The glass vessel’s cylin­drical shape—­its ser as an object—­gives the aggregate of shells a temporary form, or estar. This configuration is open to transformation and change by the very nature of the contained material, an aspect intensified by the work’s original participatory element, which encouraged viewers to touch and sift the shells with their hands. Yet this fundamental estar extends even to the composition of the shells. Each is an organic entity constructed from fluid biological and environmental deposits that harden over time into a solidified form—­a container for a living body, and thus a kind of Bólide of its own. These are in turn ground down by the friction of waves until they decompose into granules and combine with silica as sand. Since glass is itself a processed, industrial form of silica, even the permanent structure, or ser, of the Bólide’s readymade container has its roots in the multiple temporalities of the contingent body, or estar, which it contains. This approach to seemingly fixed or inanimate objects as mutable entities that are receptive to, and indeed embody, transformation allowed Oiticica to mobilize the commodity as matter in potentia and, further, to articulate it in terms of flow rather than juxtaposition. Oiticica described “the glass jar that contains the color” as a “premolded object, since it is readymade beforehand.”120 The readymade was thus a shaped or formed entity that was capable of being activated or remade through the vitalism of its colored matter. In his earlier paintings, vitalism was linked to the collaborative dialogue between maker and material. The “vertical color” of the Invenções subsequently associated color with a viewer who perceived chromatic depth over time. The Bólides shifted these terms due to their heightened participatory dimension and veritable elimination

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of the artist’s hand. The viewer now takes on the role of researcher and experimenter. Instead of approximating the physical creation of the artist, he or she “develops” and “unfolds” the “body of color” with the readymade. By structurally reconfiguring the viewer’s role, the Bólides recalibrate the relation between the commodity and the work of art. Oiticica’s earlier works resisted Concretism’s accommodation to the industrial logic of finished commodities by recuperating the vitalism of the artist’s physical creation. This position, however, used postindustrial materials such as commercial paint to recover a largely preindustrial relationship to artistic labor. Adopting the readymade as both a container (vessel) and content (pigment) of the work in the Bólides, ­Oiticica confronted the structuring force of the commodity. But rather than appealing to its mystification, as in Klein’s retention of the essential passivity of the viewing subject, he penetrated the materiality of the commodity in order to transfer making to the spectator him-­or herself. Flux and fungibility—­qualities that typify the commodity as it is submitted to the logic of economic exchange—­ are thus recast as material, basely subterranean operations to be harnessed and redirected by the participant in concert with the work. The resulting “body of color” cannot be extracted or depleted, as in Pedrosa’s industrial metaphor of child cognition. It remains contingent upon on the copresence of viewer and work within the space of encounter. To make color with the readymade is therefore not to make color in an artisanal sense. It is to phenomenally construct a “body of color” out of the mutability of the commodity and, in so doing, channel its “trans” status towards the conceptual and perceptual emergence of the work of art. In this process, the temporal character of making shifts. No longer confined to a specific act initiated by the artist, it is iterative and mobile, taking the body of the viewer as its locus rather than the other way around. In B34 Bólide Bacia 1, which invites the viewer to sift its pigmentary matter by hand, or B11 Bólide Caixa 9 (1964), in which a tray of brilliant saffron pigment can be exposed to varying degrees of light, the viewer metabolizes the commodity, converting its physicality into chromatic energy dependent upon the viewer’s manipulation and touch (fig. 3.26). In 1957, Duchamp underscored the essential function of reception in the constitution of any work of art, noting that, “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone” but is shared with the spectator.121 The “ready-­constructible color” of Oiticica’s Bólides critically elaborates on this notion of reception by physicalizing its epistemological model, providing an insistently bodily account of the process of interpretation and activation. Importantly, both Oiticica and Duchamp found a precedent in the work of Georges Seurat, the divisionist painter who deskilled la patte (the artist’s “paw” or touch) in order to transfer the making of color to the viewer’s eye (fig. 3.24). In Seurat’s work and the color theory that undergirds it, a painting is constructed through regularized points of isolated, unmixed color. Optical interaction therefore occurs in the viewer’s retina rather than on the canvas. Anarchic-­utopian in his political impulses, Seurat was sympathetic to the new industrial forms of the late nineteenth century and aligned his method with the democratizing potential

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Fig. 3.24 Georges Seurat, Le Bec du Hoc, Grandchamp, 1885. Oil on canvas, 64.8 x 81.6 cm. Tate, London /A   rt ­Resource, NY.

of mechanization. His paintings rejected color as purely a vehicle of authorial expression and subjectivity, foregrounding instead scientific principles, the repetitive labor of the artist, and the sensorial exertion of viewers now integrated within the work’s chromatic production. By regularizing la patte in a corporeal approximation of the machine and soliciting the spectator to actively construct the work in the process of viewing, Seurat’s paintings anticipated the conceptual contours of Duchamp’s position that it was “the spectator who makes the picture.”122 Yet Seurat’s provocation, unlike Duchamp’s, was delivered in an insistently retinal way. And Oiticica, who in 1978 enthused “Also seurat has everything to do with me!” amplified precisely this imbrication of the perceptual and the conceptual through his “ready-­constructible color.”123 Yet while Oiticica’s works similarly maximized the viewer’s optical activity, the process of haptically manipulating the colored material effectively reversed Seurat’s mechanization of la patte. Both artists were interested in how color was made in the viewer’s eye. If Seurat’s attempt to integrate scientific principles within his painterly method assumed a certain predictability of human perception, Oiticica’s ­“sci­entific” experiments (his Experimento “Terra de Cores com Líquidos Vários”, for example) focused on the contingency of color and pigmentary matter in

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par­ticular (fig. 3.1). As early as the Série Branca, Oiticica had sought to make a single color as variable as possible on the canvas surface. In nonpainted or partially painted works such as the Bólides, he pursued such variety through existing materials that modified the appearance of color by intensifying the refraction of ambient light, such as glass and water. In B32 Bólide Vidro 15 (1965–­66), an ovoid glass receptacle containing several pouches of commercial pigments, even the plastic of the pouches alters the perceived color of the pigment, functioning as another vessel, another lens (fig. 3.25). As Phelan has noted regarding her conservation tests of his work, Oiticica even sought to maximize the variability of color at the granular level of pigment. He often used pigments with high levels of ground-­up silica—­a material particularly sensitive to light due to its large, irregular grains.124 Frequently used as filler for inexpensive pigments, silica indicates precisely the sort of inferior mixtures Motta noted in his 1954 article about Brazilian domestic paints. The chromatic fluctuation of such impurities was unattractive to Motta, who sought material stability and permanence, as well as Klein, who wanted to produce a

Chapter Three Ready-Constructible Color

Fig. 3.25 Hélio Oiticica, B32 Bólide Vidro 15, 1965–­66. Glass, plastic, pigment, earth, 46.0 x 35.8 x circumference 152 cm. Photo by César Oiticica Filho. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio ­Oiticica.

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Fig. 3.26 Hélio Oiticica, B11 Bólide Caixa 9, 1964. Oil with polyvinyl acetate emulsion on wood and glass, pigment, 49.8 x 50 x 34 cm. Photo by Claudio Oiticica. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

recognizable and consistent color sensation across a range of applications. (Klein sifted his pigment for just this reason.) But this protean quality was highly desirable for Oiticica as it underscored how the “body of color” was constructed in the temporal process of viewing. Indeed, the ability for impurities to magnify the interaction of matter and light is concrete evidence for how color is “made” in the viewer’s eye. By intensifying rather than minimizing the variability of matter and light, the Bólides render viewing reflexive and explicit. Pigment is not therefore a form of evidence, as in Klein’s conceit, but a primal constructive material awaiting the viewer’s intervention. The Bólides are not residues of past artistic events; they are environments in which such events might happen. As “structures for inspection,” as Oiticica put it, they demand to be touched: drawers of pigment opened, shutters swiveled forwards and back, inner compartments discovered, apertures revealed.125 In B2 Bólide Caixa 2 “Platônico” (Platonic) (1963) or B11 Bólide Caixa 9, hinged panels

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and moveable trays allow the viewer to harness and direct light upon interior spaces and raw pigment, modulating and shifting their appearance (fig. 3.26). The works thus create an arena for the exploration of color. But they also create a physical model of how color is formed through the interaction of matter and light. As the viewer produces and controls this interaction, color is realized as a result of the participant’s touch—­his or her patte. In so doing, the Bólides physicalize the imperceptible process of color perception itself. Viewed through this lens, Oiticica’s oft-­repeated statement that the Bólides sought to give color a new structure—­a “body,” as he put it—­does not simply refer to the way the works materialize color. It also refers to the way they model the behavior of color as an organic phenomenon constituted through and by the viewer over time. The viewer’s perceptual act is thus externalized in physical form and redoubled as the participatory process by which this form is known. If Oiticica’s incorporation of readymade elements reduced or even eliminated the artist’s patte, touch returns as the beholder’s share.

Painting-­in-­general With the Bólides, Oiticica used prepainterly materials to expand into a post­ painterly field. In raw pigment, painting is condensed into the colored matter from which paint is made. This physical matter signifies itself (as a “body of color”) as well as its source (as a sample given temporary form). The Bólides thus claim both the “aesthetic” color and the color “of” from Oiticica’s 1961 formulation, while locating both in color drawn from “the world.” This shift does not dispense with the material making associated with the painter’s craft. Rather, it transfers it from artist to viewer. This is perhaps the most radical aspect of the Bólides. In Oiticica’s early practice, the artist made color so that it was found by the viewer. In the Bólides, color is found readymade and the viewer constructs its “body” through the work. As “trans-­objects,” the Bólides shuttle between viewer and maker just as they move between the categories of work of art and readymade thing. For this reason, painterly expression and the incursion of the industrial are not mutually exclusive in Oiticica’s works. They jointly partake in a “ready-­constructible color” animated by the viewer’s touch. This emphasis on the hand, or patte, finally, demonstrates how radically Oiticica’s practice recast contemporaneous reference points for painting in Brazil, specifically the desire to align painting with modernization, the acceleration of national development, and the stimulation of the industrial sphere. This desire—­what I have termed “painting-­in-­general”—­pertained to an economic imperative to displace older traditions of artisanal painting, as well as to an intellectual imperative to identify painting as a cognitive foundation for the modern subjects of a new Brazil. Oiticica drew from both of these discourses. Yet by remapping the interactions between their component parts, he disrupted their teleologies. With regard to the former discourse, Oiticica acknowledged and exploited the structuring force of the commodity. But rather than treat its materiality as the apex of an industrial process, he penetrated it in order to

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access a “trans” state in fluid and reversible flux. By presenting readymade color as yet-­to-­be-­constructed by the viewer, he rerouted the structure of potentiality and conversion inherent to the commodity, replacing its detachable exchange value with an emergent “body” dependent on both the viewer and the work. In that this “body of color” is constructed by physicalizing the viewer’s own perceptual process, Oiticica insisted that his postpainterly color practice was rooted in the most elemental aspects of prepainterly materiality and sensation. Here we come to the second discourse of painting-­in-­general. Period texts such as Pedrosa’s Crescimento e Criação mapped economic and national development directly upon cognitive development, as per the unconscious impulses of the child. This was in keeping with a broader interest in art of children and the mentally ill among Brazilian proponents of modern art in the 1940s and 1950s. Whereas “outsider” art was strongly associated with gestural abstraction in the United States and Europe, Brazilian advocates such as Pedrosa often linked it specifically to geometric abstraction.126 The appearance of structured geometries within this art, Pedrosa argued, was evidence that the unconscious in fact tends towards an elemental order that conventional representation tends to obscure.127 Crescimento e Criação celebrated art education’s ability to cultivate exactly these logical tendencies. Whereas Concretism sought to approximate the machine by distancing the hand from the work, Pedrosa’s advocacy of “control” and “order” in childhood art education aimed to discipline the psyche via the motor impulses of the body. Children who learned to “utilize their hands with precision,” he wrote, “will see life as a healthy or beautiful work of art to preserve.” They will not “clap their hands for hysterical dictators” but “march towards progress without turning their backs on liberty.”128 La patte was thus a central vehicle by which to nurture the rational mind. For Pedrosa, Serpa’s success as a child art educator lay in how he “accelerates the moment in which visual control begins to exercise itself on the motor impulses.”129 Mechanized by Seurat as a result of industrialization, la patte was here the unconscious drive to order that would deliver the aspirational promise of a fully industrialized, democratized, modern world. What Duchamp found impossible—­to be an expressive artist in the age of industrialization—­was advocated as the primary tool of the modernizing process itself. Oiticica frequently had children photographed interacting with his Bólides. His September 19, 1963, notebook entry likewise referred to the works’ capacity to return the viewer to a child’s perceptual state: “I myself feel like a child who begins to experiment with objects in order to understand their qualities.”130 By suggesting that the Bólides functioned like ur-­forms through which to discover the primordial geometry of objects, Oiticica echoed Pedrosa’s emphasis on a primal structure that underlies experience. Yet, Oiticica specified that these primordial forms were not produced sui generis from elemental cognitive functioning but rediscovered in the “wasted world of everyday objects.”131 As he wrote regarding a children’s art class he offered in 1965, readymade objects such as boxes were to be “recreated through the plastic conception of the child,” who would “disclose” them through manipulation.132 The Bólides thus redirected Pedrosa’s evolutionary developmentalism. Rather than harness the blind motor

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movements of the child towards the appearance of ordered geometric form, they offered geometry as a readymade structure to be unfolded by the child’s patte. In that this patte physicalized the child’s perceptual processes through his or her temporal apprehension of color, cognitive function was not disciplined but externalized and differentiated as the constructive process by which to perceptually reconfigure the existing world. Oiticica’s Bólides thus escaped neither the commodity structure of the readymade nor the regulative tendencies of its industrial field. They released its mutability as a body to be metabolized by viewers themselves.

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* For Oiticica, positing the child as an ideal user of the Bólides was a way of ­foregrounding a subject in formation—­one whose touch was not disciplined by the organizing impulses of Gestalt form but who unfolded the geometric shapes of readymade objects and materials in order to release their fungible, re-­constructible capacity. In his 1968 recommendation for his former student, Andreas Valentin, Oiticica aligned this exploratory developmental process with the formation of an intellect predisposed to revolutionary action. Yet in the numerous photographs he staged of children interacting with his Bólides, one has little sense of the adult interlocutor he had in mind. To close this chapter, then, I want to turn to a very different kind of Bólide—­B33 Bólide Caixa 18 ­“Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo” Caixa-­poema 2 (B33 Box Bolide 18 “Homage to Horseface” Box-­poem 2) (1965–­66) (fig. 3.27). This work was dedicated to the

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Fig. 3.27 Hélio Oiticica, B33 Bólide Caixa 18 “Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo” Caixa-­poema 2, 1965–­66. Glass, wood, photographs, painted nylon mesh, iron bars, transparent plastic, red pigment. Photo by Hélio Oiticica. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

infamous bandit Manuel Moreira, known as Cara de Cavalo, who was executed in a hail of bullets after a widely publicized police chase in 1964. Oiticica knew Cara de Cavalo personally and identified the Bólide as constituting a key “ethical” moment in his work.133 It has since come to signal a supposed shift from aesthetics to ethics in his practice. How can we come to terms with such a work in light of the analysis of “ready-­constructible color” put forward in this chapter? Much like Oiticica’s other raw pigment Bólides, B33 Bólide Caixa 18 foregrounds a sack of colored pigment. Yet its explicit representational content—­four stark photographs of Cara de Cavalo’s mutilated body—­seem far removed from the art historical and developmentalist concerns charted in those earlier works. In fact, one way of interpreting the work’s ethical dimension is to understand the violence of the black-­and-­white images—­their repetition, graphic facticity, and unrelenting realism—­as a shock that disrupts processes of chromatic aestheticization and forces the viewer to confront the specter of social marginality. ­Oiticica’s subsequent use of a similar image for his 1968 banner Seja Marginal Seja Herói (Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero) likewise indicates a self-­conscious identification between the vanguard artist and the crucified bandit.134 Writing after Oiticica’s death, poet Waly Salomão described that banner’s “auto-­referential” nature, asserting that it spoke to “the heroic resistance . . . of the artist in the face of the cooptive world of dealers, curators, galleries, and museums.”135 In this set of homologies, the artist-­outlaw emerges as a solitary individual whose renunciation of the normative social contract is both a gesture of liberty and radical critique. If this position sounds a note of romanticization, its impulse is consistent with the intensification of a narrative of political revolt in the early years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, before the most brutal repression began in 1969. Yet B33 Bólide Caixa 18, I would argue, orchestrates a more complex corporeal and political logic, one in which the abstract, emergent “body of color” unfolded by way of the participant’s touch is calibrated with, and against, the explicit violence of the photographic image. Likewise, while the artist’s elective affinity to the position of marginality significantly obscures the workings of class-­and race-­based oppression (Oiticica, it bears reiterating, was neither poor, dark skinned, nor disenfranchised in any conventional sense of the word), the economic and social coordinates of his “ready-­constructible color” may offer an alternate structure of identification. While such a framework is no less disturbing, it cuts to the heart of the production of social inequality. Here we must take seriously Oiticica’s 1968 proposition that B33 Bólide Caixa 18 was “a mode of objectifying the problem” of marginality rather than merely lamenting the crime.136 Like many of Oiticica’s prior box Bólides, B33 Bólide Caixa 18 consists of a rectangular structure that can be modified by way of hinged panels. One of the sides opens by way of a painted red gauze strip to reveal the box’s photograph-­ lined interior and pouch of red pigment. These photographs propose an initial structure of identification between the viewer and the represented subject: each reproduces the same image of Cara de Cavalo prostrate on the ground, torso riddled with bullets and arms outstretched. Heavily circulated in newspapers of

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the time, the photograph’s point of view is from within a crowd of onlookers, whose backs in turn are silhouetted in the image’s foreground. The perspective is thus at once that of witness and aggressor, as our proximate position above the crucified body aligns us with the shots that were fired. The claustrophobic reiteration of the image within the narrow confines of the box is both spectacularizing and alienating. Depicted space is flattened and derealized while the traumatized body multiplies. The repetition and size of the photograph likewise establishes it as a mediated representation—­one consumed with a certain ­“morbidity” and “social pleasure,” as Oiticica put it in 1968, that characterizes the reporting of violent crime.137 The image-­laden interior of B33 Bólide Caixa 18 thus induces a visual shock embedded within a preexisting social schema. Within this framework, the viewer’s relationship to Cara de Cavalo proceeds from nonidentification rather than empathy. Inserted within this visual economy are sculptural elements: the painted gauze strip and the pouch of pigment, the latter imprinted with the words “Aqui está, e ficará! Contemplai seu silêncio heróico” (Here he is, and will stay! Contemplate his heroic silence). Brilliant red, the pigment is acutely metaphoric, evoking both the blood and ashes of the victim in palpable, visceral form. If the incursion of the photographic image within Oiticica’s otherwise abstract work speaks to the urgency of mediation and representation, this pigment situates such concerns by means of the embodiment that runs through the Bólides as a whole. Mapping the specific body of Cara de Cavalo upon the abstract “body of color” released by way of phenomenological encounter thus offers the viewer an alternate mode of sensorial apprehension. Spectacular and distancing violence is counteracted with the haptic quality of touch. Spatial and social alienation can only be overcome, the Bólide suggests, by intimate contact between bodies. Oiticica indicated as much in a letter to Guy Brett about the work, noting the difficulty in rectifying the social construction of Cara de Cavalo as “public enemy n° 1” with the man he knew.138 By channeling vision through the touching, sensing body and reciprocally constructing a body of color through the chromatic contingency of readymade elements, B33 Bólide Caixa 18 imagines the reconstitution of mutual, intersubjective relations. Yet by casting the abstract, though insistently literal, character of the pigment in metaphoric terms, B33 Bólide Caixa 18 also renders the historical individual Cara de Cavalo as pure materiality. Far from inert, the vivification of this materiality is at stake in the viewer’s tactile manipulation of the pouch. But it depends on a prior reification of the subject in order to work. To understand B33 Bólide Caixa 18 as “objectifying the problem” of marginality is therefore also to comprehend that the radical asymmetry that structures social exploitation enacts a violence that is no less objectifying in force. As urban theorist Janice Perlman demonstrated in her seminal 1976 book on the myth of marginality in Rio, the so-­called marginal subjects of the Brazilian favelas were not peripheral to society, as public policy and popular culture alike assumed. Rather, they were functionally absorbed within the system against their own interests.139 Brazil’s urban poor thus experienced—­at the level of the social—­the very

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­ tructure of inequitable integration that generated Brazilian economic under­ s development at large. Moreover, the attempt to alleviate underdevelopment by way of developmentalist policies disempowered large sections of the populace and reproduced asymmetry at a different scale. The fundamental inconsistency of the Brazilian commodity and the psychic schizophrenia of its social relations were thus part and parcel of what Oiticica called a single “consumptive capitalist machine.”140 Both were generated from within a logic of exploitative extraction, and both were incommensurate with the ideology they functioned to uphold. The “heroic silence” of Cara de Cavalo is thus twofold. It gestures to the outlaw’s agency—­his individual acts of negation—­but it also reveals the all-­encompassing, destructive, and suppressive character by which this alterity was produced and maintained. To metabolize the physical matter of B33 Bólide Caixa 18 within a “field of develop­ment” dependent upon the participant’s touch is thus to produce an epistemological model that critically reroutes this structure of exploitation. It is also, however, to rehearse and repeat the historical violence from which such a project proceeds. In this acknowledgment of the fundamentally historical character of perceptual encounter, we must locate B33 Bólide Caixa 18’s dynamics of transformation and revolt not simply within an individual consciousness but within an inter­ subjective arena of social performance and conditioning. Here, bodies are the explicit locus of social regulation and violent action but also agency and desire. A central question that proceeds from this shift of emphasis revolves around the transformative character of the participant’s body. This concern animates the Parangolé, an order of object Oiticica invented shortly after his first raw pigment Bólides and to which I turn in chapter 4. If the Bólides transferred “making” from artist to viewer through the coincident release of a “body of color,” the Parangolé folded this “making” back upon the body of its participants—­inviting them to recreate their own bodies in conjunction with physical matter. This construction and reconfiguration of the body is explicitly intersubjective—­part of a reversible process of seeing and being seen that Oiticica called the “watching-­wearing cycle.” As I shall argue, the reciprocal self-­construction and self-­differencing at the heart of the Parangolé was rooted in Oiticica’s idiosyncratic configuration of the organic and the systematic. While the Bólides allow us to conceive of a “body of color” conditioned by an industrial and social field, the Parangolés ultimately compel us to question what a body is.

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Art does not wish to be eternal. Its historical shell will fill up ­museums, while its living meaning goes on shifting from work to work. Ferreira Gullar

4 What a Body Can Do A printer’s mock-­up shows two photolithographic reproductions aligned horizontally on a page (fig. 4.1). Black and white, grainy, their edges have the traces of blotter or emulsifying mask. On the left, a man stands barefoot on a street, face turned towards the camera lens, feet pointed in the opposite direction. His right arm is outstretched, drawing with it a piece of fabric that hangs from a layered garment slung around his neck. The image is captioned “Miro of Mangueira Dances with cape 1 parangolé (1964).” On the right, another man is pictured from above, hair bleeding into dark shadows that fill the upper portion of the frame. His body is obscured by a series of interlocking fabric strips draped across his left shoulder. The caption reads “Eduardo Ribeiro unfolds cape 2 parangolé (1965).” Dancing and unfolding—­the actions depicted in the photographs—­are key modes of the Parangolé, a new order of art object invented by Hélio Oiticica in 1964.1 In dancing, the body animates the Parangolé, vivifying its multicolored layers and modifying its form in space and time. In unfolding, the Parangolé extends and transfigures the body, allowing it to be newly explored. Pictured on the left, P4 Parangolé Capa 1 (P4 Parangolé Cape 1) (1964) can be worn in many ways. Its layers of painted canvas, gauze, netting, and plastic can hang vertically, compressed through the downwards pull of gravity, each stratum nestled closely against the next. Its stiff exterior shells can also be sprung open to reveal hidden torsions and pliable fabric leaves. Extended, rotated, manipulated, and transformed, the cape is a malleable architecture and also a skin. P5 Parangolé Capa 2 (P5 Parangolé Cape 2) (1964–­65), pictured on the right, has a different anatomy, its structure formed not out of layers but of loops. This cape is a matter of circuits. A central broad spine supports thinner bands that that fold around it in Möbius strips. Appendages and pockets replace sheet-­like leaves: a pouch of pink pigment encased in a plastic sack, a newspaper-­lined sleeve, a pair of red underwear stitched to an outer seam. Enfolded within these capes, the wearer’s body constitutes another kind of materiality, a corpus to be constructed anew. On August 12, 1965, Oiticica inaugurated the Parangolé at the opening of the exhibition Opinião 65 (Opinion 65) at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de

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Fig. 4.1 Hélio Oiticica, mock-­up for pamphlet to be distributed at inauguration of the Parangolé at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, August 12, 1965. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Janeiro (MAM-­RJ). As part of this public introduction, Oiticica distributed a ­pamphlet containing the images described above and two texts pertaining to the new order of work.2 In the first, “Bases Fundamentais Para uma Definição do ‘Parangolé’” (Fundamental Bases for the Definition of a Parangolé), he outlined his overarching conceptual framework: “the discovery of what I call Parangolé defines a specific position in the theoretical development of my entire ­experience of color-­structure in space.”3 He went on to describe the Parangolé’s relation to “popular constructive primitivism”: the implicit “Parangolé character” of favela architecture, carnival festivals, and the improvised shacks of popular fairs. Such phenomena provided a specific spatial constitution and address of the participant’s body—­what Oiticica called a “constructive nucleus.” The Parangolé was not an appropriation of these objects and environments but a convergence between them and the structures of time, space, and color explored in his previous works. In the second text, “Anotações Sobre o Parangolé” (Annotations on the Parangolé), Oiticica detailed the order’s three categories—­banners, capes, and tents—­concentrating on the participatory experience of the cape and what he called its “wearing-­watching cycle.” In wearing, the participant acts as a “structural nucleus” or “motor” of the work, animating its form through movement. An “inter-­corporeal space [is] created upon the work’s unfolding,” he wrote, effecting a “metamorphosis” of the participant and the work of art.4 Watching another participant transformed by a cape completes and closes the cycle, as viewers recognize their own transmutation externalized in the image of the other. The actions depicted in the photographs correspond to these modes: Eduardo turns inwards in the act of wearing, absorbed in the environment the cape creates immediately around and with his body; Miro turns outwards in the relational address of watching, soliciting the viewer as a fellow participant in the process of reinvention and social exchange. In the watching-­wearing cycle, the asymmetrical structure of identification that defines B33 Bólide Caixa 18 “Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo”—­what Oiticica

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described as the “objectification” of marginality—­is cast as a reversible process in which participants mirror but also differentiate themselves from others.5 Because the phases are codependent, successive, and reduplicative, reciprocity neither dissolves nor reifies distinctions between self and other. On the contrary, difference defamiliarizes identity: in watching, you recognize that you too are seen. Consequently, the self emerges only as it becomes other to itself. This is why photographs of participants wearing Parangolés such as those of Miro and Eduardo can merely schematize the order’s behavioral circuit. The images arrest the motion that fuels the folding and unfolding of body-­and-­work as well as the temporality of intersubjective transformation. Moreover, because we occupy a distinct, unmarked position outside of the photograph, the necessary reciprocity of otherness breaks down. It can only be proposed from within the bounds of the image, where the fluidity of difference can also be mistaken for its opposite—­ identitarian consolidation as a series of enduring bodily signs. The documents Oiticica released to introduce the Parangolé thus established the possibility of reciprocal self-­othering at the core of the order. What they could not do, however, was ensure that this fundamental reversibility would be acknowledged or even perceived.

* The 1965 inauguration of the Parangolé plays a pivotal and symbolic role within the internal trajectory of Oiticica’s work and later reception.6 The mutual incorporation of the participant and work and the formulation of the body as a fundamentally plastic, transformable entity have clear roots in Oiticica’s chromatic investigations and his exploration of the participant’s touch. But these developments were equally indebted to the artist’s entry into the world of Mangueira, a hillside favela far removed from his middle-­class home. Oiticica began to frequent Mangueira in early 1964.7 There he became an official member of the samba school Estação Primeira da Mangueira, one of the most traditional of Rio’s carnival organizations, and, beginning in 1965, took part as a passista ­(principal dancer) in the city’s annual carnival desfile (parade or procession) (fig. 4.2). The Parangolé is formally and conceptually unthinkable without ­Oiticica’s initiation into this social world of dance. Through his experiences in Mangueira, ­Oiticica had his first sexual encounters, almost certainly with men.8 He also came to link the marginal position of the artist with the social marginality, a relation subsequently articulated in works such as B33 Bólide Caixa 18.9 In a November 1965 text, “A Dança na Minha Experiência” (Dance in My Experience), he connected the participatory nature of the Parangolé to “the overthrowing of social preconceptions, of group and class barriers” and likened the Dionysian expression of the individual within a collective to Friedrich Nietz­ sche’s “immanence of the act.”10 The “vital experience” of dance produced a “social dislocation” that countered his own “excessive intellectualization” and “bourgeois conditioning”—­traits he noted had been ingrained in his upbringing since birth.11 Newly inhabiting his body through dance was thus a way to

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Fig. 4.2 Hélio Oiticica in samba ensaio, Mangueira, 1964 or 1965. Photo by Desdémone Bardin. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica and the family of Desdémone Bardin.

de­naturalize the social strictures that organized and controlled bodies through race, class, and gender. Desire, social transgression, the ecstatic crushing of inhibitions: all were fulcra in the “search for myth” Oiticica understood as foundational to the Parangolé.12 Indeed, it is as myth that the Parangolé entered public life at its inauguration at Opinião 65. In April the year before, a military coup had established a dictatorship that would become increasingly repressive after the notorious Ato Institucional n° 5 (Institutional Act n. 5) of 1968. Soon after the coup, the influential Centros Popular de Cultura (Centers for Popular Culture), or CPCs, of the leftist national student union were dismantled and their headquarters burned.13 As the

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last president of the CPC, Ferreira Gullar and others formed the theater collective Grupo Opinião (Opinion Group) to continue the CPC’s goal of uniting popular and political art. Opinião 65 was named in the spirit of this resistance and claimed to be a “rupture” with the artistic past.14 The explicitly social orientation of the Parangolé—­its structural reliance on participation and roots in the physical spaces and ritual traditions of the Brazilian underclass—­were thus part of a broader attempt to rethink the nature of vanguard art within a society marked by vast economic inequality and inchoate political upheaval. Several artists included in Opinião 65 took up such concerns by returning to representation and legible social content. But Oiticica’s Parangolé was a singular contribution within this group, due in no small part to events that occurred at the exhibition’s opening (fig. 4.3). Because the body in motion was an integral component of the Parangolé, Oiticica invited a group of friends and samba dancers from Mangueira to inaugurate the order with him. Together they formed a procession, wearing the capes, flourishing the banners, and playing music as if another carnival had erupted outside the museum. Taken aback by the unusual appearance of this exuberant and overwhelmingly working-­class group, the

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Fig. 4.3 Inauguration of the Parangolé outside of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, August 12, 1965, P2 Parangolé Bandeira 1 at center. Photo by Desdémone Bardin. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio ­Oiticica and the family of ­Desdémone Bardin.

museum director refused to allow the procession to enter the building, revealing the elitism and racism of Brazil’s conservative artistic culture. While photographs reveal that individual participants did indeed enter the museum at some point during the opening, Oiticica was compelled to premiere the Parangolé order outside. The Parangolé’s antipathy to the rarified environment of the museum has defined its historical and critical reception. In the immediate wake of the exhibition scandal, newspaper reports pointed to the order’s prohibition as indicative of its radical, anti-­art aims.15 Three decades later, when participants wearing the capes were summarily ordered out of a gallery at the 1994 São Paulo Bienal, the Parangolé’s transgressive sociality seemed as potent as it was in 1965.16 Indeed, even when not expelled from the museum, the Parangolé sits uneasily within it. As critics have rightfully argued, a Parangolé displayed on a museum wall is not a Parangolé but a formal vestige of the work—­a material husk awaiting vivification through a participant’s action.17 The Parangolé would thus seem to be the paradigmatic symbol of radical art’s inadmissibility to the museum.18 Rejected by the institution’s social strictures upon its public introduction, it also rejected the museum’s behavioral structures by virtue of its participatory form. Yet the Parangolé has an intimate, indeed genetic, relationship to the museum that has long been obscured. Oiticica conceived of the Parangolé and, importantly, designated it with a name while employed by the Museu Nacional, a natural history museum located in Rio’s São Cristóvão neighborhood (fig. 4.4).19 There he helped his father classify Lepidoptera (an order of insects consisting of butterflies and moths) from 1961 through 1964.20 It was almost certainly this meticulous training and “excessive intellectualization” that Oiticica sought to throw off with the delirium of improvisatory movement he celebrated in “A Dança na Minha Experiência.” Yet it was during the same years that Oiticica worked at the Museu Nacional that he developed an internal taxonomy with which to classify his works, one he would use in one form or another throughout his life. As I shall suggest, this taxonomy provided the conceptual basis for the convergence of the biological and the systematic in Oiticica’s oeuvre. It is also the root of the Parangolé’s status as an order of emergent knowledge—­what the artist elliptically termed “the structuring of the new” in 1978.21 In short, the shift of Oiticica’s works out of the museum of modern art was critically intertwined with his deployment of the epistemological framework he absorbed within the museum of national history at the very same time. The notion of a “speciation event”—­which refers to the “splitting” or “unfolding” of a given species into two—­is key to these conceptual and institutional relations. Because organisms are always evolving, speciation events are durative rather than punctual in character. For the taxonomist who identifies a new species and locates it within an existing genealogy, however, such events constitute precise, historical discoveries that alter the discursive organization of living things. This was also the implication, I argue, of the 1965 introduction of the Parangolé. Paradoxically, Oiticica’s success in establishing the new order as a symbol of his shift from “art” into “life” has eclipsed its idiosyncratic roots within

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a taxonomic system that was developed to encode and categorize life itself. If we can comprehend the underlying logic of this system, however, we can also recover Oiticica’s conceptual interventions within it. As we shall see, the Parangolé engendered—­in both generic and sexual senses of the term—­a body ­defamiliarized by means of intersubjective and interobjective exchange. Viewed from this lens, the epistemological provocation of the Parangolé does not inhere in a simple negation of institutional categories but in the order’s ability to model difference as an emergent phenomenon in and of itself.

Nomination, Contingency, Parangolé A taxonomic investigation of the Parangolé logically begins with its name. Although the Parangolé’s first public appearance was at MAM-­RJ in August 1965, several articles noting Oiticica’s “invention” had already appeared in local newspapers beforehand.22 In June, his invitation to exhibit at David Medalla’s and Paul Keeler’s Signals Gallery in London was enthusiastically reported by the local press.23 The confrontation at the opening further cemented Oiticica’s reputation as a rising star of the Brazilian avant-­garde. The gallerist Jean Bogichi stated as much in a television interview shortly after the event. In response to the question “Qual é o parangolé?” (What is the parangolé?) he rapturously proclaimed, “Parangolé is what it is. It is the myth. Hélio Oiticica is our Flash Gordon. He doesn’t fly through outer space. He flies through layers of social space.”24 While Oiticica suggested in a letter to Medalla that the art public had not participated in the inauguration as fully as he would have liked, the event

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Fig. 4.4 New insect galleries re­installed by José Oiticica Filho and others, showing butter­fly display, Museu Nacional, 1960. Courtesy of Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

effectively solidified the Parangolé as a designation firmly associated with his name.25 In fact, the word parangolé was not of Oiticica’s invention but rather carioca gíria, a slang term that emerged from Rio’s favelas but by 1964 had already begun to become obsolete. As Waly Salomão wrote in his posthumous homage to Oiticica, Qual é o Parangolé?, the word has no precise translation but derives from the “dynamic plasticity of language.”26 It can refer to a disturbance, a samba rhythm, a sudden excitement, a working-­class ball. But it can also suggest a linguistic style, an idle talk shaded towards the cunning, insignificant, or sly. A parangolé in this light implies a temporal or discursive phenomenon with a certain discreteness, however permeable its borders. The query “Qual é o parangolé?”—­roughly equivalent to “What’s going on?”—­thereby defers its definition to the individual that responds. The word parangolé thus points and gestures to an unstated phenomenon, yet has no precise denotative meaning of its own. A slide between social and semantic registers, it is contingency shaped by context, its meaning a figuration of its own status as slang. Thus when Bogichi pronounced that a Parangolé “is what it is,” it revealed that Oiticica’s act of desig­nation was one of a very particular sort. His nomination provided a material phenomenon for the word parangolé to refer to, thereby transferring the word’s mutability of meaning to his own works’ mutability of form. In part, Oiticica’s strategy follows that of Kurt Schwitters, whose works he doubtless saw at the 6th São Paulo Bienal in 1961. As Oiticica wrote, “The word [Parangolé] here assumes the same character that ‘Merz’ and its derivatives (‘Merzbau’ etc.) had for Schwitters. For him it was the definition of a specific experimental position, fundamental to the theoretical and experiential comprehension of his entire work.”27 Merz was the second syllable of “Commerzbank,” a word from an advertisement Schwitters used in truncated form in one of his collages of 1919. Torn from its commercial context and returned to the status of brute matter, it enacted at the level of linguistics the metonymic operation at work in all of Schwitters’s early assemblages. In each, commodities were “de-­ formed” and recuperated as material shards.28 Once inhabitants of an exterior world, these fragments were transformed into equivalent constructive units internal to a given composition. In short, Schwitters splintered language and objects into nonsignificance so that they could be redeployed as art. In contrast, Oiticica’s appropriation of the word parangolé proceeds from language’s capacity to slide and shift around meaning while remaining utterly intact. If Schwitters’s linguistic appropriation established a logic of the combinatory fragment, Oiticica’s established one of contingency based on the conditional gesturing operations of the term parangolé. Yet Oiticica’s discovery of the word also situates this contingency within a specific spatial, experiential context signaling its loaded significance within his construction of art and self. In a February 1965 diary entry elaborated in later interviews, Oiticica noted that he had encountered the word while on a bus to his job at the Museu Nacional, written upon a makeshift beggar’s shelter that had been assembled against a wall.29 As he explained, four wooden stakes

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­ upported a scaffolding of interwoven threads, the entire construction bearing s a similarity to a work that he was then in the process of making. (He ultimately titled that work P3 Parangolé Tenda 1 [P3 Parangolé Tent 1] [1964–­65]). The words “Esse é o Parangolé . . .” (This is the Parangolé . . .) were scrawled upon a tarp tied to this structure. Oiticica described his reaction as nothing short of a revelation—­“ There it is, the magic word!”—­he purportedly exclaimed.30 As this narrative makes clear, the artist had already been searching for a designation when he came across the term. Its “magic” therefore derived not simply from its meaning (or lack thereof) but from the resonance between its semantic slippage, the site of encounter, and his own work, the latter still in emergent form. A little-­known 1977 interview underscores the symbolic associations of the event. Here, Oiticica first notes that only the word parangolé was legible on the cloth, but then suggests that the phrase was akin to “This here is the parangolé of the bride . . .” He goes on to describe the construction as a paramento (liturgical vestment or ornamental canopy) “as if the site of a wedding . . . like a bridal travel suite [or trousseau],” and muses that it must have derived from an “archetypal fantasy of mating.”31 In this description, the spatial character of the shelter is associatively inscribed within a rite of cultural and sexual passage in which the body of the bride shifts in its social significance by means of the implied transition from virgin to wife.32 The liminal temporal nature of this passage is likewise significant within the mythology of Oiticica’s discovery of the word. When he returned to the site the next day to photograph it—­“one of the most beautiful species of thing in the world,” as he put it—­the peculiar assemblage had entirely disappeared.33 The original construction’s provision of a taxonomic and morphological anchor for a transition in Oiticica’s own work was therefore inextricable from its fugitive nature—­its literal enactment of the query “what is a parangolé?” Two enigmatic photographs taken by his friend Desdémone Bardin and apparently titled by Oiticica indicate that he explicitly sought to register the impact of this encounter despite (or perhaps because of) the shelter’s sub­ sequent disappearance. In “Proclamation of the Parangolé,” two men, one of whom appears to be Oiticica, hoist a sailcloth covered in text up a flagpole, in likely reference to the location of the original construction near Praça da Bandeira (Plaza of the Flag) (fig. 4.5). “Genesis of the Parangolé,” meanwhile, pictures a group of objects and textiles arranged around a tree, perhaps the temporary assemblage of a construction worker, but equally evocative of the altars that practitioners of the Afro-­Brazilian religion candomblé assemble in outdoor sites (fig. 4.6). Staged near the parking lot of MAM-­RJ, the location recalls the Parangolé’s proximate, yet peripheral, relationship to art. Yet these photographs invoke the Parangolé in a manner vastly different to the order’s public introduction in August 1965. In the images, one cannot be certain of the provenance, intentionality, or even identity of the phenomenon that is framed. By exacerbating this indeterminacy, the photographs perform the very semantic mutability originally signified by the term parangolé. At the official 1965 inauguration, by contrast, Oiticica’s appropriation of the word harnessed this mutability of meaning to the

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Fig. 4.5 “Proclamação do Parangolé,” ca. 1964. Photo by Desdémone Bardin. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica and the family of Desdémone Bardin. Fig. 4.6 “Gênese do Parangolé,”

formal logic of the objects he designated with its name. The inauguration likewise secured these objects’ connotations in the form of theoretical texts, paradoxically establishing the Parangolé as an order best explained by tautological reference to itself. This is why it seemed logical for Bogichi to remark that a Parangolé “is what it is” just days after it was introduced to the public for the first time.

ca. 1964. Photo by Desdémone

*

Bardin. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica and the family of Desdémone Bardin.

But imagine the Parangolé as an unknown thing—­neither a theoretical proposition, avant-­garde provocation, nor even work of art but a simple aggregation of physical material worn, carried, or arranged on the body. Imagine a Parangolé before it was given a name. How might such a thing come to accrue meaning rather than signify itself outright? One clue lies in a piece of ephemera: a slice of historical context in most banal form (fig. 4.7). It is a weekly schedule of Oiticica’s activities, written out in his hand, probably from early 1964. With meticulous precision, Oiticica divided

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Fig. 4.7 Hélio Oiticica, weekly schedule, ca. 1964. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

his days into temporal blocks, noting when he would work at his job (mornings, Monday through Thursday); when he would eat (lunch at noon, dinner at 7:00 p.m.); sleep (11:30 p.m., except weekends); and relax (the beach on Sundays, samba rehearsals Saturday nights). Oiticica’s most frequent activity was “working in the studio.” But the schedule reveals the quotidian comings and goings that occurred around the making of art. Work first, then play. Work began at 5:30 a.m., when Oiticica accompanied his father to his job at the Museu Nacional. José Oiticica Filho was a specialist in the Sphingidae, a

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family of butterfly native to the Americas, of which he discovered several new species. For each new species, he submitted an article for publication in which an individual “type” specimen was named and morphologically described. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who established the basic tenets of morphology at the end of the eighteenth century, believed that the task of science was to discern the “inner nature” of an organism’s form.34 Fixed form (Gestalt) was only an abstraction of an organism’s deeper mechanism of change or formation (Bildung). As he wrote, “if we look at all these Gestalten, especially the organic ones, we will discover that nothing in them is permanent, nothing is at rest or defined—­everything is in a flux of continual motion.”35 The comparative study of form was thereby directed toward the more philosophical problem of its transformation over time. Morphology in the taxonomist’s laboratory, however, was a rather different affair. If Goethe’s idealist conception sought to identify a single generative principle of life, the taxonomist’s painstaking labor of comparison and categorization was aimed at the manifold organization of living things. The splitting of a species or genus, however, reveals how these two impulses were intertwined. For if taxonomists were tasked with distinguishing and differentiating organic forms, they were also obliged to acknowledge the continuity between forms over time. In 1961, when his son began to work as his assistant, for example, Oiticica Filho was preparing new research on the Oiticica butterfly, a genus named in his honor by an American colleague in 1949. According to a report filed by Oiticica Filho to the head of the museum’s zoology section in December of that year, the “unfolding (desdobramento) of the Oiticica into two genera (gêneros)” warranted renewed attention to the taxon and possibly a new name.36 Here in condensed form lies the tension between morphology’s philosophical interests in transformation and the finite classifications of its operational demands. All modern taxonomy derives from Carl Linnaeus’s binomial nomenclature, in which a genus name is followed by a species type. In this system, a name is merely a marker for a thing and no motivation between the two is claimed. And yet, such a name is motivated—­not in relation to what it designates but to the system by which such a designation can be made. The species Eacles ­manuelita (Oiticica 1941), for example, refers to the “manuelita” species of the “Eacles” genus, while “Oiticica 1941” denotes its discovery and publication by Oiticica Filho in 1941. Following a common practice within the Lepidoptera world, ­Oiticica Filho named the species in honor of a friend or colleague, in this case “Manuelita.” Oiticica himself would later adopt this same convention in artworks such as P7 Parangolé Capa 4 “Lygia Clark” (1965). In compensation for the arbitrary relations between names and the teeming diversity of natural things, Linnaeus’s system offered an internal logic of hierarchical categories, each grouping nested one within the next. The discovery of a new species was therefore not the creation of new form. It was the organization of unnominated form within an existing schema of knowledge, with each designation a re­ instantiation of the system itself. To recognize that a new species had “unfolded”

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from another was therefore also to acknowledge that the entire system was an artificial construction mapped upon the continuity of life. Because taxonomy is the organization of knowledge, epistemic shifts necessarily rearrange its pattern.37 In the wake of theories of evolution, morphology was pressed to identify the individual developmental of a single organism (ontogenesis) as well as the genealogical development of a species (phylogenesis). In turn, taxonomy shifted from the listing of discrete organisms to their classification as a reflection of phylogenetic descent. In place of fixity and independent categories of living things, evolution proposed interrelatedness and constant change. In so doing, it also put the category of the species—­the most basic unit of taxonomic identification—­under ontological and operational pressure.38 If organisms were in a process of continual evolution, then a species was only a theoretical reality. Designation was merely an epistemological approximation. Like a photograph, it offered a temporary stilling: a static image of living entities themselves in the process of continuous and sometimes erratic change. For this and other reasons, evolutionary biology and taxonomy (or systematics, as the modern practice is called) are sciences prone to revision and contentious debate. During Oiticica Filho’s years at the Museu Nacional, for example, biologists disputed the means and even the possibility of defining the species as a concept. By the mid-­1960s, most subscribed to the notion that it was a reproductively isolated and naturally interbreeding population.39 But alternative explanations also held sway. Likewise, while evolution explained the existence of hybrids, variations, and overlapping taxa, it was up to taxonomists to establish a stable system of nomenclature to take such intermediate phenomena into account. The “unfolding” of the Oiticica genus that preoccupied Oiticica Filho in 1961 was just one case. This was epistemic shift lowered to the daily toil of the laboratory. Faced with the possible emergence of a new genus or species, one could either “lump” or “split.” Most often, Oiticica Filho chose the latter. As he wrote in a 1938 article, “In difficult cases, it is preferable to divide.”40 Every taxonomic revision results in a new relationship in the order of living things—­not of course in nature but in discourse and representation, where knowledge about nature is performed and displayed. In 1961, the task of helping to rearrange the Museu Nacional’s Sphingidae specimens in their wooden cases according to the latest taxonomic research fell to the younger Oiticica (fig. 4.8).41 In the library, he was also responsible for cataloguing bibliographic files for the American species of the Sphingidae order “from Linnaeus until the present time.”42 Knowledge was reordered, then, in the physical spaces of the filing cabinet and exhibition display. In the filing cabinet, it was revealed to have a history—­each file a diachronic slice through various systems brought to bear upon the natural world, each in turn superseded and rendered obsolete. In the exhibition display, knowledge was spatialized according to the most recent system, with each specimen reshuffled within a synchronic epistemological map. For Oiticica, nomination has its roots here: in the library, the laboratory, and the museum.

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Fig. 4.8 Reinstalling cases of

*

Lepidoptera section, Museu Nacional, date unknown. Courtesy of Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

Oiticica worked at the Museu Nacional from 1961 until 1964, when his father suddenly passed away. During these same years he developed an internal taxonomy for organizing his artistic practice. Like contemporaneous Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, Oiticica gave global names to groups of related early works such as the Bilaterais and Relevos Espacias, both of 1959.43 But with the Nuclei, which he began in 1960, Oiticica’s names began to take on a taxonomic logic of their own. Diary entries attest that this logic developed over time. On August 7, 1961, Oiticica referred to the Nuclei as conforming to three “types”—­small, medium, and large—­that were distinguished according to size as well as the “quality and sense each presents.” On December 17, he wrote that he had realized an “improvised” Núcleo (Nucleus)—­“another modality of the núcleo”—­thus conceiving of the types as “modalities,” or possible variations of a single expression. On January 1, 1962, he noted that the types belonged to an “order.” On April 16 he gave them a code, referring to his first experiment of two years earlier as “Pequeno Núcleo nº 1” (NC1). And on May 7 he wrote of the Nuclei as one of several genera

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within his artistic experiments in space: “When I approach the ‘núcleo’ I want to express something very different than when I approach the ‘penetrável,’ despite the intrinsic relations . . .” The difference between the Nuclei and Penetráveis was therefore one of “essence” rather than “type.” Oiticica now equated this distinction with the scientific designation “genus” (genero), which he seemed to use interchangeably with “order.” Just as Goethe emphasized a generative force animating all living forms, Oiticica understood his orders as part of a single holistic conceptual program: “The diverse modalities of genera within space . . . indicate, in truth, diverse senses within the same expression.”44 Oiticica’s adoption of scientific taxonomy expanded in 1963 with the Bólides. With them, he appears to have drawn from three systems: the nested box-­within-­ box structure of Linnaeus’s hierarchical taxonomy, the chronological coding that communicates phylogenesis, and the sequential numeration used by artists such as Schwitters and Paul Klee (fig. 4.9).45 For example, B39 Bólide Luz 1 Apropriação 3 (B39 Bolide Light 1 Appropriation 3, 1966) refers to an object thirty-­ninth within the Bólide order, first within Bólide containers of light, and third within a sequence of appropriations drawn from real life. Oiticica’s titles thus reiterate the historical and relational position of a given object within the internal system of the artist’s work. Much like the development of a new species or genus, the emergence of a new order of object within Oiticica’s system depended on pushing the conceptual, structural, or utilitarian qualities of one or even two preexisting orders so far that the resulting “species” became a new kind of thing. Two studies from just

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Fig. 4.9 Hélio Oiticica, undated list of Bólides. Courtesy of ­Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

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Fig. 4.10 Hélio Oiticica, study for Núcleo em lona, August 19, 1963. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica. Fig. 4.11 Hélio Oiticica, P3 ­Parangolé Tenda 1, 1964–­65. Paint, wood, plastic, straw ­matting, nylon screen, 264 x 120 x 120 cm. Photo by Hélio

before Oiticica invented the Parangolé as a distinct order of work are exemplary in this regard. The first, from August 1963, documents Oiticica’s preliminary sketches for an unrealized work labeled Núcleo em lona (Nucleus in sailcloth) (fig. 4.10). His indication of sailcloth as material suggests that he was reconceptualizing the layered chromatic structures of his Núcleo order through the use of a flexible rather than rigid support. The second, from September 1964, refers to Parangolé 3 Tenda 1 (Parangolé 3 Tent 1), which served as the revelatory point of comparison in his encounter with the word parangolé before the work’s completion in 1965 (fig. 4.11). Significantly, the artist used a different name—­Penetrável Parangolé—­in this preliminary drawing, which suggests that the term Parangolé was a secondary descriptive term that modified Oiticica’s preexisting order Penetrável before becoming its own order (fig. 4.12). Within Oiticica’s internal system, Penetráveis were spatial structures such as cabins or labyrinths. His initial taxonomy thus reveals the conceptual evolution of the Parangolé as a wearable chromatic architecture.

Oiticica. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

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Fig. 4.12 Hélio Oiticica, study for Penetrável Parangolé, September 9, 1964. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

This evidence suggests that Oiticica internalized the epistemological ­ ssumptions of biological taxonomy and applied them to an aesthetic field. a Nominating new orders of art was akin to the establishment of a new species or ­genus, with each artwork within that species a variation within a type. Yet ­Oiticica’s taxonomic logic did not only provide a method for establishing a field of internal relations among his own works. It also offered an ontological bridge between his works and extra-­artistic objects and behaviors that existed within the expanded realm of “life.” Oiticica registered this shift in his taxonomic ­system when he began using readymade objects within his Bólides. Both the Bólides and the Nuclei are designated with a “genus” category, followed by a descriptive “modality” or “type.” In the Nuclei, this “type”—­small, medium, large, or improvised—­corresponds to a formal quality entirely determined by the artist’s choice. By contrast, the Bólide types describe the readymade element that lends the sculpture its structure (such as a box, glass, basin, or bed). Just as in biological classification, the discovery of a new species did not involve the creation of form so much as the organization of existing form into a new schema of knowledge. With the Bólides and Parangolés, Oiticica made use of both readymade elements (such as specific glass jars) and morphological types (such as the generalized forms of banners or capes). Yet the taxonomic logic that undergirds

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Fig. 4.13 Berta G. Ribeiro, “Bases para uma classificação dos adornos plumários dos índios do Brasil,” Arquivos do Museu Nacional vol. 43, 1957. Courtesy of Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

his practice also suggests that he deployed nomination as an act of s ­ peciation— or “unfolding” in his father’s terminology—­from preexisting phenomena rather than the wholesale transposition of found elements into his work. A 1957 article in the journal Arquivos do Museu Nacional, “Bases para uma classificação dos adornos plumários dos índios do Brasil” (Bases for a Classification of Brazilian Indian Feather Adornment), is illuminative in this regard (fig. 4.13). The article is a taxonomy of wearable feather objects in the collection of the Museu Nacional and follows a text by Oiticica Filho that the younger Oiticica would have filed as part of his bibliographic tasks. It is quite plausible that Oiticica had this ethno­graphic article in mind in March 1964, when he made a study for an un­ realized headdress Parangolé, as well as in November of that same year, when he wrote “Bases Fundamentais Para uma Definição do ‘Parangolé,’” the title bearing obvious similarities to the 1957 article (fig. 4.14). Yet Oiticica’s text was not an inventory of existing objects renominated from an indigenous system of naming and function to another corresponding to the colonial logic of the ethnographic museum. Rather, it was his first attempt to describe the conceptual and ontological relationship between his works and existing phenomena, a

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Fig. 4.14 Hélio Oiticica, study for Cabeleiras Parangolé, March 1964. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

relationship condensed in his initial act of designation—­“the discovery of what I call ‘Parangolé.’”46 In this text, Oiticica acknowledged the material, formal, and morphological connections between his works and preexisting objects (such as tents, banners, and clothing) as well as bodily practices such as dance. But he also argued that the Parangolés had neither mimetic nor appropriative relations to these objects or behaviors—­an incisive nuance he was sometimes at pains to express. The relation to the “appearances” of preexisting things is there, but it is not primordial in the genesis of the idea, although perhaps it could be from another point of view, of the “why” of this relationship observed during the realization of the work, its formation. What is of interest here at the moment is the “how” intention in the work’s formation . . .47 In this passage, Oiticica gestured to a generative structural relationship between his works and preexisting objects and practices, while insisting on the ontological and even perceptual independence of the work of art. Discussing his glass

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Bólides in the same text, he emphasized that readymade elements such as glass vessels or raw pigment acquired new significance when integrated into a work. Such objects were put in “a relation that transforms what was known into new knowledge and what remains to be apprehended . . . that residue that remains open to the imagination, recreating itself upon the work.”48 In other words, although each work was a physical creation—­a new species within the aesthetic realm of art—­they were also designations of preexisting form, much like the discovery of a new species of butterfly or moth. Nomination was thus a way of producing new configurations of knowledge, of reimagining the relations between various worlds. In this sense, each new order Oiticica introduced within his practice was an evolutionary (although nonlinear) development from both art objects within his conceptual framework and preexisting phenomena in the world.49 Here we can begin to unpack the distinction Oiticica drew between his own interest in ­“popular constructive primitivism” and the cubist encounter with African art. Oiticica argued that while the cubists appropriated the “spatial sense” of an “entire [African] object” in order to dismantle the norms of Western representation, the Parangolé constituted a moment of “a priori convergence” between his work and existing spatial and chromatic structures—­the latter offering ­“constructive principles” for the new art.50 Accordingly, the Parangolé did not appropriate one system of visual signification for the purposes of radically undermining another. It produced a moment of infrathin differentiation from both ­phenomena—­in short, a speciation event by which a new set of organisms emerged into the world. If we understand nomination an act of framing by which a given entity is identified and delimited from a larger field, Oiticica’s formulation of the Parangolé folded this operation of distinction. It pressed ­categorization into relationality and fixture into dynamic and temporal form.

Techniques of the Body The taxonomic thinking Oiticica assimilated at the Museu Nacional conceived of emergence as the splitting of a single species or genus into two, resulting in a genealogical branching of increasing, but hierarchically patterned, complexity. As we have seen, Oiticica’s deployment of this taxonomic logic was far more rhizomatic, as it engendered speciation from multiple points of origin. These points were internal to his work (the relationship between color, time, and space) and encountered by chance (the improvised shelter where he first came upon the word parangolé). But they were also self-­consciously produced, as in the Parangolé’s relationship to carnival practices, of which the artist became initiated in 1964. Much has been made of Oiticica’s encounter with favela of Mangueira and his participation as a passista in its famed samba school. Within the personal mythology he initiated with “A Dança na Minha Experiência,” this encounter was inextricably linked to the genesis of the Parangolé and his own transgression of

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race, class, and sexual lines. Posthumous elaborations have often condensed these associations, such that the Parangolé comes to signify bodily emancipation not simply for the artist but also for the favela dweller, whose body is grafted upon Oiticica’s as a locus of liberation and desire.51 Yet the artist’s relationship to residents of Mangueira such as Miro, a celebrated passista who appeared in Oiticica’s 1965 pamphlet, entailed a sustained negotiation of social distinctions rather than their collapse. Likewise, Oiticica’s articulation of the Parangolé was far more complex than the euphoric plenitude so frequently imputed to the body within accounts of Brazilian samba and dance. The cultures of the favela and of carnival were indeed revelations for the artist. But they were also ones that provided a principle of emergent organization from within an experience of Dionysian excess. Despite his avowal of the “deintellectualizing” force of dance, Oiticica’s self-­discovery through Mangueira did not constitute a rupture with the classificatory systems that marked his earlier work. Rather, such experiences provided a means by which taxonomic registers were redirected through the social form of bodies in space, ultimately to question the nature of the body itself. Oiticica’s March 1963 and September 1964 studies for a Núcleo em lona and Penetrável Parangolé suggest that his new order of object was a conceptual outgrowth of prior experiments in quasi-­architectural structures. His account of his discovery of the word parangolé likewise indicates that the earliest conceptions of the order relate primarily to bricolaged spatial constructions rather than wearable objects. Over the course of the next year, however, Oiticica’s emergent order came to take on specific structures unique to carnival, notably the carnival desfile, or procession. This period coincided with Oiticica’s intensifying relationship with Mangueira in preparation for his appearance as a passista in the carnival of February 1965. This relationship was noted by the artist in theoretical texts but also in the style section of local newspapers. In September 1964, they reported that Miro was teaching Oiticica samba steps and in December that the artist had redesigned the standards (defining banners and flags) of Mangueira from traditional pink and green to vivid red and yellow.52 Although this latter report does not mention these standards being works of art, when Oiticica in­ augurated the Parangolé at MAM-­RJ in 1965, the first designated species of the new order, P1 Parangolé Estandarte 1 (P1 Parangolé Standard 1), consisted of a standard in vivid red (fig. 4.15). Mapping the temporal order of the procession upon a taxonomic logic of form, Oiticica thereby introduced the Parangolé as one would announce the coming of a carnival parade. In striking contrast to the libidinous and chaotic excess often associated with Brazilian carnival, the actual composition of a samba school procession is highly codified. The standard bearer (porta-­bandeira) displays the school’s flag, the master of ceremonies (mestre-­sala) is charged with ritually protecting her, various wings (alas) follow behind, and so on. A note in Oiticica’s hand­ writing, most likely from 1964 or 1965, outlines the order of a carnival desfile and suggests that he was learning such patterns of organization alongside samba steps while developing the Parangolé.53 His choice to designate his

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Fig. 4.15 Hélio Oiticica, P1 ­Parangolé Estandarte 1, 1964. Photo by Claudio Oiticica. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio ­Oiticica.

Parangolé Estandarte as the first of the new order rather than Parangolé Tenda, which he appears to have begun earlier, suggests that he deliberately took such processional ­structures into account. Much like the banners of a political parade, the standards displayed at the commencement of a carnival procession announce the allegiance and corporate identity of the group that follows. In a political parade, a slogan on a banner announces a collective platform in a single voice (fig. 4.16). In contrast, the identity of a samba school is maintained through colors (green and pink in the case of Mangueira), which remain constant throughout the years. Color therefore functions as an abstract organizing principle par excellence. It operates socially and formally to establish a collectivity out of disparate parts. Oiticica was doubtless attracted to this chromatic organizing function, particularly as his early works revolved around the way in which colored structures address the viewer in space. In P1 Parangolé Estandarte 1, he folded painted strips of fabric into Möbius loops around two poles, replacing Mangueira’s traditional colors with the signature reds he had explored since the Relevos Espacias and Invenções. This banner does not announce the identity of a group of individuals but the formal and conceptual platform of the Parangolé order itself. Typically, this is the function of an artistic manifesto. Indeed, the two texts Oiticica released at the 1965 opening perform key aspects of this conceptual and

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Fig. 4.16 Demonstration, Correio da Manhã, August 23, 1968.

t­ heoretical elaboration. But P1 Parangolé Estandarte 1 also announces that the conceptual import of the order can be communicated abstractly, through form alone. In the blankness of its statement—­its lack of slogan, message, or symbol— P1 Parangolé Estandarte 1 established a politics of form that challenged the period’s defining articulation of the artist’s role in leftist politics—­the Marxist platform of the CPC.54 The group’s 1962 manifesto exhorted artists and intellectuals to create a “revolutionary popular art” that would reveal the conditions of superstructure and base.55 Artistic quality was to be determined by political

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efficacy and ideology privileged over form. So-­called “authentic” folk expressions of o povo (the people) such as carnival, meanwhile, were perceived as manifestations of a premodern, depoliticized social system. Thus, although it sought the liberation of the Brazilian underclass, the CPC ultimately treated “the people” as receptacles for correct political ideology handed down from the Marxist leaders of the left. The 1964 military coup revealed the failure of this strategy. The CPC had expected o povo to join the intelligentsia in a Marxist revolution, but instead the conservative military takeover garnered significant levels of support from the working class. In the wake of this right-­wing “revolution,” many student leaders and cultural activists were forced to confront the possibility that their slogans and pamphlets had had little effect.56 In the transitional period between the suspension of habeas corpus, institutionalization of censorship, and criminalization of political activity by the notorious AI-­5 at the end of 1968, the left curiously continued to dominate cultural production. But if the CPC had naively attempted to construct a mass audience for political art, critics such as Roberto Schwarz noted that the new esquerda festiva—­or festive left, as it was termed—­produced radical ideology primarily for its own aesthetic consumption.57 In this sense, the immediate period leading up to and following the April 1964 coup constituted a veritable crisis in the politics of the message. Oiticica’s P1 Parangolé Estandarte 1 is a banner with no message besides the relationship between the body and form. Rather than delivering content, it isolated the means by which a vehicle for content is annexed to the body, in turn allowing for the ascription of its message to an individual or group. An undated text indicates that Oiticica was clearly aware of the political associations of the banner as a generic type, but wanted to foreground its more elemental aspect of carrying: The banners were made with the intention of carrying a structure and transforming it, rediscovering the act of carrying . . . as the nuclei of motion itself; the act of walking, the most indecipherable one, of standing, which is revealed by that of carrying. It can hold a political sense as . . . in demonstrations in the street: to carry and show a protest or demand.58 Having absorbed the structural lesson of carnival processions—­the ability to symbolically organize a collectivity abstractly, through color alone—­Oiticica concretized the unstated form of the CPC’s aesthetic position (political placards or banners) while divesting it of linguistic content. Stripped of ideological message, only the potentiality of protest as an embodied act remained. By elaborating a politics of blank form, Oiticica refocused attention on the relationship between the body and ritualistic announcement in carnival and political protests alike. In both, the participant’s platform is revealed through the act of carrying a banner or standard. This object serves as a communicative appendage that physically joins an individual body to an identity or position. By pinpointing the behavioral juncture of body and appendage in what Oiticica described as “the act of carrying,” P1 Parangolé Estandarte 1 announced the new

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Fig. 4.17 Hélio Oiticica, “Protest Capes” and “Poem Capes” at the Paris Biennale, 1967. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

order of Parangolé by establishing the body’s potential for extension as an emergent politics in and of itself. P1 Parangolé Estandarte 1’s articulation of “structure-­action”—­the conjunction of work and body in the act of carrying—­suggests a highly defamiliarized corpus in which artificial extensions externalize its communicative capacities while altering its basic form.59 Despite Oiticica’s own descriptions of this defamiliarization (in 1965 he wrote that the “very ‘act of dressing’ the work already implies a corporeal-­expressive transmutation of the spectator”), the Parangolé has been frequently understood as a catalyst of free expression, as if to allow the liberation of a fully coherent body, heretofore restrained.60 Oiticica’s often-­repeated 1965 account of the Dionysian experience of dance and its “total act of being” have doubtless contributed to this interpretation, particularly when combined with the essentialization of the body (often in racialized terms) endemic to accounts of Brazilian carnival. Likewise, when Oiticica added statements and slogans to his Parangolés in the “protest capes” sent to the Paris Biennale in 1967, the blank form forcefully established in P1 Parangolé Estandarte 1 reverted to the status of enunciative sign (fig. 4.17). These 1967 Parangolés—­“Of Adversity We Live,” “We Are Famished,” “I Embody Revolt”—­speak in the voice of collectivity against a backdrop of increasingly repressive military rule. In so doing, they edge closer to the position of the CPC, whose political message was implicitly conveyed by a single nationalized body—­o povo—­and did not treat the body as a highly constructed message in and of itself. The display of these capes in Paris further positioned the works as representing the political situation of Brazil. Stripped of the movement and particularity of individual bodies, they could only invoke an allegorical subaltern for whom the Parangolés spoke. Yet if Oiticica’s 1967 Parangolés attempted to merge an abstract politics of form with the legibility of a message, by 1970, he was careful to disavow the representational politics such a conflation might entail. As he proclaimed in the catalogue for MoMA’s Information exhibition, “i am not here representing brazil;

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or representing anythingelse [sic]: the ideas of representing-­representation, etc. are over.”61 Indeed, throughout the 1970s, Oiticica returned to previous formulations of the Parangolé, noting that his earlier “mythification” had to be countered with subsequent “demythification.”62 In “parangolé síntese,” written in 1972 after he had moved to New York, Oiticica appeared to acknowledge the contradictions in his prior search for “unconditioned” sensorial experience.63 “Whereas in 1965 he had described dance as a “total act of being,” a “total act of I,” he now observed, “What does not interest me in dance is its naturalistic state of ‘human manifestation,’ nor reductions to ‘ego-­trip.’”64 This statement recast the conceptual contours of the Parangolé, perhaps even repudiating a certain exoticization of the body during his own initiation into the world of samba in 1964.65 Around this time Oiticica likewise began to write of identity as a performative event. Describing a (to his mind, dull) reading by the poet John Perrault, Oiticica exclaimed, “what is this compared to the black panthers, young lords, women’s lib and gay movements? nothing!”66 Far from deploying preexisting subjectivities, these burgeoning social movements were evidence that the construction of identity was a radical relational and aesthetic act.

* As we have seen, the political pressures for legible representation combined with Oiticica’s early enthusiasm to overdetermine the Parangolé as an emancipatory, even identitarian form. Yet close analysis of the very first instantiations of the order reveal a sustained proposition about the mutability of the body, one that did not ignore the fact of bodily inscription but sought to refuse its stabilization as an incontrovertible sign. It is to these first articulations, all completed before the order’s 1965 unveiling, that I turn now. Oiticica originally conceived the Parangolé order as related modalities that followed the taxonomic pattern established by his emerging classificatory system. In a newspaper article published two days before its 1965 introduction, Oiticica noted the Parangolé encompassed three “spatial positions in the participant-­work relation,” consisting of capes, standards, and tents.67 He observed: In the “tent” the participant “penetrates” in order to unveil the particular color-­structure of the work. The “standard” is a structure linked to the act of carrying realized by the participant, and the “cape” is carried out in three cycles: the participant watches another who dresses, after which he dresses and discloses the same color-­structure himself; finally [they] participate in a wearing-­watching collective.68 Like the containing elements of the Bólides, these “spatial positions” established hierarchical taxa within the classification system as a whole. Just as there were Bólide Boxes, Bólide Glasses, Bólide Basins, and eventually a Bólide Bed, the new order distinguished between Parangolé Standards, Parangolé Tents, and Parangolé Capes. With the Bólides, the modifying box or glass accounted for the

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i­ncorporation of readymade elements within Oiticica’s practice. It also described the manner in which chromatic contents were released as a “body of color” by way of the participant’s touch (closed drawers and compartments in Bólide Boxes, transparent receptacles in Bólide Glasses, and so on). With the Parangolé, the modifying modality did not describe an internal relation between physical contents and form but instead an external relation between a form and the participant him-­or herself. Standards, tents, and capes were thus fundamentally modalities of interaction. They formulated a behavioral relation by which body and work were newly conjoined. We can tease out the implications of this convergence by contrasting the Parangolé with the fantasia (costume), which likewise plays a pivotal role in carnival ritual and form. While the fantasia is modeled on actual clothing (however unusual or fanciful in association), the Parangolé’s three modalities isolate the meta functions of clothing—­as signifying medium in standards and flags, as corporeal modification in capes, and as shelter for the body in tents—­and ­materialize them as distinct modes of bodily address. In 1934, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss noted how the body’s most basic patterns of physical motion—­its “bodily techniques” or “habitus”—­are socially produced.69 Far from a stable, coherent entity, the body conceived by the Parangolé is an assemblage of ­material and communicative prostheses that can be modified and recombined.70 Defamiliarizing the relationship between the body and its material accoutrements, the Parangolés reintroduce “wearing” as a means to invent bodily techniques anew. By the time Oiticica had completed the first five instantiations of the Parangolé, this formulation of the body—­as a composite of functions, as a social relation, and as a temporal process rather than fixed form—­was already in place. We will remember that P1 Parangolé Estandarte 1 established the body as a communicative medium capable of extending itself through appendages such as banners or signs. P2 Parangolé Bandeira 1 (P2 Parangolé Flag 1) underscored this communicative capacity in the highly simplified form of a small flag (fig. 4.3). Whereas the object-­type upon which the first Parangolé was based is a banner with a slogan or iconographic sign, the second iteration was based on the small flags used to call attention to an event or direct traffic—­a form already empty of words. Such flags do not announce, like a standard or protest sign. They signal, their meaning entirely dependent on the context in which they appear. In this sense, P2 Parangolé Bandeira 1 most closely embodies the original slang meaning of parangolé. A signal only functions if at least two individuals are party to its significance. Thus, while only held by one person, P2 Parangolé Bandeira 1 registers the fundamental relationality of the order: the body emerging into meaning through communicative exchange. The next work, P3 Parangolé Tenda 1, takes the cabin or tent as its object-­ type (fig. 4.11). As noted earlier, this work evolved out of Oiticica’s Penetráveis and Nuclei, and was perhaps his earliest response to informal architectures such as those that characterize the favelas. Unlike the solid-­paneled cabins and plaques of his earlier orders, its structure consists of a rudimentary scaffold

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Fig. 4.18 Miro wearing Hélio Oiticica, P4 Parangolé Capa 1, 1964. Paint, polyvinyl acetate emulsion, canvas, vinyl plastic, tulle, nylon mesh, cord, 105 x 94 x 9.8 cm. Photo by Desdémone Bardin. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica and the family of Desdémone Bardin.

upon which flexible materials such as plastic, painted canvas, reed matting, and gauze, are pinned, looped, suspended, and draped. The participant who “penetrates” these layers of colored material enters a structure that is both a shelter for the body (or bodies) and an externalization of the body’s skeleton. The Parangolé thus demonstrates the architectural function of clothing while positing architecture as a nested body or skin. This exchange of inner and outer spaces—­skeletons and skins—­is elaborated in P4 Parangolé Capa 1, the fourth instantiation of the order and the first of ­Oiticica’s Parangolé capes (fig. 4.18). The improvised architectural quality of the “tent” modality develops into improvised motion as the participant manipulates and dances with the cape. The garment consists of several layers of painted canvas interspersed with smaller strips of colored plastic and netting twisted in Möbius loops. All are bound together on one end to form a mantle or cloak. As with many subsequent capes, Oiticica used a homemade paint mixture ­consisting of inexpensive commercial pigments such as “Pó Xadrez” with PVA glue as its base. This glue gives the outer layers a stiffness and weight that contrasts with the soft plastic inner elements hidden within its folds (fig. 4.19). As participants augment and extend their bodies by means of the cape’s outer husks, they also disclose its complex inner anatomy by revealing these elements in turn. Of all Oiticica’s capes, P4 Parangolé Capa 1 most visibly evolves from the tradition of painting. The work’s vivid red, orange, and yellow layers recall the folded forms of the Relevos Espacias and the “vertical color” of the Invenções. When not in motion, these outer layers likewise evoke the planar extension of painted canvas sheets. Yet Oiticica did not want the cape to be understood as a wearable painting nor the body as a mere support for the work. As he noted in a later interview, the Parangolé is “an incorporation (incorporação) of the body (corpo) in the work and the work in the body.”71 Oiticica therefore underscored this reciprocal incorporation in the next Parangolé. In this work, he chose not to emphasize the body as a generator of the work, as per the whirling nucleus of P4 Parangolé Capa 1, but the way in which wearer and work together produce a body out of mutual parts (fig. 4.20). Unlike the earlier cape, P5 Parangolé Capa 2 has no obvious orientation and can be worn in a number of ways. Its central structure is a painted yellow spine of canvas netting with smaller bands that twist around it to form Möbius loop combinations on either side. Two appendages are attached to its seams: a plastic extension containing a clear sack of ­brilliant pink pigment similar to the alizarin contained in B8 Bólide Vidro 2 (1963–­64) and a pair of red underwear stiffened with paint that emerges from the locus of the canvas strips. Finally, a kind of sleeve or open pocket formed from a second layer of painted canvas lined with newspaper faces the front of the yellow band (fig. 4.21).

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Fig. 4.19 Hélio Oiticica, P4 ­Parangolé Capa 1 (detail), 1964. Photo by Irene Small. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Fig. 4.20 Hélio Oiticica, sketch for P5 Parangolé Capa 2, January 4, 1965. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica. Fig. 4.21 Hélio Oiticica, P5 Parangolé Capa 2 (detail), 1964–­65. Photo by Irene Small. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Two countermodels of a composite, artificial body elucidate the specific operations of P5 Parangolé Capa 2. The theatre costumes of Bauhaus designer Oskar Schlemmer, which Oiticica likely saw at MAM-­RJ in 1957, explore the body’s capacity for abstraction through generalization (fig. 4.22). His “ambulant architecture” rendered the human form in cubic volumes, for example, while his “marionette” typified it through spherical and ovoid forms.72 Schlemmer’s experiments proceed from the body’s normative structure and behavior in order to exaggerate and defamiliarize its overall Gestalt form. The science of prosthetics likewise assumes a typical body. Rather than amplify or extrapolate from this

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Fig. 4.22 Oskar Schlemmer, “Ambulent Architecture” and “Marionette” drawings exhibited at São Paulo Bienal, 1957.

normative shape, however, it isolates the functionality of individual parts in order to restore the body’s habitus—its conventional behaviors and skills.73 P5 Parangolé Capa 2 inverts both these formulations of the constructed body by resisting normative function as well as form (fig. 4.23). Unlike Oiticica’s first Parangolé cape, it is impossible to wear P5 Parangolé Capa 2 evenly across the body so as to recreate the bilateral symmetry of the human body. Insistently lopsided and erratic, its irregular protuberances and apertures alternately encumber and ease the participant’s movement. The orifices and extensions duplicate the wearer’s anatomy, poeticizing its hidden aspects and behaviors while transforming its capacities and shape. In so doing, these auxiliary organs and appurtenances—­the tactile pouch of pigment, the stiffened underwear, the twisted canvas loops—­allow wearers to explore aspects of their bodies externalized and materialized in anomalous form. In this sense the Parangolés reroute the phenomenon of the “phantom limb,” wherein amputees continue to have the sensation of learned habits such as a hand turning the knob of a door.74 By contrast, Oiticica’s prosthetics disturb the body’s normative habitus, compelling it to create bodily techniques anew. Furthermore, these appendages equalize material and communicative prostheses. One can only discern the newspaper images that line the cape’s pocket, for example, by plunging one’s head into the narrow sleeve. There, the newsprint images are felt as much as seen. The asymmetrical pairing of paint-­stiffened underwear and dangling sack of pigment, meanwhile, mutually defamiliarize erotics and painterly practice, concatenating pliability and tumescence, extrusion and retraction, abstraction and literal form.

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Image courtesy of Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo.

Fig. 4.23 Hélio Oiticica, Parangolés including P5 Parangolé Capa 2 (center), 1964–­65. Photo by Andreas Valentin. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica and Andreas Valentin.

Fig. 4.24 Jerônimo with Hélio Oiticica, P8 Capa 5 “Mangueira”, 1965. Paint, fabrics (linen, rayon, satin, canvas, tulle, nylon mesh), 106 x 79.8 x 20 cm. Photo by Claudio Oiticica. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

It is not insignificant that Oiticica’s first sexual encounters occurred in the same period that he conceived of the Parangolé. For if the Bólides released a “body of color” through the viewer’s touch, the Parangolés invite wearers to ­remake their bodies as materially composite and interactive corporeal devices. In P8 Parangolé Capa 5 “Mangueira” (1965), a pair of shorts attached to a fabric extension even allows for two wearers to inhabit and become enveloped in single work (fig. 4.24). Capes such as these replicate and externalize parts of the wearer’s body, creating an “inspecting field for intra-­corporeal discoveries,” as Oiticica put it, that multiply the body’s possibilities for presentation and recombination.75 The resulting homologies and transferals generate a set of equivalencies between the participant’s body and the material prostheses that echo and extend aspects of its behavior and form. In so doing, they also eliminate residual notions of a pregiven “natural” body. Sexual characteristics, communicative instruments, interior anatomies, and exterior forms are all scrambled within the mobile network of a new corporeal field. Thus while both the Parangolés and Bólides comprise of layers that invite tactile processes of disclosure, the Parangolé entails an “unfolding the body itself.”76 As we shall see, this material unfolding instantiates a logic of binaries complexly based on the relationship between genero (in Portuguese, both genus and gender) and form.

What a Body Can Do By altering the form of a participant’s body and supplementing, transforming, and duplicating its functioning parts, P5 Parangolé Capa 2 troubled normative conceptions of what a body is. In so doing, it also intervened within one of the key systems from which the order emerged—­biological classification—­and its roots in the tension between morphology’s philosophical and taxonomic aims. Here we return to the August 1965 inauguration of the Parangolé. Literature on Oiticica has consistently viewed this event from the perspective of what went wrong: the fact that the artist and his friends were prevented from entering the museum, rather than the fact that they had originally come there for the purposes of unveiling the new order of art. The event has therefore been comprehended—­perhaps even by Oiticica—­as the proclamation of anti-­art, despite the fact that he only adopted this rhetorical stance the following year.77 Yet if we consider the taxonomic background of his classificatory system, the inauguration constitutes a far more complex epistemological intervention, heralding the announcement of a new species or genus rather than the simple negation of art. In order to recover this intervention, we must consider the implications of mapping the introduction of the Parangolé upon such scientific discoveries, in particular, the concept of sociosexual pairing key to entomological thought. The Parangolé’s standards, capes, and tents are modalities (or species) of interaction based on a behavioral relation between the participant’s body and the object-­type upon which the work is based. Morphology, defined as the comparative study of organic form, concerns the relations between the structure of

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living entities and the behaviors these structures allow or produce. The Parangolé order is thus deeply morphological in conception. It provides the means to conceive of participant(s) and work as a composite organic entity. But it also provides a method for differentiating and grouping these various entities into discrete modalities by way of structures and affiliated behaviors—­much as a taxonomist would identify a new species of butterfly or moth. Yet while taxonomists can only establish the existence of a new species through the comparative study of normative bodily form, the Parangolés multiply the possibilities of what a body might be. Taxonomic conventions require taking a snapshot of an organism once it develops into a mature adult stage, thereby arresting its continual process of growth and decay. By contrast, the Parangolé has no internal life cycle. Instead it condenses the organism’s capacity for change into its material structure, resulting in a composite body in continuous flux but with no stable shape. Such a body can no longer be assessed in a single ideal state. Rather, the Parangolé embodies emergence in its very form. In this way, the order performs the elusive quality which idealist morphology sought to perceive but which taxonomy could never provide. When Oiticica announced the Parangolé in 1965, he was therefore proposing a new genus of artwork within a taxonomic framework incapable of accounting for the temporal character of this genus’s form. Yet rather than dispense with this framework, Oiticica’s announcement radically reconfigured its logic as a system of thought. Here we can return to the numerous announcements of new butterfly species and genera that José Oiticica Filho made over the course of his career in zoology reviews such as those of the Arquivos do Museu Nacional (fig. 4.25). In order to announce a new species or the splitting or unfolding of an existing one, lepidopterists publish microscopic photographs or drawings of the male and female genitalia of butterfly specimens alongside images of their outer forms. These are accompanied by a morphological analysis of the specimens in relation to other known species. Butterflies have hard, external skeletons and complex genital structures that fit together during mating in what can loosely be described as a lock-­and-­key configuration. As these interlocking genital forms constitute an essential differentiating factor between species, a lepidopterist must demonstrate the morphological difference between genitalia of related species in order for a new species to be acknowledged within the entomological world. Thus while taxonomy is essentially a zoological filing system of cataloguing living things with labels, it is also an epistemology—­a theory of how we know what we know about the world. In the case of Lepidoptera, paired sexual difference is the basic unit of epistemological coherence. It is the foundational binary out of which a taxonomy is built. Oiticica’s Parangolés exchange this epistemological notion of fixed sexual difference for one predicated on radical change. In his work, the body can no longer be comprehended as a static, sexed entity identifiable through stable form. Rather, it is a series of nonnormative, irregular, and mutable modalities: a content whose social and sexual character could be modified and reconceived.

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Fig. 4.25 José Oiticica Filho, “Tipos de Saturnioidea no United States National Museum. 5—­Gênero Arseunura Duncan, 1841,” Arquivos do Museu Nacional vol. 43, 1957. Courtesy of Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

Like the format of entomological publications that announce a new species, the pamphlet that Oiticica prepared for his 1965 opening included a textual description of the new order and a pair of photographs of one of its species types (fig. 4.1). The first text, “Fundamental Bases for a Definition of the Parangolé,” provided a comparative description of the order in the vein of analogous scientific publications. It established the Parangolé’s relation to both preexisting art orders such as Bólides and Nuclei and preexisting quotidian objects and environments such as favela architecture and improvised temporary shelters. The second text, “Annotations on the Parangolé,” has no precise counterpart in such entomological publications. In it, Oiticica outlined the “watching-­wearing cycle” that occurs in relation to the Parangolé cape. In order to fully experience the Parangolé, participants needed to transform their body by wearing the cape and watch a similar transformation enacted on the body of another. A new binary is thus established by virtue of the watching-­wearing pair. In constructing a behavioral, rather than anatomical dichotomy, Oiticica substituted the male/female pairs of Lepidoptera classification with paired participants whose reciprocal actions are necessary to complete the Parangolé cycle. An epistemological structure based on binary genital difference was thereby replaced with one based on the phenomenological alteration of optical and tactile cues. Moreover, these sensory cues established what a Parangolé is through a primary act of social exchange. The taxonomic argument for classifying Lepidoptera on genital distinction assumes the reproductive role of sexual pairing. Indeed, the most common definition of a species—­the “biological species concept”—­is based on the coherence of “naturally” inbreeding populations.78 The watching-­wearing cycle of the Parangolé, not unlike Gullar’s description of the Neoconcrete non-­object, depends on use to activate the work. But like the non-­object as well, this use is use-­without-­aim—­it simply produces the ­epistemological category of the work. In the watching-­wearing exchange, the participant’s identification slides between self and other per the continuous feedback of the Möbius loop. The stable, sexed bodies required of Lepidoptera classification are thus recast as interchangeable behavioral modes whose sensory mating establishes the basic unit of epistemological coherence required to comprehend the genus Parangolé. Genus becomes gender, but only so much as it can be constantly remade. Here we might recall that Oiticica described the structure where he first encountered the word parangolé as “an archetypal fantasy of mating,” a kind of bridal trousseau. His evocation of marriage within the context of this discovery is highly significant, as traditionally, marriage entailed a ceremony in which the purely social conventions of male-­female gender relations ostensibly resulted in an actual physical change to the body of the bride. The trousseau was uniquely symbolic within this transformation, for the bloody mark of passage would have been ritually displayed on these cloths. It thus served as a material index of sociosexual transformation: evidence of how gender (the social organization of sexual differentiation) can produce material, genital change.79 This elicitation of

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mating is likewise relevant within the sexual culture Oiticica was beginning to explore circa 1964. While the current and dominant conception of gay identity foregrounds object choice (i.e., same-­sex orientation), Brazilian sexual codes of the 1960s emphasized the relational role one’s body played in the sexual act.80 The consequent emphasis on penetration versus reception reinscribed a traditional dichotomy of active and passive partners. Yet within male-­male exchanges, such codes allowed for a gender fluidity illegible within subsequent paradigms based solely on the similarity of genital sex.81 In this sense, it is significant that the Parangolés defamiliarized and augmented the material basis of the body while instituting a reversible behavioral dichotomy in its watching-­wearing pairs. If the sensory mating of the watching-­wearing cycle established the primary unit of epistemological coherence for the inauguration of the Parangolé, this pairing also redefined what a body is as what a body can do. In essence, Oiticica’s absorption of taxonomic thought resulted in a wholesale disruption of its epistemological codes. In 1963, the American psychiatrist Robert Stoller used the term “gender” for the first time to signify a psychosocial identity distinct from biological sex.82 Ironically, Oiticica appears to have concurrently invented the term through his announcement of the new genero of the Parangolé. Inaugurating genus as ­gender, he installed a transitive category in which the materiality of the body, its composite reconstruction, and its social relationality cannot be disengaged.83

* The unexpected events of Oiticica’s 1965 introduction launched two interpretations of the Parangolé. On one hand were those who understood the Parangolé as a poeticization of the “folkloric” culture of the favela and carnival and thus a performance by individuals uniquely affiliated with these practices and sites. Although Oiticica precipitously dismissed such interpretations in the opening paragraph of “Fundamental Bases for the Definition of the ‘Parangolé,’” even the exhibition’s curator, Ceres Franco, wrote that he had “created a three-­dimensional art of participation inspired by the tradition of musical folklore of Rio’s outskirts.”84 According to this view, the Parangolé brought “the people” to the museum, and it was scandalous because they were overwhelmingly poor, dark skinned, and unwelcome, as the museum’s director made amply clear.85 On the other hand were those who took Oiticica’s participatory proposition seriously and saw the Parangolé as a challenge to the sociocultural parameters of “high” art. This group understood the order’s social provocation as reflective of its formal one, the work’s whirling layers of fabric analogous to the layers of social strata transgressed by its participant. David Medalla’s article for his London-­based journal Signals is exemplary in this regard. Medalla, who had learned of the inauguration in letters from Oiticica, relayed the events to a new international public as follows:

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The exhibition caused great controversy (which is still raging in Rio) and disturbed the artistic establishment of Brazil. . . . The jaded habitués of Rio’s art galleries were scandalized by the entire demonstration, and at one point the police were nearly called by the stuffy museum officials to stop the demonstration. The people who entered the spirit of Oiticica’s work with great enthusiasm were those from the favelas, the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Unhampered by the sort of self-­consciousness which inhibits “arty” people, the people of the favelas danced the samba, twirled the capes, created aerial sculptures . . . Jean Bogichi, director of Rio’s Gallery Relevo, summed it up when he said: “Hélio Oiticica is our Flash Gordon. He doesn’t fly through the sidereal spaces. He flies through the layers of our social structure . . .” We at SIGNALS hope Oiticica’s work will help in breaking down those constricting layers, divisions, boundaries of an uneven, unequal, unhealthy social structure.86 While these interpretations diverged in their grasp of the participatory nature of the work, both effectively essentialized the bodies that wore the Parangolés. These bodies were not materially composite, constructed entities knowable through behavior rather than form. Rather, they were coded according to race and class as “authentic” Brazilian bodies, embodying their authenticity to the degree that they remained marginal from the museum. Framed through such accounts, the Parangolé quickly came to be viewed as an instrument of emancipation in the face of social, economic, and political repression. As the political situation in Brazil grew increasingly dire, Oiticica himself began to contribute to this reading. Although he had dismissed “folkloric” explanations of the works, a 1967 article noted that “the social Parangolé is this: homage to our popular myths, to our heroes (which many consider bandits), and above all protest, a cry of revolt.”87 That year, he likewise converted the generalized capacity for revolt concretized in P1 Parangolé Estandarte 1’s blank form into specific enunciations in protest capes such as P15 Capa 11 “Incorporo a Revolta” (I Embody Revolt) (1967) (fig. 4.26). Whereas several of his capes were dedicated to specific individuals such as Clark, Mário Pedrosa, or Mosquito (the young boy he called the “mascot of Mangueira”), these protest capes spoke in the unspecified voice of “I” or “we.” Since a Parangolé cape can be worn by anyone, it is an innately flexible apparatus. Its politics are transitive and transferrable, though they gain unique inflection for each individual every time they are worn. The idea that such Parangolé capes were the singular province of disempowered bodies, however, constrained the capaciousness of these politics, for it implied that such subjects depended upon the work’s enunciative function to render them into visibility and legible speech. Further, since photographs of participants can only signal, rather than enact, the reversibility of difference inherent to the watching-­ wearing cycle, Oiticica’s frequent staging of friends such as Miro, Nildo, and Jerônimo within period photographs (all of whom were dark skinned, from Mangueira, and identified only by their first names) often unwittingly consoli-

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Fig. 4.26 Hélio Oiticica, P15 ­Parangolé Capa 11 “Incorporo o Revolto”, 1967. Fabric, leather,

dated race and class as signs of this difference in and of themselves. Thus while the events of August 1965 provided a raison d’être for Oiticica’s subsequent claims for a socially based anti-­art, the essential epistemological provocation of the Parangolé—­to question what a body is at all—­was momentarily obscured. The most incisive riposte to this interpretation was ultimately provided by works of art. In 1966, Lygia Clark made a work called Respire Comigo (Breathe

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straw matting, 90 x 60 x 10 cm. Photo by Claudio Oiticica. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Fig. 4.27 Lygia Clark, O Eu e o Tu: Série Roupa-­Corpo-­Roupa, 1967. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of Associação Cultural “O Mundo de Lygia Clark.”

with Me), consisting of a pleated rubber tube that approximates the sound of a body’s breathing when stretched. Pulling upon this rubber loop next to his or her ear, the participant materializes the body’s own respiratory processes, much like the externalized parts and behaviors of P5 Parangolé Capa 2. In 1967, Clark exhibited a pair of clothing works at Nova Objetividade Brasileira called O Eu

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e O Tu: Série Roupa-­Corpo-­Roupa (The I and the You: Clothing-­Body-­Clothing Series), which consisted of boiler suits intended for a man and woman who—­ blinded by hoods—­would explore secondary sex characteristics (such as body hair) ­externalized in artificial form on the body of the other (fig. 4.27). Clark, whose engagement with the body grew increasingly psychoanalytic in orientation over the ensuing years, here intuited the essential provocation of gender in Oiticica’s watching-­wearing pairs. Although these suits largely returned gender to conventions of binary sexual difference stabilized within normative bodily forms, they nevertheless demonstrated the basic principle obscured in the ­“folkloric” interpretation of the Parangolé—­that the order engaged the culture of carnival not because it entailed a release of an “authentic body,” but rather because it constructed corporeality anew. Oiticica’s own response took varying forms and degrees of legibility. In 1968, he made two “Hermaphrodite” Bólides that translated the order’s capacity to transform and contain to the realm of living bodies. In these Bólides—­one ­designated for men, the other for women—­women’s lingerie and phallic attachments, respectively, allowed for an inversion of sexual morphologies.88 Perhaps because these works continued the central provocation of Clark’s suits (and in this sense paradoxically maintain normative categories of the body), Oiticica does not appear to have referenced or displayed the works in any extensive manner. They were subsequently lost or destroyed long before the fire of 2009. By contrast, a 1969 text, “Discovery of Hermaphrodipotesis,” written while in London, indicates that sexual—­specifically genital—­indeterminacy prompted a critical, theoretical stance. This invective against the professionalism and commercialism of the art establishment attacked the notion of the message and the fixing of signification within artistic practice in general. Against the reactionary impulse of this semantic consolidation and its complicity with the market, ­Oiticica exhorted the reader to “Hermaphrodatize your acts!,” an operation he likened to both prophylactic “self-­enchantment” and promiscuous jouissance.89 To “hermaphrodatize” was therefore a conceptual strategy for deterritorializing sexual behavior and artistic practice alike, of rendering them mobile, flexible, and resistant to the stagnation of fixed categories. “I have no fear,” he wrote, “I am hermaphrodatized from you—­I am the snake that bites its tail . . . Bite, ­darling, bite your tail—­fuck yourself!”90 In “Hermaphrodipotesis,” the self-­same and self-­differing operations of the fold take the form of the body as a single, libidinous Möbius loop—­penetrating and simultaneously engulfing itself in a veritable convergence of gender and sex. Oiticica illustrated his text with a schematic drawing of the ouroboros, a serpent biting its own tail. Though neither is explicitly mentioned in the text, the snake signals both the reflexivity of the “eternal recurrence” formulated by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the iconography of the Afro-­Brazilian candomblé deity Oxumaré, whose ability to change sex signifies the principle of transformation.91 In this latter reference, Oiticica appears to return to an interest in practices of candomblé possession explicitly evoked in his 1967 “poem” cape P17

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Parangolé Capa 13 “Estou Possuido” (I Am Possessed).92 When the body hosts an orixá (saint) such as Oxumaré during a trance state, it becomes other to itself at the very moment of maximal embodiment. In this sense possession enacts—­ within a single participant—­the watching-­wearing cycle of the Parangolé. In a suite of photographs taken of Nildo and Oiticica wearing P17 Parangolé Capa 13 “Estou Possuido” this conceptual resonance is strangely refracted along racial lines. In one, Nildo appears alone, displaying the cape’s linguistic utterance to the camera lens. In another, he appears with Oiticica (who now wears the cape), yet is rendered practically invisible by dint of the play of shadows against his dark skin. Departing from the racializing effects of such photographs—­ their tendency to fix rather than render into flux—­the critical intersexuality of “Hermaphro­dipotesis” acknowledged the formative influence of Afro-­Brazilian culture while displacing race as its essentialized visual signifier.93 It thus con­ stitutes a politics of identity turned on its head, an operation in which the body always—­and never—­coincides with itself. The implications of “Hermaphrodipotesis” as an antidote to a simplistic ­politics of representation are far reaching. Significantly, its exhilarating and corrosive critique is implicit in “Brasil Diarréia,” a text Oiticica wrote in New York in 1970. As the full weight of the dictatorship began to be felt back at home, ­Oiticica repudiated the conservative embrace of national character advocated by both the political right and left (and to which his one-­time embrace of “our popular myths” might be ascribed). In “Brasil Diarréia,” he reiterated a claim for a “subterranean” position of “inevitable ambivalences,” rerouting the anthropophagic (or consuming) impulse of Tropicália through the trope of excretion.94 If the Parangolé’s reciprocity of difference was vulnerable to stagnation when consolidated as a series of identitarian signs, “diarrhea” was both a symptom of the ailing body politic and a profoundly corporeal metaphor for the dissolution of identity as such. As Oiticica wrote, “whomever wants to construct (nobody ‘loves Brazil’ more than I!) has to . . . dissect the bowels of this diarrhea—­plunge into the shit!”95

* Perhaps Oiticica’s most succinct artistic response to misperceptions of the Parangolé came in November 1970 with his Made-­On-­The-­Body-­Cape. This proposition was his contribution to the multiples exhibition 3 → ∞: New Multiple Art at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, where Oiticica had lived on and off for a year following his 1969 Whitechapel retrospective. By the time of the multiples exhibition, he had returned to Brazil and was preparing to move to New York, where his Nests had just been displayed at MoMA at the exhibition Information. The Made-­On-­The-­Body-­Cape formalized an experiment first undertaken at “Apocalipopótese,” an event held in the Atêrro do Flamengo just outside MAM-­RJ in 1968 and subsequently repeated with students at the University of Sussex in 1969.96 Oiticica’s contribution was one of the few completely free works in the White­chapel exhibition, and consisted simply of these directions:

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1—­each piece of cloth should measure 3 yards in length; 2—­the cloth must not be cut in the making of the body cape; 3—­safety pins should be used in the construction and the cloth can afterwards be sewn to make a permanent cape; 4—­the structure built on the body should be improvised by the participator himself (if aid from anther person is needed, ok) and made so that it can be taken off afterwards without cutting; 5—­a number of people may participate together, but only one colour, i.e. one piece of cloth, should be used for each cape.97 Unlike the highly-­constructed architectures of the Parangolés, the Made-­On-­The-­ Body-­Cape was “built” on the body, transforming the autographic nature of the earlier capes into an economic allographic script realized by each participant (fig. 4.28). In publishing his script as a multiple, Oiticica was able to disseminate

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Fig. 4.28 Hélio Oiticica, Made-­ On-­The-­Body-­Capes in Pamplona, Spain, 1972. Performance directed and documented by Leandro Katz following Hélio Oiticica’s instructions. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica and Leandro Katz.

knowledge of the Parangolé as a material experience rather than through documentary photographs that, in picturing the order and truncating its watching-­ wearing cycle, edged dangerously close to the essentializing, performative dynamic he wanted to avoid. But the Made-­On-­The-­Body-­Cape was not simply a strategy for disseminating proxy Parangolés to a wider audience. It also isolated the Parangolé’s articulation of the body as a composite, plastic device. Just as the Nests in Information whittled down the principle of growth Oiticica first identified in the favelas into the abstract structure of a generative cell, the Made-­On-­The-­Body-­Cape translated the specificity of the body’s “making” into a single strip of cloth.98 A participant building a cape upon their body makes a schematic mold of their inter­ action with the fabric. Subsequently removing this material structure from the body, per the instructions, leaves the participant with a material registration—­ a flexible cast—­of what their own body can do. As Oiticica wrote, the resulting forms are “abstractions of the body”: three-­dimensional imprints that record the body as process rather than form.99 In a 1970 letter regarding the Whitechapel multiples exhibition, Oiticica described the Made-­on-­the-­Body-­Cape as a kind of “human pulpa” (pupa), referring to the chrysalis stage that lies between a butterfly’s caterpillar and mature forms.100 In this stage, the caterpillar attaches itself to a plant in order to spin a cocoon with bits of external matter and strands of silk produced by glands lodged beneath its skin. Inside, the pupa metamorphizes into its final, winged shape. Within the lifecycle of the butterfly, the chrysalis stage marks the body as pure emergence: a form constituted by the generative force of its own change. But the chrysalis also marks a temporal interval in which the butterfly is materially inextricable from its environment, as its cocoon is both molded on the body and physically constructed from that which surrounds it. Emergence is therefore not pure so much as relational and interdependent—­it describes a body that produces a frame by folding itself together with its outside. Oiticica’s training at the Museu Nacional did not provide him with this experience of emergence but, rather, with a method for designating how such emergences could be known. If this epistemological framework seems far removed from the world of politics and samba, self-­discovery and avant-­garde art, it was nevertheless the means by which these conceptual vectors of Oiticica’s practice could interlace. My route through and around the inauguration of the Parangolé thus rearticulates the epistemic shift of advanced art of the 1960s and 1970s by way of an alternate model of a museum: one that does not stand polemically between art and anti-­art (or more crudely, art and life) but functions as a space for the investigation of living things. In the natural history museum, the tension between morphology’s classificatory and philosophic demands—­between being and becoming—­is productively revealed. There, the very artifice of taxonomy performs the shifting modes of ordering knowledge about the world. And just as no scientist would conflate the designation of a species with the biological life it represents, so too with Oiticica’s “invention” of new orders of art. Nomination registers a moment within an ongoing investigation into multiple cultural

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­ ystems. But the entity named develops a life of its own life through the behavs iors it invites. Likewise, while the species is the basis for our conception of evolutionary change, it can only be operationally rather than ontologically defined. In this sense, although Oiticica proclaimed the Parangolés to be “anti-­art” in 1966, his practice transformed that ontological provocation into an epistemological one. “The museum is the world,” he wrote in that same text.101 Such a museum, I argue, asks not “what is art?” but “when is art?” and, most importantly, “what can it do?”

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Fig. Coda 1 Hélio Oiticica, B38 Bólide Lata 1 Apropriação 2 “Consumitivo”, 1966. Courtesy of ­Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

Coda “The fire lasts and suddenly one day it goes out, but while it lasts it is eternal.”1 This was Hélio Oiticica writing in 1966 about a burning can he appropriated as a work of art. One of innumerable makeshift road signals fashioned from oil tins that lit the night like “cosmic, symbolic signs,” the firecan was anonymous and ubiquitous. Yet for the artist it was unquestionably a work when singled out by the perceptive act. Recalling the Bólide’s original meaning as “fireball,” Oiticica titled it B38 Bólide Lata 1 Apropriacão 2 “Consumitivo” (B38 Bolide Can 1 Appropriation 2 “Consumitive”). Nomination fixed the appropriation in history as a unique event. Designation defamiliarized the quotidian occurrence within a provisional realm of art. But it was each fire’s singularity that continued—­and continues—to give the work life. Each fire burns for a unique duration. Each consumes, and is consumed, until it reaches a definitive end. Oiticica died unexpectedly at the age of forty-­two in 1980, leaving behind a labyrinth of experiments and writings in his wake. B38 Bólide Lata 1 Apropriacão 2 “Consumitivo” was one of these: a proposition infinitely realized within the “museum as world” he wrote of that same year. Oiticica himself seems to have taken only a single photograph to register the appropriation (fig. coda 1). In the strangely bleached print that resulted, a chemical stain appears to dramatically extend the firecan’s licking flames, as if to encode the virtuality of the work’s concept as a precarious physical trace. Within the countless filing cabinets and boxes of folders that suddenly comprised the artist’s final archive, this and all documents gained their own materiality and unpredictable life. On October 16, 2009, a fire sparked by a short circuit in an air conditioner burned hundreds of Oiticica’s works in a storage facility in the family home in Rio. The artist sold little during his lifetime. Thus, immaculately preserved within this repository were works and papers spanning the entirety of his career, from early paintings and untitled experiments to maquettes for unrealized projects, slides, films, paint chips, drawings, costumes, newspaper clippings, photographs, negatives, and thousands of pages of notebooks and letters. For many Latin A ­ merican

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artists, the incident was not only tragic but profoundly political.2 With the anemic collecting policies of national museums and the gradual siphoning off of major works to wealthier institutions abroad, radical Latin American art practices of the 1960s and 1970s have become less and less accessible within the continent. That Tate Modern in London, with only eight pieces, suddenly found itself as the most significant institutional repository of Oiticica’s work was a case in point. For many, it seemed as if Oiticica had suffered a second death. While initial estimates indicated that 90 percent of the estate’s collection had been destroyed, conservators soon amended this estimate, projecting that many works, particularly numerous early gouaches protected by metal flat files, could be saved. But the loss cannot be underestimated. Gone, for instance, are almost all of the Parangolés, which, due to their fabric and paint construction, must have been quick to go up in flames. Even now, as Oiticica’s “second death” appears less definitive, pressing questions about the recuperation of the works persist. What should be ethically reconstructed from the material remains of the fire? When there are no remains, should works be remade on the basis of the estate’s digital archive of notations and plans? If works are reconstructed, should they be in editions? How should they be dated? Will we understand such re­constructions as works of art? Or as documents, exhibition copies, m ­ emory aides, or simply commodities for sale? While thrown into urgent relief by the fire, many of these questions were waiting to be asked not only of Oiticica’s work but also of his contemporaries—­ artists like Lygia Clark, Allan Kaprow, Gordon Matta-­Clark, Artur Barrio, Eva Hesse, to name just a few—­who pressed the traditional artwork into participation, pedagogy, process, event.3 As these artists’ historical import grew and their art aged, it has become increasingly difficult to locate many individual works on the continuum between static object and score. The presentation of Clark’s Bichos in Plexiglas cases stripped of their interactive potential or the sale of “original” Made-­On-­The-­Body-­Capes are case in point. While some such re­assignments are more egregious than others, each points to a fundamental de­stabilization brought about by the rearticulation of concept, experience, and materiality at the core of these works. New vulnerabilities have arisen from these remapped relations. But so too has new critical potential. From this perspective, what can Oiticica’s works tell us about the afterlives to which they gave birth? Consider the Parangolés. Because the originals were prone to deterioration, museums wishing to display them had already utilized carefully constructed exhibition copies long before the fire. These could be worn and physically explored as the artist intended, rather than hung forlornly on the wall. These ­posthumous replicas now preserve the material memory of their lost originals. ­Having acquired a new degree of authenticity, they will be replicated in turn, initiating a chain of copies that point back to an absent source. Yet while the Parangolés were never static objects, neither were they instruction-­based propositions such as the Made-­on-­the-­Body-­Capes. Their architectures were complex and meticulously composed, often with highly specific material choices and

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pronounced facture. Even the most scrupulous copies therefore enact a slow, if imperceptible, shift from their source. Yet the archive provides clues for conceiving of this transformation through the paradigm of species drift. As I have argued, the Parangolés do not abandon art but instead enact an epistemology of life. In order to continue to experience these works as living forms, we must therefore acknowledge that they will in­ evitably change. With care, this change will be infinitesimal—­as Marcel Duchamp wrote of the distinction between two objects cast from the same mold, infrathin.4 Yet it is quite possible that at some point in the future, viewers will encounter Parangolés that have unfolded into new species morphologically distinct from those Oiticica conceived in his time. Bearing in mind the historical character of both a species and its nomination, such viewers may be able to comprehend such objects in terms of their genealogical relation to Oiticica’s oeuvre. This means we cannot dispense with the archive and its material substrate—­indeed, we need to attend to them all the more. But it also means that in order to critically consider the identity of Oiticica’s practice and surviving works, we have to analyze conditions of nonidentity, unmaking, and counterproduction as well. In 2007, Tate Modern hosted the exhibition Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color, originally organized by Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. At Tate Modern, a replica of B11 Bólide Caixa 9 (1964) was made and displayed outside of the main galleries where it could be manipulated and touched.5 The original sculpture, which belongs to Tate Modern’s permanent collection, remained within the exhibition galleries, where it anchored the replica’s character as an authentic copy, or contrafactum, to use an anachronistic term. Art historian Peter Parshall has argued that during the Renaissance, the contrafactum came to describe an image or entity that shared aspects of its referent’s essential structure, even as it actively performed its difference from the thing itself.6 It was neither a forgery nor a false representation but a privileged substitute uniquely positioned to transmit informational facts. Tate Modern’s replica was just such a contrafactum: at once art and not-­art, an embodiment and a demonstration, an object that challenged the museum’s traditional hierarchies of value while shoring up the auratic cult of the original at the same time. If participatory experience once promised to de­­ fetishize the traditional artwork by transforming contemplation into action, here it simultaneously secured the very identity of the privileged object by means of a proxy form. If not explicitly acknowledged by the institution, the terms “work” and “document” curiously traded places between Tate Modern’s replicated Bólide, exiled outside of the galleries, and its authentic Bólide, positioned securely within the galleries’ bounds. If the original object became a documentary supplement to the work’s activation in the present, the replica also became a documentary illustration of the work as a historical object, much like a photograph or a recording of an event. In shuttling between these mutual possibilities, the contra­factum Bólide effectively suspended the secure location of the work. From this perspective, a dual process of displacement and consolidation was in effect well before the fire, even as Oiticica’s works troubled institutional protocols from within.

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Fig. Coda 2 Sem título, de ­Francis Alÿs, por Duda Miranda, 2006. Metal spoon, magnet, and napkin. Coutesy of Duda Miranda.

In 2006, one year before Tate Modern’s exhibition, a very different kind of contrafactum was realized in Brazil. In this instance, it was initiated not by a museum but by a fictitious collector named Duda Miranda—­a mysteriously absent reader of Jorge Luis Borges, library administrator, and sometimes theorist of art.7 Miranda’s collection consisted entirely of replicas of works by such artists as Oiticica, Robert Smithson, Cildo Meireles, Felix Gonzalez-­Torres, and Francis Alÿs. Between May and June of 2006, visitors could request a key from the ­Museu Mineiro, a historical museum located in the city of Belo Horizonte, which allowed them to access to a modest rented apartment nearby. There Miranda’s collection was displayed within an ordinary domestic environment of armchairs, houseplants, tea kettles, dishcloths, and magazine racks (fig. coda 2). For Miranda, whose authorial voice emerged by way of a series of letters and interviews published in an accompanying catalogue, the replicas were legitimized by the conceptual orientation of the original works, each of which intentionally eschewed the artist’s hand. Miranda’s coterminous acts of production and collection thus constituted a process of interpretation—­a rereading of the originals rather than an attempt to reproduce the specificity of individual artifacts themselves.8 The resulting objects were thus remakes rather than replicas. They shifted emphasis away from a unitary moment of production to multiple points of reception, each of which reactivated the work as a material potentiality rather than a singular object in space. Operating in a contrafactive mode, these

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objects presupposed the falsity of the work precisely for the purposes of experiencing its real aesthetic effects. In so doing, they circumvented the exchange value imposed by the art market in favor of the use value of the work of art. In an interview, Miranda was candid about the reproduced status of the collection. Although the works were not authentic, they nevertheless had “the power to affect.”9 If Oiticica’s 1966 nomination of a firecan demonstrated how an ordinary phenomenon could be infinitely comprehended as a work of art, Miranda’s collection extended and rerouted this gesture. Beginning from the work, it decoupled nomination from making to propose that the afterlives of art inhere not in singular possession but in collective use. Yet just as Oiticica understood that each firecan was an “illustration of life” because of both its vitality and inevitable end, Miranda, too, intuited that contrafactive works trade in the fugitive as well.10 To wit, Miranda’s collection was dispersed shortly after its exhibition, perhaps to be reunited, or reimagined, or forgotten, at a later date. Oiticica’s firecan thematized renewal by way of an appropriation available to anyone at any time. But, like Miranda, he also anticipated processes of ossification and reactivation in relation to the material specificity of his works. On December 18, 1979, little more than a month after laying the last brick of Ready Constructible, he undertook an action at a landfill in Cajú, Rio, that he called Contra-­Bólide (Devolver a Terra à Terra) (Counter-­Bolide [To Return Earth to Earth]) (fig. coda 3).11 Conceived as a “poetic counteroperation” to his earlier order of Bólides, the action consisted of positioning a wooden frame on the ground, filling it with black earth brought from another site and subsequently removing the frame.12 Whereas the earlier order used containers to gather and secure dispersed pigmentary matter into a defined structure, Contra-­Bólide (Devolver a Terra à Terra) used an open structure—­Oiticica’s generative cell of the square—­to return a pigmentary sample to the earth. A critical unmaking, it destabilized the Bólide’s historical calcification into a series of sculptures by materially inverting the earlier order’s conceptual procedure. If the replicas produced by Miranda and Tate Modern appealed to a contrafactive mode in order to recover a work’s experiential function, Oiticica’s mobilized the contrafactive as a process—­the very making of making against. Contra-­Bólide (Devolver a Terra à Terra) functions in multiple temporal ­registers. Both its citation of Oiticica’s original 1963 invention and its performative actualization on December 18, 1979, are historically punctual in character. The work’s entropic decomposition into the landfill, meanwhile, entails an infinitesimally slow process by which the square of black soil gradually loses its formal coherence as it is absorbed into the earth. Yet while such a temporality entails the dissolution of figure into ground (this ground itself a literal field of decomposing matter), Contra-­Bólide (Devolver a Terra à Terra) also unleashes complex modes of futurity. In a text of January 1, 1980, just three months before his death, Oiticica wrote that instead of a work, it was “a species of program-­ work in ­progress that can be repeated when occasion necessitates.”13 In this ongoing, propositional character, Contra-­Bólide (Devolver a Terra à Terra) allows for a potentially infinite number of iterative events, each followed by entropic

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Fig. Coda 3 Hélio Oiticica, Contra-­Bólide (Devolver a Terra à Terra), 1978. Wood, earth, 80 x 80 x 10 cm. Photo by Andreas Valentin. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica and Andreas Valentin.

disaggregation in turn. For Oiticica, each repetition would be a “concretion” of the Bólide’s emergence as an “invention-­discovery.”14 Each would use a frame in order to reinaugurate the original unfolding of the work into the world. Contra-­Bólide (Devolver a Terra à Terra) materially theorizes the deterritorialization of the work of art. Far from a simplistic rejection of the category of art, it precisely and rigorously demonstrates the degree to which countering the forces of historical normalization depends on reactivating the work’s genesis as a work of art. The result is something other to this work. But in its emergence, a work is always other to art as well. It is this double differentiation that Contra-­ Bólide (Devolver a Terra à Terra) makes available in tangible, participatory form. In an article published at the close of the traveling portion of Oiticica’s first international posthumous retrospective from 1992 to 1994, Guy Brett, long-­time supporter and one of the most sensitive commentators on the artist’s work, recounted how exhibition organizers reenacted Contra-­Bólide (Devolver a Terra Nerra) at each venue—­Rotterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, and Minneapolis—­ where it had been shown. He ruminated that it was both a “burial and a resurrection,” a recognition of the museum’s institutionalization of Oiticica’s practice and a means of vivifying his “poetics of life” at the same time.15 Yet he also perceptively remarked that “it may not be right to present it as apparently an either-­or-­ choice, or to set up a polar opposition between ‘museum’ and ‘life.’”16 Indeed, we have seen that Oiticica’s complex engagement with museums reveals the life of the work of art itself. In acknowledging that works of art can have life, we must also acknowledge that they can—­and sometimes must—­die. In this sense, the multiple temporalities of Contra-­Bólide (Devolver a Terra à Terra)’s metacritique are not available to all propositions or objects. The material destruction of the fire, paired with Oiticica’s growing reputation, means that comprehending these varying modalities is all the more urgent now. For to attend to the life of art also means recognizing that the distance between its genesis and our own reception cannot be willed away. Nowhere is this type of distance more palpable, yet easily obscured, than in Oiticica’s relationship to the historical avant-­garde proposal to end with art. Here is a passage from his diary on Christmas Day, 1959: I read the prophetic words of Mondrian: “What is certain, is that there is no escape for the nonfigurative artist; he must stay within his field and march towards the consequence of his art. This consequence brings us, in a future perhaps remote, towards the end of art as a thing separate from our surrounding environment, which is the actual plastic reality.”17 Such a statement appears to anticipate Oiticica’s triumphant realization of ­Mondrian’s “plastic reality,” and much of the artist’s reception has proceeded from these grounds. But a little-­known work Oiticica made with his former student Andreas Valentin suggests that we might dilate, rather than collapse, this

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historical distance and in so doing render visible that which also lies between Oiticica and ourselves. In February 1978, Oiticica had returned to Brazil from New York and learned that the old lifeguard posts of Rio’s south zone beaches were going to be replaced.18 The posts were reminiscent of the avant-­garde architecture of Mondrian’s one-­time colleague J. J. Pieter Oud, and Oiticica chose to commemorate this unexpected modernist reference within Rio’s urban texture with a new work called Parangolé Jornal (Newspaper Parangolé) (fig. coda 4).19 Consisting of three newspaper spreads laminated in clear plastic to make a cape, Parangolé Jornal was made “to be photographed,” as Oiticica put it, to illustrate a newspaper article—­the first report of the artist’s return to Brazil.20 In one of Valentin’s photographs, a man wraps the Parangolé around his shoulders, its pages obscuring his face from view. Mondrian imagined the dissolution of art into a utopian “plastic reality.” But here the emblem of such a reality is an anonymous and soon obsolete architecture, a liminal shelter for a subject whose presence seems equally contingent—­as precarious as the newspaper he uses as a carapace or skin. On March 8, 1978, Jornal do Brasil ran a full-­page feature on Oiticica along with a photograph of Parangolé Jornal. In the interview, Oiticica attacked the notion that he had “returned to his roots,” noting that they had been “torn out and burned” long ago.21 He likewise asserted that his wasn’t a “return” because he was only “commencing”—­“Everything that I did earlier, I consider a prologue.”22 Within the article, the photograph of Parangolé Jornal enacts a peculiar mise en abyme. While the cape’s status as a work of art is barely legible in independent images, its recursive repetition within the pages of the newspaper is highly de­ familiarizing. Confronted with an image of a body enfolded in a newspaper in the very newspaper pages the reader folds and unfolds in turn, the viewer’s own newspaper transforms into a Parangolé Jornal the moment he or she recognizes the proposition as a work of art. The pictured and actual uses of the medium are thus self-­same and self-­differing, a dissonant convergence of art and news. It is not so much the work of art that dissolves into a utopian reality but a hetero­ geneous and contingent reality that emerges, however fleetingly, as a work. On March 8, 1978, a reader encountering the photograph of Parangolé Jornal in the pages of the Jornal do Brasil might also have read articles about the pos­ sible return of habeas corpus and direct electoral rights after years of their suppression by Brazil’s military dictatorship. Would these debates about democratization have resonated with Oiticica’s comment in those same pages that the artist’s task was to “overcome” the “verbal block” of the Brazilian populace?23 Would the patently visual and phenomenological nature of his newspaper intervention signal that such an impediment (and its overcoming) might likewise take behavioral, quotidian form? It is of course difficult to know. But for the brief moment in which it appeared as a photograph within the newspaper, Parangolé Jornal was a material, historical index of these possibilities. In the work’s physical absence, this contingency points us elsewhere, not least to the historical distance between Parangolé Jornal

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Fig. Coda 4 Hélio Oiticica with Andreas Valentin, Parangolé “Jornal”, 1978. Photo by Andreas Valentin. Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica and Andreas Valentin.

and the present day. This interval is no less vertiginous than that between Mondrian’s euphoric prediction of a plastic reality and Oiticica and Valentin’s photograph of 1978. Inhabiting this historical space, we might recognize the contemporary frames that we can likewise fold and unfold into view. The two and a half decades of Oiticica’s practice from the mid-­1950s through 1980 coincided with the imaginative projection and political appropriation of developmental modernity, first by a democratic government and then by a repressive military regime. But the illusory promise of economic ascension—­and its political instrumentalization—­is no less strong today. Likewise, if this book has charted the emergence of a participatory paradigm in Oiticica’s practice within a unique set of historical coordinates, participatory experience is now as prized by institutions and markets as aura and contemplation were in his time. To recover the work of art’s emergent and emancipatory qualities, we must follow Oiticica’s cue and “invent” in turn.

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Acknowledgments I first encountered Hélio Oiticica’s work in Cuba in November 2000. Rounding the corner of an alley in Havana, I glimpsed a flash of color and a twirling body—­ someone wearing a Parangolé, though I didn’t know what one was at the time. Magnetized, I soon found myself in a room filled with strangely beautiful yet curiously familiar objects and sensations: basins of earth, rubber gloves, white sand, the scent of coffee grinds. My first thanks are to César Oiticica, who directs the Projeto Hélio Oiticica, and César Oiticica Filho, who organized that exhibition. During several extended periods of research beginning in 2004, they generously provided me access to the estate’s collection and archive. ­Ariane Figueiredo and Daniela Matera Lins Gomes were indispensable in facilitating my research there, responding to my countless requests with meticulous detail, patience, and warmth. For me and so many others, the news of the 2009 fire at the Projeto was nothing short of traumatic. I am extraordinarily lucky for the hours upon hours that I spent with the work—­this book simply would not have been possible without them. Three exhibitions came at pivotal moments during my research and provided expansive, rigorous contexts to think about and with Oiticica’s work. Luciano Figueiredo and Mari Carmen Ramírez each curated stunning retrospectives at the Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, respectively. The conservation studies Wynne Phelan made at the MFAH were tremendously generative for my thinking. The opportunity to experience Oiticica’s Eden in Carlos Basualdo’s Tropicália exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, was likewise definitive. I am equally indebted to countless conversations with artists, critics, historians, and friends of Oiticica. For their time, enthusiasm, and incisive recollections, I am particularly grateful to Guy Brett, Ferreira Gullar, Neville D’Almeida, Carlos Vergara, Andreas Valentin, Antonio Manuel, and Augusto de Campos. Warm thanks also go to Ronaldo Brito, Rubens Gerchman, Frederico Morais, Jerome Greenberg, Marcos Bonisson, Silviano Santiago, Ivan Cardoso, Paulo Venâncio Filho, Luiz Camillo Osorio, Sérgio Cohn, Jean Bogichi, Celso Favaretto, Jorge Salomão, Allen Roscoe, Lee

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Jaffe, Glória Ferreira, and Dore Ashton. My response to Oiticica’s work as a ­subject of historical analysis has been indelibly shaped by discussions about contemporary practice in Brazil. Many artists, but especially Matheus Rocha Pitta, Thiago Rocha Pitta, Lais Myrrha, Marilá Dardot, Rosângela Renno, Ana Linnemann, and Ricardo Basbaum have been vital in this regard. In a 2012 interview, the Brazilian curator Agnaldo Farias asked, “When do people look at our objects? Because that is exactly where the new ways of looking will emerge.” It is my hope that I have indeed looked over the course of these years, and that these pages express a seed of the “singularity,” as Farias put it, that I experienced as a result. I am privileged that this book joins a robust conversation about the contours and implications of Brazilian and Latin American art. For their dialogues and the examples they have set in their own work, I thank Frederico Coelho, Elena ­Shtromberg, Mónica Amor, Sérgio Bruno Martins, Zanna Gilbert, Michael Asbury, Sérgio Bessa, Isobel Whitelegg, Joaquín Barriendos, Tatiana Ferraz, Paula Braga, Felipe Scovino, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Kaira Cabañas, Miguel López, Adele Nelson, Gina McDaniel Tarver, Aleca Le Blanc, José Falconi, Cristiana Tejo, ­Daniela Labra, Robin Greeley, and Megan Sullivan. Daniel Quiles has been a particularly inspired and inspiring interlocutor for this and many other endeavors. Our discussions about methodology, critical intervention, and the sheer mechanics of argument have made this book immeasurably stronger. I have also benefitted from presenting my research at numerous conferences, workshops, and lectures. I am particularly grateful to K. David Jackson, Christine Mehring, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Andrea Giunta, Roberto Tejado, Cristina Freire, Zan Dumbadze, Jennifer Raab, Edward Sullivan, Claire Bishop, Anna Indych-­ López, Yve-­Alain Bois, Michael Lobel, Christopher Dunn, Alex Alberro, Nina Dubin, and Gabriel Rangel for their invitations, comments, and stimulating forums. During a 2007–­8 residency at the Getty Research Institute, discussions with Tom Cummins, Leonard Folgarait, Spyros Papapetros, Helmut Müller-­Sievers, Karen Lang, Chelsea Foxwell, Gloria Sutton, Kristina Luce, Karen Hellman, Katja Zelljadt, Brandon Taylor, Olivier Debroise, Susan Buck-Morss, and John Tain were fundamental for the growth of this project. At the University of Illinois, Urbana-­ Champaign, a host of Unit seminars, South Farm crits, MAC talks, and PLSNT potlucks were instrumental in forming a vibrant intellectual community for me from 2009 to 2012. Jonathan Fineberg, Nancy Abelmann, Lisa Rosenthal, Conrad Bakker, and Nan Goggin provided key institutional support. Allyson Purpura, Jesse Ribot, Lauren Goodlad, Suzanne Hudson, and Terri Weissman were crucial sounding boards. Particular thanks go to my extraordinary writing group of Justine Murison, Lilya Kaganovsky, and especially Jennifer Greenhill, with whom I have deliberated the relations between word and image since we pored over slides together as graduate students. At Princeton, I have been welcomed by an inspiring group of colleagues in the department of Art & Archaeology and the Programs in Latin American Studies and Media & Modernity. For their insight and support of various aspects of this project, I am especially grateful to Hal

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Foster, Chika Okeke-­Agulu, Rachel Price, Gabriela Nouzeilles, Bridget Alsdorf, and Rachael DeLue. My work on this project has been supported by a number of fellowships and grants for which I am deeply appreciative. They include an award from the Barr Ferree Foundation Publication Fund at Princeton University; a Creative Capital & Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant; Humanities Released Time granted by the Research Board of the University of Illinois, Urbana-­Champaign; a Getty Research Institute Predoctoral Fellowship; a Dedalus Foundation PhD Fellowship; a Yale University Dissertation Fellowship; and grants provided by the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies and the Paul Mellon Centre at Yale University. My research was facilitated by a host of curators, scholars, registrars, and archivists in Brazil and elsewhere. I want to thank in particular Claudio Barbosa and Elizabeth Catoia Varela of the Centro de Pesquisas e Documentação of MAM-­RJ; Felipe Scovino, then of the Associação Cultural “O Mundo de Lygia Clark”; Alexandre Soares of the Museu Nacional’s Lepidoptera section, Maria José Veloso da Costa Santos of its Biblioteca, and Jorge Dias da Silva Junior and Maria das Graças of its Seção de Memória e Arquivo; Ana Paulo Marques at the Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo; Edson Motta Filho of the Escola de Belas Artes of Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; Gabriel Patrocínio at the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial; Poi Marr and David Fagan of the Museum of Modern Art Ireland; Maria Rossi Samora of the Biblioteca of MAM-­SP; Heloísa Espada; Waltraud Weissmann; Walter de Castro; Valter Sacilotto; Leandro Katz; and all those who kindly provided images and permissions. In bringing this book into material form, I have relied on much expert guidance as well. At Princeton, Trudy Jacoby, John ­Blazejewski, Julie Angarone, and especially Dave Connelly provided indispensable assistance with images and formatting. Susan Lehre and Kathe Woodside at Princeton and Anthony Burton and James Toftness at the University of ­Chicago Press deftly navigated institutional labyrinths. Gavin Browning proved a wonderfully astute and clear-­eyed editor. Caterina MacLean applied an exacting eye to the text. Teresa Cristina Jardim de Santa Cruz Oliveira facilitated essential permissions at the Arquivo Distrito Federal. Endless gratitude goes to my stellar research assistant, Alice Heeren, who has maneuvered tax codes, pigment compositions, and image authorizations with grace and aplomb. My introduction foregrounds the importance of the reader, and this book has been infinitely enriched by mine. In this project’s earliest stages at Yale, David Joselit allowed me to see its vectors, while Kellie Jones showed me how it could breathe. Alexander Nemerov urged me to believe in writing; Christopher Wood insisted on its scope. Ryan Holmberg and Prajna Desai provided powerful models of intellectual courage. Jonathan Katz, Jennifer Stob, Philipp Ekardt, and Hiroko Ikegami were invaluable and generous interlocutors. Well before I started graduate school, Okwui Enwezor taught me to look, and look harder, at archives and works of art alike. At essential subsequent stages, Daniel Quiles, Jennifer Greenhill, Alexander Nagel, Spyros Papapetros, Rachel Price, Hal Foster, Megan

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Acknowledgments

Luke, and Sarah Hamill each offered distinctive and incisive comments on aspects of the book. Julia Bryan-­Wilson and Carrie Lambert-Beatty likewise provided richly productive feedback as readers. I am especially indebted to Jess Atwood-­Gibson for her wit, critical intuition, and unfailing good sense. It has been my tremendous good fortune to have Susan Bielstein as my editor. Her unwavering support and sage guidance have been lifelines throughout. Bringing this book into the world has been the labor and love of many years. My debts to my family and friends run deep. They have accompanied its requisite twists and turns, matching my exhilaration and despair with equal doses of invigoration and conviction. I am grateful for their laughter, their engagement, their practices of living. Most of all, I thank Tumelo Mosaka, my camerado, who has folded his life together with mine. This book is for him and our Kha-­ai, who appeared, magnificently, in the midst of it all.

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Notes Introduction 1

2

3

4

Luciano Figueiredo, Lygia Pape, and Waly Salomão, eds., Aspiro ao Grande Labirinto: Textos de Hélio Oiticica (1954–­1969) (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986). This same year Oiticica and Lygia Clark were represented by a major exhibition at the Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo. The first book-­ length study, Celso Favaretto’s A Invenção de Hélio Oiticica (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo), which argues that Oiticica’s work constitutes a nexus for the Duchampian and Constructive trends of modern art, followed in 1992. An expanded volume of Oiticica’s writings translated in English and German, Hélio Oiticica: Das große Labyrinth / Hélio Oiticica: The Great Labyrinth (Frankfurt: Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main), appeared in 2013. The first international retrospective of Oiticica’s work traveled to venues in the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, the United States, and Brazil between 1992 and 1997; it was followed by his inclusion in Documenta 10 in 1997. See Hélio Oiticica, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro, Rotterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, Minneapolis: Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Witte de With, Galerie National du Jeu de Paume, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Walker Art Center, 1992); and Catherine David and Jean-­Francois Chevriel, Documenta X, The Book: Poetics / Politics, exh. cat. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 1997). Mari Carmen Ramírez’s landmark essay, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960–­1980,” took its name from Oiticica’s work P16 Parangolé Capa 12 “Da Adversidade Vivemos” (1967). Luis Camnitzer, Jane Faver, and Rachel Weiss, eds., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-­1980s, exh. cat. (New York: Queens Museum, 1999), 53–­71. This work also served as inspiration for an exhibition focused on the concept of precariousness curated by Carlos Basualdo (Da Adversidade Vivemos = De l’adversité, nous vivons, exh. cat. [Paris: Paris Musées, 2001]). See also Daisy Peccinini de Alvarado, Figurações, Brasil anos 60 (São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 1999). See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics [1998], trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les Presses du reel, 2002). Bourriaud’s formulation has been heavily critiqued, most notably by Claire Bishop in “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–­79 and “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum (February 2006): 178–­83. Oiticica has been linked to Rirkrit Tiravanija, a key figure of the so-­called “relational” work in several anthologies of participatory art, including Claire Bishop, ed., Participation, Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006)

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5

6

7 8

9

10 11

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and Robert Atkins, Rudolf Frieling, Boris Groys, and Lev Manovich, The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), as well as exhibitions, for example Hélio Oiticica/Rirkrit Tiravanija: Contact at the Walker Art Center in 2010. See for example Guy Brett and Luciano Figueiredo, eds., Oiticica in London, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2007); Frederico Coelho, Livro ou Livro-­Me: Os Escritos Babilônicos de Hélio Oiticica (1971–­1978) (Rio de Janeiro: Editora UERJ, 2010); and Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, “TROPICAMP: Some Notes on Hélio Oiticica’s 1971 Text,” Afterall 28 (Autumn-­Winter 2011): 5–­15. Oiticica began to use the term “program-­in-­progress” in the early 1970s while living in New York, where it referred most explicitly to a series of expanded cinema experiments involving slide show environments. But he quickly likened this open, nonlinear structure to his thought process and work more generally. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” [1968], in Image-­Music-­Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 146. Haroldo de Campos, “The Open Work of Art” [1955], Dispositio: Revista Hispánica de Semiótica Literaria 6, nos. 17–­18 (Summer-­Fall 1981): 5–­8; Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work” [1962], in The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1–­23. The latter essay was an expansion of a paper Eco gave in 1958 at the 12th Congrés International de Philosophie. Ricardo Basbaum astutely observed how Oiticica and Clark refocused attention on the spectator rather than the artist in “Clark & Oiticica,” in Fios Soltos: A Arte de Hélio Oiticica, ed. Paula Braga (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 2008), 111–­14. Anna Dezeuze has likewise described such works under the rubric of the “do-­it-­yourself” artwork. See “An Introduction to the ‘do-­it-­yourself’ artwork” and “‘Open work,’ ‘do-­it-­yourself’ artwork and bricolage” in her anthology The ‘Do-­It-­Yourself’ Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 1–­21, 47–­68. On the importance of the score as a vehicle for realization in postwar art see Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). Vera Martins, “Oiticica: Transformação dialética da pintura,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, May 20, 1961, 2. The digitalization process was initiated under the aegis of the Brazilian foundation Itaú Cultural and completed by the artist’s estate in 2004. The resulting archive contains over 2000 digital documents, some hundreds of pages in length. In addition, the estate retains a collection of undigitalized and uncatalogued papers deemed personal rather than artistic in orientation. Research for the present book has been drawn from both these depositories, among others. On Oiticica’s archive, see the following important studies: Zizette Lagnado Dwek, “Hélio Oiticica: O Mapa do Programa Ambiental” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 2003); Coelho, Livro ou Livro-­Me; and Paula Braga, Hélio Oiticica: Singularidade, Multiplicidade (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 2013). See for example Aracy Amaral, “Hélio Oiticica,” Colóquio Artes (Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian) 15, no. 11 (February 1973): 55–­60; Guy Brett, “Hélio Oiticica: Reverie and Revolt,” Art in America 77, no. 1 (January 1989): 110–­21; Haroldo de Campos, “Hang-­glider of Ecstasy,” and Waly Salomão, “HOmage,” in Hélio Oiticica, exh. cat. (1992), 217–­21, 240–­ 46; Eduardo Costa, “Hélio Oiticica: The Street in a Bottle,” Flash Art 174 (January-­February 1994): 75–­77; and Waly Salomão, Qual é o Parangolé? e Outros Escritos (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2003). In 1964, Oiticica wrote that his orders “are not established a priori, but created following a nascent creative necessity” (“Bases Fundamentais Para uma Definição do ‘Parangolé,’” November 1964 [AHO/PHO 0035.64], 3). The year before his death, he likewise noted, “everything that is made within these categories . . . is a concretization of this category, the categories are unknown things, they are not categories established with a single vision . . .

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each work inaugurates that category once again, rendering it in turn increasingly i­ntelligible.” “Ivan Cardoso Entrevista Hélio Oiticica,” in Ivampirismo: O Cinema em Panico, eds. Ivan Cardoso and R. Lucchetti (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Brasil-­America, 1979), 77. I have treated the fire in “Material Remains: On the Afterlife of Hélio Oiticica’s Work,” Artforum (February 2010): 95–­96. Numerous articles appeared in the Brazilian press; see for example Ferreira Gullar, “Quase um Precursor,” Folha de São Paulo, December 13, 2009, http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/ilustrad/fq1312200920.htm; Fabio Cypriano, “Obra não era preservada como merecia,” Folha de São Paulo, October 18, 2009, http://www1.folha .uol.com.br/fsp/cotidian/ff1810200927.htm; and Daniela Name, “Hélio Oiticica e a Cultura dos Escombros,” Pitadinhas (blog), October 18, 2009, http://daniname.wordpress.com /2009/10/18/helio-oiticica-e-a-cultura-dos-escombros/. Several of these articles are archived at http://www.canalcontemporaneo.art.br/brasa/archives/002565.html. As Cypriano wrote, “For as sad, lamentable, and tragic it is, the loss of practically the entirety of artist Hélio Oiticica’s [work] represents, ultimately, the end of the fetish for material in his works and the liberation of his ideas. Now, since there are no more originals, everybody can create their own Parangolé. Luckily, the great part of his archive was digitalized and can be found on the site Itaú Cultural . . . The original [documents] . . . may be burned, but they have managed to survive on the internet, where everybody can access them, just as the artist wanted of his work” (“Obra não era preservada como merecia”). A key archetype for this narrative is Lygia Clark’s Livro-­Obra, an artist’s book produced in 1986 that lucidly charts the artist’s trajectory from 1954. The linearity of this approach was already established in criticism in the late 1950s, for example Ferreira Gullar’s art historical series “Etapas de Arte Contemporânea,” published in the Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil from March 1959 to October 1960, which culminates in Neoconcretism. This rhetorical tradition has largely continued in institutional and scholarly presentations. See for example Beatriz Scigliano Carneiro, Relâmpagos Com Claror: Lygia Clark e Hélio Oiticica, Vida Como Arte (São Paulo: Editora Imaginário, 2004); and Luis Pérez-­Oramas and Cornelia Butler, eds., Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), which uses Clark’s own description, “the abandonment of art,” as its central provocation. See Hélio Oiticica, diary entry, December 25, 1959 (AHO/PHO 182.59), 6; and Lygia Clark, “Letter to Piet Mondrian,” May 1959, in Lygia Clark, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Fundacío Antoni Tàpies, 1997), 114–­15. In this, it has likewise acted as a countermodel to Peter Bürger’s charge in his 1974 Theory of the Avant-­Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) that the neo-­avant-­garde institutionalized the radical impulse of the historical ­avant-­garde as art. See Michael Asbury, “Hélio Oiticica: Politics and Ambivalence in 20th ­Century Brazilian Art” (PhD diss., Camberwell College of Arts, 2003); and Suely Rolnik, “Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-­Full of Lygia Clark,” in Susan Martin and Alma Ruiz, eds. The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, Mira Schendel, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999). As Ramírez wrote in the conclusion of her essay for her 2007 retrospective of Oiticica’s work, “[T]he Parangolé stands at the crossroads of the end of the avant-­garde utopia envisioned in Mondrian’s quote—­the end of art as a thing separate from our environment, which is, actually the plastic reality—­and what came afterward.” “The Embodiment of Color—­‘From the Inside Out,’” in Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color, ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez, exh. cat. (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2007), 68. This contradiction has continued in the reception of recent participatory and collaborative practices. On this paradox see Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012).

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20 Craig Owens, “From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life After ‘The Death of the Author’?” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 126, emphasis in original. 21 It bears noting that Ramírez’s central point of comparison was not the elaboration of institutional critique in conceptual art but Joseph Kosuth’s famously tautological formulation, “art-­as-­idea-­as-­idea.” See Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Blueprints Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America,” in Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1993), 156–­67; and “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Latin American Conceptualism, 1960–­1980.” See also Miguel A. Lopez’s excellent historiographical analysis of the term “ideological conceptualism” in “How Do We Know What Latin American Conceptualism Looks Like?,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry 23 (Spring 2010): 5–­21. 22 Daniel Buren, “Critical Limits” [1970], in Five Texts (New York: John Weber Gallery, 1973), cited in Owens, “From Work to Frame,” 130–­131. 23 On the “folkloric,” see Oiticica, “Bases Fundamentais Para uma Definição do ‘Parangolé,’” as well his letter to David Medalla, August 21, 1965 (AHO/PHO 0586.65). See also Hélio Oiticica, “Subterrânia,” September 21, 1969 (AHO/PHO 0382.69); and “Brasil Diarréia” [1970], in Arte Brasileira Hoje, eds. Ferreira Gullar and Mário Pedrosa (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1973). 24 See Oiticica’s text on B33 Bólide Caixa 18 in Hélio Oiticica, 25 February–­6 April 1969, White­ chapel Gallery, ed. Guy Brett, exh. cat. (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1969); and “Heróis e Anti-­Heróis de Oiticica,” Diário de Notícias, April 10, 1968, 2nd section, 3. Luis Camnitzer has argued for a privileged relationship between Latin American conceptual art and politics in Conceptualism in Latin America: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007). 25 Paola Berenstein Jacques’s Estética da Ginga: A Arquitetura das Favelas Através da Obra de Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro, Casa de Palavra, 2001) represents an important effort to surpass a purely speculative application of philosophy, in this case by maintaining an engagement with architecture through a Deleuzian framework of fragment, labyrinth, and rhizome. 26 T. J. Clark wrote in 1973 in what became a foundational text for the social history of art, “The point is this: the encounter with history and its specific determinations is made by the artist himself. The social history of art sets out to discover the general nature of the structures that he encounters willy-­nilly; but it also wants to locate the specific conditions of one such meeting.” T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 13. 27 In this I follow Ronaldo Brito’s prescient 1975 suggestion that “A careful analysis of [Neo­ concrete] production might reveal not only its connection to the postulates of modern science—­especially non-­Euclidean geometry—­but also an implicit idea about what constitutes the ‘social’ and art’s insertion into this ‘social.’ It is a ‘politics’ if we may use this expression.” Neoconcretismo: Vértice e ruptura do projeto construtivo brasileiro (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify Edições, 1999), 90. 28 Ferreira Gullar, “Manifesto Neoconcreto,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 22, 1959, 4–­5. As he reiterated in a 2012 interview, “I often say that the Neoconcrete Manifesto is different from avant-­garde manifestos that seek to announce what will occur; my manifesto states what occurred, here and now, in the production of the artists being considered.” Ferreira Gullar in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez (New York: Fundacio Cisneros, 2012), 39. As Tania Riveira as likewise observed, “Neoconcrete experience does not come from any theory, precisely because it is based on the understanding that artistic production is in itself reflection and knowledge production . . .” “Ethics, Psychoanalysis and Post­ modern Art in Brazil: Mário Pedrosa, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark,” Third Text 26, no. 1 (January 2012): 55.

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29 Lygia Pape described the artistic process of this period as a “feedback loop in which one work generates another.” Frederico Morais, “Neoconcretismo: cavar novas linguagens,” O Globo, July 22, 1975. She also noted that “Merleau[-­Ponty] appeared once the works were finished and there was a need for a text to contextualize . . . [and] situate a production that had never been seen before . . .” “O que eu não sei,” Item (Rio de Janeiro) 1 (June 1995): 17. 30 As Gullar wrote, “Emerging directly from and of this space, the [Neoconcrete] non-­object is a working over and reinauguration of that space: it is the permanent rebirth of form in space.” “Diálogo Sôbre o Não-­Objeto,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 26, 1960, 5. 31 See Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes [1964], ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968); Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session,” in Dissemination [1972], trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) and “The Hinge,” in Of Grammatology [1967], trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Luce ­Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One [1977], trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), as well as her rejoinder to Merleau-­Ponty in “The Invisible of the Flesh: A Reading of Merleau-­Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ‘The Intertwining—­The Chiasm,’” in An Ethics of Sexual Difference [1984], trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Séan Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Mónica Amor has made recourse to Derrida’s reading of “the hinge” in “From Work to Frame, In Between, and Beyond: Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, 1959–­1964,” Grey Room 38 (Winter 2010): 20–­37. This essay beautifully foregrounds the affective, antirepresentational impulse of Clark and Oiticica’s work but does not treat the fold as a broader methodological operation by which the work of art is embedded in the social, historical world at large. 32 Yve-­Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Rosalind Krauss, “A Conversation with Hubert Damisch,” October 85 (Summer 1998): 3–­17. Damisch writes, “A theoretical object is one that is called on to function according to norms that are not historical. It is not sufficient to write a history of this object . . . . A theoretical object is something that obliges one to do theory . . . . Second, it’s an object that obliges you to do theory but also furnishes you with the means of doing it. Thus, if you agree to accept it on theoretical terms, it will produce effects around itself . . . . Third, it’s a theoretical object because it forces us to ask ourselves what theory is. It is posed in theoretical terms; it produces theory; and it necessitates a reflection on theory. But I never pronounce the word theory without also saying the word history. Which is to say that for me such an object is always a theoretico-­historical object” (8). 33 See for example Rhod Rothfuss, “El Marco: un problema de plástica actual,” Arturo: Revista de Artes Abstractas 1 (1944); and Tomás Maldonado, “Lo abstracto y lo concreto en el arte moderno,” Arte Concreto 1 (August 1946): 5–­7. It is quite conceivable that Gullar had the Argentine groups in mind when he distinguished Clark’s series from efforts to “break out of the frame,” arguing instead that she “assimilated” the frame into the painting. “Lygia Clark” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 15, 1959, 5. 34 Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 60–­102. 35 See for example T. J. Clark on Jackson Pollock in “The Unhappy Unconscious,” in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 305; and Maria Gough, “Modes of Abstraction, Models of Interpretation,” in Blanton Museum of Art: Latin American Collection, ed. Gabriel Pérez-­Barreiro (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 52–­59. 36 See for example Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds., The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Victoria: ­Re-­Press,

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2011); and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Rivera describes this process of participatory activation as “the transformative torsion of the subject (mostly) through an object” (“Ethics, Psychoanalysis and Postmodern Art in Brazil,” 59); Amor as a “somatic and psychological matrix” (“From Work to Frame, In Between, and Beyond,” 28). See also Rivera, “Da expressão do eu à ação do outro,” in Hélio Oiticica e a Arquitetura do Sujeito (Niteroi: Editora da Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2012). This amalgamate entity likewise has affinities with wasp-­orchid assemblage described by Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their conception of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980], trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). In this regard there are resonances between my approach and the emphasis on re­ constructing the social through topological, relational links in actor-­network theory. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network-­Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). But whereas actor-­network theory advocates a “myopic” tracing of networks devoid of hierarchy or discontinuity, I understand my historical and interpretive intervention as necessarily producing disjunctions within the field. The word reoccurs in Oiticica’s works and writings over the course of his career, from his 1959–­62 painted Invenções through his 1970s experiments in expanded cinema, such as Helena Inventa Ângela Maria (1975), in which “invention” is a reimagination of preexisting elements or personas. The term also had explicit hemispheric resonance, appearing in the writings of Uruguayan artist and teacher Joaquín Torres-­García, in turn highly influential for artists working in geometric abstraction in Argentina, who adopted it widely for publications, exhibitions, and artist groups in the 1940s. “Ivan Cardoso Entrevista Hélio Oiticica,” 73. This formulation is indebted to the Brazilian poet and critic Haroldo de Campos, particularly his Galáxias (São Paulo: Ex Libris, 1984), a series of episodic fragments that follow the transnational and otherworldly voyages of an author/narrator as he moves through geographical, literary, and allegorical space. De Campos, who worked on Galáxias from 1963 to 1976, visited Oiticica in New York in the early 1970s and likewise described his work as the “rotating signs of a universal code” from which the an artist makes “his mark in appropriation and manipulation” in his posthumous tribute, “Hang-­glider of Ecstasy,” in Hélio Oiticica, exh. cat. (1992), 220. “Ivan Cardoso Entrevista Hélio Oiticica,” 80. Ramírez has persuasively invoked the model of the constellation to describe Latin American avant-­garde practices. See “Constellations Towards a Radical Questioning of Dominant Curatorial Models,” Art Journal 59, no. 1 (2000): 14–­16, as well as Mari Carmen Ramírez and Hector Olea, eds., Inverted Utopias: Avant-­Garde Art in Latin America, exh. cat. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004). David Joselit, for example, has described the “currency” of contemporary art in terms of its ability to circulate according to “an epistemology of search.” After Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). Several decades earlier, George Kubler described the generativity of artists’ works as conditioned by “moments of entrance,” in turn transmitted as “signals” to the present, much like “dead or distant stars.” The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). As Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz observed in a landmark 1970 essay, formerly colonized countries were integrated into modern world markets “by means of . . . their [economic and] social backwardness, which reproduces itself, instead of canceling itself out.” “Culture and Politics in Brazil, 1964–­1969” [1970], in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 143. The literature and debates on “multiple” and “alternative” modernities is extensive. See for example the special issue “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (Winter 2000);

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Timothy Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Notes to Pages 12–17 2000); Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). With specific relation to art and art history, see also Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); Nicholas Bourriaud, Altermodern, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 2009); the special issue on “African Modernism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2010); and Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For counterarguments of modernity’s expansive, even “singular” reach, see Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002) and T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 46 Hélio Oiticica, “Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade,” in Nova Objetividade Brasileira, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: MAM-­RJ, 1967). 47 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 262–­63. 48 Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 23. 49 Guy Brett closes his chapter “A Radical Leap” on Latin American concrete, optical, and kinetic work in Dawn Ades’s influential exhibition catalogue Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820–­1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) with Oiticica’s move “outwards, towards the external world” (283). See also Amor, “From Work to Frame, In Between, and Beyond.” 50 On these years, see Coelho’s important study Livro ou Livro-­Me; Sabeth Buchmann and Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s Block-­Experiments in Cosmococa—­ program in progress (London: Afterall Books, 2013); my own “Towards a De­literate Cinema: Hélio Oiticica’s and Neville D’Almeida’s Block-­Experiences in Cosmococa—­Program in Progress (1973),” in On Performativity, ed. Elizabeth Carpenter, vol. 1, Livings Collections Catalogue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2014), http://walkerart.org/collections/publications /performativity/deliterate-cinema; Braga, Hélio Oiticica: Singularidade, Multiplicidade; Katia Maciel, “‘O cinema Tem que Virar Instrumento’: As experiências quasi-­cinemas de Hélio Oiticica e Neville D’Almeida” and Beatriz Scigliano Carneiro, “Cosmococa—­programa in progress: heterotopia de guerra,” in Braga, ed., Fios Soltos: A Arte de Hélio Oiticica, 169–­79 and 187–­209, ­respectively. 51 On responses to the regime amongst visual artists, see Claudia Calirman, Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Her study begins with the passing of Ato Institucional n° 5 (AI-­5) at the end of 1968 and addresses Oiticica’s work largely in terms of its influence on younger artists such as Manuel. See also Elena Shtromberg, Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016). 52 Oiticica was associated (at times to his chagrin) with the countercultural movement tropicália during this period. On tropicália, see Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Carlos Basualdo, ed., Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture, 1967–­1972, exh. cat. (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2005); and Frederico Coelho, Sou Brasileiro, confesso minha culpa e meu pecado: Cultura marginal nas décadas de 1960 e 1970 (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2010). Oiticica’s banner Seja Marginal Seja Heroí (1968) was notoriously cited as evidence for the imprisonment and subsequent exile of the musicians Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil after they used it as a backdrop for a concert in 1968. See Caetano Veloso, Verdade Tropical (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), and Waly Salomão, Qual é o Parangolé? 53 As Michael Asbury has written, “to see Oiticica only as an artist who challenged the military dictatorship does not reveal the true significance of the conjunction of his political ethics and aesthetics. Obviously, Oiticica denounced the regime—­how could it be other­wise?—but, to

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cast this into a simple antagonism of ‘for or against’ obscures the fact that he was engaged in transforming the mode by which we understand art, bringing to light problems that affect Brazilian society even today.” “Hélio Oiticica e a Ditadur Militar,” Em 1964: Arte e Cultura no Ano do Golpe (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Morreira Salles, 2014), http://em1964. com.br/helio-oiticica-e-a-ditadura-militar-no-brasil-por-michael-asbury/. See Oiticica’s own critique of simplistic formulations of the “engaged” artistic culture of this period in his text “Anotações para um trabalho sôbre ‘A Pintura Depois o Quadro,’” January 1, 1962 (AHO/ PHO 0182.59), 77, as well as his 1980 interview with Carlos Alberto Pereira and Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda in Patrulhas Ideológicas, Marca Reg.: Arte e Engajamento em Debate (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1980), 141–­52. 54 See for example Frederico Morais, “Hélio Oiticica 1937–­1980: O último romântico de uma vanguarda radical,” O Globo, March 25, 1980; Wilson Coutinho, “O Marginal Iluminado: uma grande exposição em São Paulo mostra a trajetória radical do maldito Hélio Oiticica,” Veja 909 (February 5, 1986): 92–­95; and Edward Leffingwell, “Hélio Oiticica: Myth of the Outlaw,” Art in America (December 1992): 83–­87.

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Lygia Clark, “Bichos,” in Lygia Clark, October 12–­29, 1960, Galeria Bonino, Rio de Janeiro, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: Galeria Bonino, 1960). Ferreira Gullar, “Arte Neoconcreto Agora,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, ­November 26–­27, 1960, 1, emphasis original. Oiticica first exhibited with the Neoconcrete group in Salvador, Bahia, in a November 1959 exhibition (technically its second, though not designated as such). New members to join the original group of Amílcar de Castro, Lygia Clark, Ferreira Gullar, Reynaldo Jardim, Lygia Pape, Theon Spanúdis, and Franz Weissmann at that time were Oiticica, Aluísio Carvão, Cláudio Mello e Souza, Carlos Fernando Fortes de Almeida, and Willys de Castro. At the official second Neoconcrete exhibition, Roberto Pontual, Décio Vieira, Hércules Barsotti, and Osmar Dillon also joined the group. Ferreira Gullar, “Manifesto Neoconcreto,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 22, 1959, 4–­5 and “Arte Neoconcreta Agora,” 1. Gullar, “Arte Neoconcreta Agora,” 1. See Mário Pedrosa, “Paulistas e Cariocas,” Jornal do Brasil, 1 Caderno, February 19, 1957, 8; Waldemar Cordeiro, “Teoria e Prática do Concretismo Carioca,” Arquitetura e Decoração 22 (March-­April 1957); and Ferreira Gullar, “Concretos de São Paulo no MAM do Rio,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, July 16, 1960, 3. Tensions between protagonists from the two groups reemerged in 1977 in light of the retrospective exhibition Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro na Arte (1950–­1962) and accompanying catalogue (MAM-­RJ and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo). See Décio Pignatari, “A vingança de Aracy Pape”; and Ferreira Gullar, “A razão de uma zanga,” Arte Hoje 1, no. 2 (August 1977): 12–­14. See also retrospective accounts in Fernando Cocchiarale and Anna Bella Geiger, eds., Abstracionismo Geométrico e Informal: A Vanguarda Brasileira nos anos Cinqüenta (Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE, 1987). Both Concretism and Neoconcretism, for example, were pitted against predominant trends of modern art in Brazil exemplified by the figurative work of Candido Portinari. Conservative artists and critics attacked geometric abstraction and its proponents as both theoretically immature and alienated from social reality. See Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, “Realismo e Abstracionismo” [1948] and Sérgio Milliet, “Duas Exposições” [1952], reprinted in Arte Concreta Paulista, ed. João Bandeira (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2002), 17, 46. Ronaldo Brito’s text Neoconcretismo: Vértice e ruptura do projeto construtivo brasileiro (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify Edições, 1999), the first half of which was published in Malasartes 3 (1975) and the full version in 1985, remains the most rigorous account of the Concrete-­

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9 10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17 18

19

Neoconcrete break to date. The rupture has been treated in numerous exhibition catalogues. In addition to Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro na Arte (1950–­1962), see for example Aracy Amaral, ed., Constructive Art in Brazil: Adolpho Leirner Collection (São Paulo: DBA Artes Gráficas, 1998); Concreta ’56: A Raiz da Forma, exh. cat. (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2006); and Robert Kudielka, Angela Lammert, and Luiz ­Camillo Osorio, eds., Das Verlangen nach Form—­O Desejo da Forma: Neoconcretismo und ­zeitgenössische Kunst aus Brasilien, exh. cat. (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 2010). Theo van Doesburg, “Art Concret,” Art Concret 1 (April, 1930), 1. The manifesto was also signed by Otto Carlsund, Jean Hélion, Léon Tutundjian, and Marcel Wantz. On Bill’s reception and engagement with Brazilian artists see Angela Lammert, “The ‘Swiss Watchmaker’ and the ‘Jungle in Construction’—­Max Bill and Modernism in Brazil or What is Modern Art?” in Das Verlangen nach Form—­O Desejo da Forma, 259–­69. See Mari Carmen Ramírez, ed., El Taller Torres-­García: The School of the South and its Legacy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992); and María Amalia García, El Arte ­Abstracto: Intercambios culturales entre Argentina y Brasil (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2011). Jorge Romero Brest, Grupo de Artistas Modernos Argentinos, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: MAM-­RJ, 1953). Maldonado wrote extensively on geometric abstraction while in Buenos Aires in journals such as Nueva Vision and Arte Concreto. See his argument for the importance of a “concrete” as opposed to “abstract” idiom in his “Lo abstracto y lo concreto en el arte moderno,” Arte Concreto I (August 1946): 5-7. See for example Tomás Maldonado, “Arte Concreta e Arte Abstrata,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, May 5, 1957, 9 and May 12, 1957, 9; and “Arte de ‘N’ dimensões,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, May 19, 1957, 9. Mário Pedrosa, “Da Natureza Afetiva da Forma na Obra de Arte” [1947], in Arte, Forma e Personalidade (São Paulo: Kairos Press, 1979), 12–­86, reprinted in Mário Pedrosa, Forma e Percepção Estética: Textos Escolhidos II, ed. Otília Arantes (São Paulo: EDUSP, 1995), 160; ­Wolfgang Köhler, Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationären Zustand, Eine naturphilosophische Untersuchung (Elrangen: Philosophische Akademie, 1920); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Epirrhema,” in Goethe, with Special Consideration of his Philosophy, trans. Paul Carus (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1915), 259. The thesis, which Pedrosa submitted to the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in 1949, was one of the earliest attempts to apply the theories of Gestalt psychology to art. On Pedrosa’s intellectual formation, see Otília Arantes, Mário Pedrosa, Itinerário Crítico (São Paulo: Editora Página Aberta, 1991) as well as her introduction to Mário Pedrosa, Forma e Percepção Estética. Pedrosa, “Da Natureza Afetiva da Forma na Obra de Arte,” 177. In a subsequent book, Köhler noted that his citation of Goethe may have produced “misapprehension,” leading some to equate the “psychophysical isomorphism” he had intended to explicate with an isomorphism between perceptual processes and the physical environment. Köhler, Gestalt Psychology: An Introduction to New Concepts in Modern Psychology (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1947), 160n1. Pedrosa appears to have intentionally misinterpreted him in this way. Pedrosa, “Da Natureza Afetiva da Forma na Obra de Arte,” 115. Décio Pignatari, Informação, Lingaguem, Comunicação [1966] (São Paulo: Atêlier Editorial, 2002), 15. The Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil was instrumental in disseminating both information theory and cybernetics. See for example Ary Maurell Lobo’s column “Cultura Scientifica, Cultura Técnica.” Haroldo de Campos, “Poesia Concreta-­Linguagem-­Comunicação,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, April 28, 1957, 4 and May 5, 1957, reprinted in Augusto de Campos, ­Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Teoria da Poesia Concreta: Textos Críticos e

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Notes to Pages 17–26

Manifestos 1950–­1960 (São Paulo: Edições Invenção, 1965), 83. See also Décio Pignatari, “Poesia Concreta: Organização,” Suplemento Literário do Estado de São Paulo, June 1, 1957. 20 Pedrosa frequented Nise da Silveira’s Centro Psiquiátrico de Engenho do Dentro along with artists such as Almir Mavignier, who coordinated the institute’s therapeutic art workshops, in the late 1940s and 1950s. See Mário Pedrosa, Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Nacional de Arte, 1980). 21 Pedrosa, interview with Cocchiarale and Geiger in Abstractionismo Geométrico e Informal: A Vanguarda Brasileira nos Anos Cinqüenta, 107. 22 Waldemar Cordeiro, “Realismo: Musa da vingança e da tristeza,” Habitat 83 (May-­June 1965): 46. 23 Décio Pignatari, “Nova Poesia Concreta,” AD: Arquitetura e Decoração 20 (December 1956). Haroldo de Campos likewise wrote in “Olho por Olho a Olho Nu,” AD: Arquitetura e Decoração 20 (December 1956), “concrete poetry . . . anticipates in the poem a reintegration into quotidian life . . . .” As Gonzalo Aguilar has observed, the ambiguity of the Concretist platform lay in its simultaneous advocacy of a language integrated in day-­to-­day life and its adoption of a poetic form which gained primary visibility as an art object displayed on museum walls. See Poesia Concreta Brasileira: As Vanguardas na Encruzilhada Modernista (São Paulo: EDUSP, 2005), particularly chapter 2. 24 Waldemar Cordeiro, “O Objeto,” AD: Arquitetura e Decoração 20 (December 1956). ­Cordeiro noted the influence of Antonio Gramsci on this formulation. 25 Ibid. 26 Décio Pignatari, “Forma, Função e Projeto Geral,” AD: Arquitetura e Decoração 24 (July-­ August 1957). 27 Pignatari, “Poesia Concreta: Organização,” which draws in turn from Norbert Wiener’s foundational text, Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the ­Machine (New York: Technology Press, 1948). 28 “O Quadro Começa Quando Você Chega,” A Hora, February, date unknown, 1957. 29 “Cariocas” refers to residents of Rio, “paulistas” to those of São Paulo. 30 Theo van Doesburg, “Art Concret,” 1. 31 Pedrosa, “Da Natureza Afetiva da Forma na Obra de Arte,” 123. 32 See for example Cordeiro’s 1958 statement, reprinted in Waldemar Cordeiro: Pintor vanguardista, difusor, critico de arte, teórico e lider do movimento concretista nas artes plasticas de São Paulo na decada 60, ed. G. S. Wilder Apud (São Paulo: ECA-­USP, 1982), 83–­84. 33 On the metacommunicative character of Concretism, see de Campos, “Poesia Concreta-­ Linguagem-­Comunicação.” 34 Max Bill, “The Mathematical Approach in Contemporary Art” [1949], trans. Morton Shand, in Max Bill, exh. cat. (Buffalo: Albright Knox Museum, 1974), 98. Brazilian artists would have accessed this text in Tómas Maldonado, ed., Max Bill (Buenos Aires: Editora Nueva Visión, 1955). 35 Ibid. 36 Pignatari, interview with Cocchiarale and Geiger in Abstractionismo Geométrico e Informal, 75. 37 Maldonado, “Arte Concrete e Arte Abstrata,” 9. 38 Ibid. 39 Cordeiro’s title references his “Ruptura Manifesto” of 1952, in which he stated, “The work of art does not contain an idea, it is itself an idea.” Correio Paulistano, January 11, 1953. This manifesto was published for the group’s first and only exhibition, which opened December 9, 1952, at MAM-­SP. This group provided the basis for the São Paulo Concretists in the mid-­1950s. 40 As Ana Maria Belluzzo has compellingly described this process, “The Concrete discipline . . . eliminates the physical dimension of space to show the mental space—­hence the

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priority of graphic construction to express mental operations.” “The Ruptura Group and Concrete Art,” in Arte Construtiva no Brasil: Coleção Adolpho Leirner, ed. Aracy Amaral (São Paulo: DBA Artes Gráficas, 1998), 112. 41 Cordeiro, “O Objeto.” 42 Ferreira Gullar, “Pintura Concreta,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, February 10, 1957, 9. 43 Abraham Palatnik, interview with Cocchiarale and Geiger, in Abstractionismo Geométrico e Informal, 129. Here Palatnik echoes a position elaborated by Pedrosa in his article “Problemática da Sensibilidade,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, July 11, 1959, 1. 44 “Lygia Clark e o Espaço Concreto Expressional: Depoimento Concedido a Edelweiss ­Sarmento,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, July 2, 1959, 3. 45 Ibid. 46 The Sêcos are the only sequence of the group to have numbers. It is estimated that ­Oiticica made around 500 Metaesquemas. 47 Ramírez has described the “mirror effect” of the Metaesquemas in “The Embodiment of Color—­‘From the Inside Out,’” 41. Many of the works, however, appear to exceed bilateral symmetry. See for example Roberto Conduru’s meticulous analysis of a single work in “Metaesquema, Metaforma, Metaobra,” Anais do 17 Encontro Nacional da Associação Nacional de Pesquisadores em Artes Plásticas (Florianópolis: UDESC, 2008). 48 Max Bill, “Idea-­design-­work: notes on a subject” [1977], in Max Bill: Endless Ribbon 1935–­ 95 and the Single Sided Surfaces (Wabern-­Bern: Benteli Verlag, 2000), 11–­17. 49 The loop has been used as a model in a wide range of disciplines. See for example Jacques Lacan’s discussion of the structure of the subject in “Science and Truth” [1966], in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2006), 726–­45; and René Thom’s formulation of catastrophe theory in Structural Stability and Morphogenesis (Reading, MA: W. A. Benjamin Inc., 1975). 50 The Möbius strip reappeared in literal or conceptual form in works including Clark’s Caminhando (1964), Oiticica’s Parangolés (1964–­79), their joint Diálogo de Mãos (1966), and Lygia Pape’s Divisor (1968). 51 Belluzzo has written on what she calls Sacilotto’s “persistent poetics of the square” in “The Ruptura Group and Concrete Art,” 126. As Sacilotto himself noted of his formal permutations, “I wouldn’t say that there is any deconstruction. I don’t intend, by any means, to undo what we already know.” Olhares Plásticos, ed. Ivan Giannini and Miguel de Almeida (São Paulo: Editora Lazuli, 2005), 33. Lorenzo Mammì has likewise observed, “If the work is good, the fluctuation of the set in relation to the parts generates a continuous enrichment . . . [The Concrete work] is essentially planar. If a relief exists within a canvas from this school, it is not to suggest thickness or depth, but to generate more possibilities of the planar reading of the image.” Concreta ’56: A Raiz da Forma, 39–­40, translation modified. 52 See Ronaldo Brito’s compelling description of this contradiction in “Sobre uma Escultura de Amílcar de Castro,” in Amílcar de Castro (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 1997), 27–­30. See also Rodrigo Naves, “Uma Ética do Risco,” in the same volume (13–­25); and Ricardo Fabbrini, “Pulsões do Construtivismo,” in Preto no Branco: A Arte Gráfica de Amílcar de Castro, ed. Yanet Aguilera (São Paulo, Discurso Editorial, 2005), 10–­30. 53 Sérgio Bruno Martins, “(Non-­)Objects,” in Constructing an Avant-­Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–­1979 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 17–­48. As Brito suggested of Neoconcretism more broadly, “The central point of interest in the Neoconcrete work is the mobilization of a non-­representational space, but its mode of insertion into real space entails a certain negativity, something that surpasses the limits of function.” Neoconcretismo: Vértice e ruptura do projeto construtivo brasileiro, 92. 54 Waldemar Cordeiro, “Os Pintores Na Vida e Na Arte: Sacilotto, poeta da economia moderna,” Folha da Manhã, May 5, 1962. Cordeiro in turn draws from Bill’s description of

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Notes to Pages 26–38

55 56 57

58

59 60 61

62

63

64

65

66

67

­ oncrete art as an “ideological concept which, made visible and translated into a painting, C has given birth to a concrete object.” Cited in Maldonado, Max Bill, 17. Ferreira Gullar, “O Descoberto do Tempo,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, ­September 28, 1958, 3. Haroldo de Campos, “Da fenomenologia da composição à matemática da composição,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, June 23, 1957, 1. Reynaldo Jardim, Ferreira Gullar, and Oliveira Bastos, “Poesia Concreta: Uma experiência intuitiva,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, June 23, 1957, 1. On Gullar’s poetic production, see Renato Rodrigues da Silva, “O Não-­Objeto de Ferreira Gullar, ou Como a ­Poesia Neoconcreta uniu-­se ao Mundo,” Prometeus 7, no. 15 (January-­June 2014); and ­Mariola Alvarez, “The Anti-­Dictionary: Ferreira Gullar’s Non-­Object Poems,” NonSite.Org 9 (April 30 2013), http://nonsite.org/feature/the-anti-dictionary-ferreira-gullars-non-­object-poems. See Ferreira Gullar, “Experiência Neoconcreta: Momento-­Limite da Arte,” in Experiência Neoconcreta (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007), 21–­72, and Ferreira Gullar in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez. Ferreira Gullar, “O Livro Poema,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 22–­23, 1959, 7. Augusto de Campos, “Pontos-­Periferia-­Poesia Concreta,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, November 11, 1956, 9. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Étalages” [1892], in Mallarmé in Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, 2001), 24–­30, and “Le livre, instrument spirituel” [1895], in Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: New Directions, 1982), 80–­84. On Mallarmé’s relationship to the newspaper, see also Marshall McLuhan, “Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press,” Sewanee Review 62, no. 1 (1954): 38–­55; and Christine Poggi, “Mallarmé, Picasso, and the Newspaper as Commodity,” Yale Journal of Criticism 1, no. 1 (Fall 1987): 133–­51. Augusto de Campos noted that the Concrete poets assumed “responsibility in the face of language” and refused to allow their works to become “mere indifferent vehicles,” or “tombs-­ taboos that . . . bury the idea.” “Poesia Concreta,” AD: Arquitetura e Decoração 20 (December 1956). See for example C. E. Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal 27 (July-­October 1948): 379–­423, 623–­56. Pignatari read information theorists such as Wiener as early as 1956 (“Arte Concreta: Objeto e Objetivo,” AD: Arquitetura e Decoração 20 [December 1956]) and used Shannon’s formulation in his lectures on information and communication theory at the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial in Rio de Janeiro from 1965–­1975. “Introdução à Teoria da Informação,” in Informação, Linguagem, Comunicação (Cotia: Ateliê Editorial, 2002). Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, “Plano-­Piloto para Poesia Concreta,” originally published in Noigandres 4 (1958), reprinted in Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, February 23, 1958, 5. On changes to the Brazilian press during this period of modernization see André Botelho, Elide Rugai Bastos, and Glaucia Villa Bôas, eds., O Moderno em questão: a década de 1950 no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks Editora, 2008); and Ana Paula Goulart Ribeiro, “Modernização e Concentração: A Imprensa Carioca nos anos 1950–­1970,” in História e Imprensa: Representações Culturais e Práticas de Poder, eds. Lúcia Maria Bastos P. Neves, Marco Morel, and Tania Maria Bessone da C. Ferreira (Rio de Janeiro: Faperj, 2006), 427–­35. On such supplements, see Alzira Alves de Abreu, “Os Suplementos Literários: Os Intelectuais e a Imprensa nos anos 50,” in A Imprensa em Transição: O Jornalismo Brasileiro nos Anos 50 (Rio de Janeiro: Fundacão Geutlio Vargas, 1996), 13–­60. See for example “Carta ao Leitor,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, July 14, 1957, 1, and September 29, 1957, 1.

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68 For an overview of de Castro’s reform of the Jornal do Brasil, see Washington D. Lessa, Amílcar de Castro e a Reforma do Jornal do Brasil: Dois Estudos de Comunicação Visual (Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 1995); and Yanet Aguilera, Preto no Branco: A Arte Gráfica de Amílcar de Castro. After a disagreement with the director, de Castro left the newspaper in 1958, but he returned in 1959 to complete the program of graphic reform. 69 Augusto de Campos, “Poesia Concreta,” AD: Arquitetura e Decoração 20 (December 1956). 70 Nelson Werneck Sodré notes that newsprint paper rose from below five to over 135 cruzeiros per kilo between 1958 and 1963 in História da Imprensa no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: MAUAD, 1998), 411–­12. 71 See Lessa, Amílcar de Castro e a Reforma do Jornal do Brasil and Aguilera, Preto no Branco. 72 According to Lessa, the “L” was a compromise between de Castro and Nascimento Brito, the director of the newspaper, who insisted that classifieds remain on the front page in some form. This framing “L” can be compared to Mallarmé’s analysis of the rez-­de-­ chaussure, or bottom edge, of the late-­nineteenth-­century French newspaper’s front page, province of the sensational roman feuilleton that lured readers into buying the newspaper. See his “Étalages,” in Mallarmé in Prose, 30. While the classified advertisements of the Jornal do Brasil represent literal commercial space and the rez-­de-­chaussure the “degeneration” of literature for the ends of commercial profit, both literalize as figure and frame the economic structure that supports the transmission of the news. 73 Assis Chateaubriand’s Diários Associados owned over thirty-­one newspapers in addition to magazines such as the hugely popular O Cruzeiro, TV and radio stations, and an advertising agency. In 1950, it coordinated Brazil’s first television transmission with the exhibition Primeiro Televisão (The First Television) at MASP. 74 MAM-SP opened its first exhibition, Do Figurativismo ao Abstractionismo, on March 8, 1949, at the Diários Associados building at Rua 7 de Abril, São Paulo. In August of 1958 the museum’s gallery spaces were relocated to the Museu da Aeronáutica and subsequently the Bienal building in the Parque Ibirapuera. See Vera d’Horta Beccari, MAM: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (São Paulo: Dórea Books and Art, 1995). 75 Waldemar Cordeiro, “O Concretismo e o Problema da Organização da Cultura,” AD: Arquitetura e Decoração 22 (April 1957). Paradoxically, in the same issue Pignatari noted in his article “Má Vontade Imaginativa: Imobilismo” that Concrete poets reached a greater audience by publishing their works in the newspaper, ostensibly in contrast to the rarified spaces of the museum. 76 On the development of design in Brazil, see André Stolarski, “Projeto Concreto: A Design Brasileira na órbita da I Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta: 1948–­1966,” in Concreta ’56: A Raiz da Forma, 191–­253; and Alexandre Wollner, “A Emergência do Design Visual,” in Arte Construtiva no Brasil: Coleção Adolpho Leirner, 223–­59. The industrial design school only operated until 1953, largely because Brazil’s fledgling industrial sector could not adequately absorb its graduates. The Associação Brasileira de Agências de Propaganda was also founded in 1951. On the history of advertising and the press see Ana Luiza Martins and Tânia Regina de Luca, Imprensa e Cidade: História da Imprensa no Brasil (São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2006). 77 R. L. Martensen “Arte e Propaganda,” Habitat 7 (n.d., early 1950s): 78–­79. 78 Although initially planned as a solo exhibition, Clark’s Galeria das Folhas show ultimately included the work of Franz Weissmann and Lothar Charoux. 79 “Lygia Clark e o Espaço Concreto Expressional: Depoimento Concedido a Edelweiss ­Sarmento.” 80 Ferreira Gullar, Lygia Clark: Uma Experiência Radical, exh. cat. (São Paulo: Folha da Manhã, 1958), republished in Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 22, 1959, 2–­3. 81 The manifesto was signed by Gullar, the poets Jardim and Theon Spanúdis, and the visual artists Amílcar de Castro, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Franz Weissmann.

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Notes to Pages 39–52

82 Ferreira Gullar, “Manifesto Neoconcreto,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 22, 1959, 4–­5, emphasis original. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Ferreira Gullar, “Os Neoconcetos e a Gestalt,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 14–­15, 1959, 4. In a recent interview, Gullar reiterated that despite the deep influence of Pedrosa’s 1949 thesis on his own thinking (Gullar had already read the text when he arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1951), he differed from the senior critic in his understanding of privileged Gestalt forms. Ferreira Gullar in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez, 29. 87 Gullar, “Manifesto Neoconcreto,” 5. 88 See Ferreira Gullar in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez, 52–­53. 89 Ibid. According to Gullar, his designation was disputed by Pedrosa, who countered that only an “object” would be available to knowledge. Sérgio Bruno Martins charts how Gullar’s formulation was strategically poised in relation to Pedrosa’s earlier work on Gestalt in his 1949 thesis in “(Non-­)Objects” in Constructing an Avant-­Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–­1979. 90 Ferreira Gullar, “Teoria do Não-­Objeto,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, December 19–­20, 1959, 1. This formulation anticipates Donald Judd’s 1965 text “Specific Objects,” in which he states, “Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other.” Reprinted in Donald Judd: Complete Writings, 1959–­1975 (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 181. On the relationship between Neoconcretism and minimalism, see Michael Asbury, “Neoconcretism and Minimalism: On Ferreira Gullar’s Theory of the Non-­Object,” in Cosmopolitan Modernisms, ed. Kobena Mercer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 169–­89; and 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 (Cambridge: Harvard University Art Museums, 2001), 105–­31. Lygia Pape argued that her contemporaneous printmaking similarly pushed mediums to a point of mutual articulation. See her statement, “Gravura: Depoimento de Lygia Pape,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 22, 1959, 8; and Adele Nelson, “Sensitive and Nondiscursive Things: Lygia Pape and the Reconception of Printmaking,” Art Journal 17, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 26–­45. 91 Gullar, “Teoria do Não-­Objeto,” 1. 92 Gullar’s logic establishes a fascinating counterpoint to Clement Greenberg’s analysis of the minimalist object in his 1967 essay “Recentness in Sculpture,” in which he wrote, “Given that the initial look of non-­art was no longer available to painting, since even an unpainted canvas now stated itself as a picture, the borderline between art and non-­art had to be sought in the three-­dimensional, where sculpture was, and where everything material that was not art also was.” Reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 182. It is also significant that Gullar’s formulation came just months after a large exhibition of Alexander Calder’s sculpture opened at MAM-­RJ in September 1959, as the American artist’s works likewise are necessarily perceived—­and gain animation—­in relation to their external environment. On Calder’s reception in Brazil, see Aleca Le Blanc, “Traveling Through Time and Space: Calder in Brazil,” in Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-­ Garde to Iconic, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013), 120–­35. 93 See Rhod Rothfuss, “El Marco: Un problema de plástica actual,” Arturo: Revista de Artes Abstractas 1 (1944); Maldonado, “Lo abstracto y lo concreto en el arte moderno”; and Gyula Kosice et. al. “MADÍ” [1946], reprinted in Inverted Utopias: Avant-­Garde Art in Latin America, eds. Mari Carmen Ramírez and Hector Olea, exh. cat. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 493. See also Nelly Perazzo, El Arte Concreto en la Argentina en la Decada del 40 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone, 1983).

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94 In 1960, Cordeiro argued that the problem of the frame had already been “exhausted” by the Madí group. Gullar, meanwhile, noted that they had merely “unwittingly brushed up against the problem” after earlier avant-­garde artists such as Tatlin and Arp before them had failed to fully pursue the issue to its ultimate consequences. See Waldemar Cordeiro, “Néo-­Retórico” Correio da Manhã, Suplemento Literário, 1 Caderno, August 6, 1960, 8 and 2 Caderno, 2; and Ferreira Gullar, “Resposta a Cordeiro,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, August 13, 1960, 7. Oiticica likewise seems to have thought that the Madí experiments were limited in their efficacy. See his “Nota,” August 10, 1964 (AHO/PHO 2089.64). 95 Gullar, “Diálogo Sobre o Não-­Objeto,” 4. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 It is likewise significant that Gullar considered the Bichos to have been influenced by his own Livro-­Poemas of 1958. See Ferreira Gullar in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez, 71. 100 See Clark, “Untitled statements, 1960,” in Lygia Clark, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Fundacío Antoni Tàpies, 1997), 139–­143. 101 See Hélio Oiticica, “Côr, Tempo e Estrutura,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, November 24, 1960, 5; and Vera Martins, “Oiticica: Transformação dialética da pintura,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, May 20, 1961, 2. While in Paris in May 1969, Oiticica translated Gullar’s text into English, possibly for inclusion in a possible issue on Brazilian art in the journal Robho (AHO/PHO 0023.69). 102 Oiticica, “Côr, Tempo e Estrutura,” 5. 103 Gullar, “Teoria do Não-­Objeto,” 1, my emphasis. 104 Oiticica, “Côr, Tempo e Estrutura,” 5. 105 Brito, Neoconcretismo: Vértice e Ruptura do Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro. 106 As Gullar wrote in the “Manifesto Neoconcreto,” “Neoconcrete art reaffirms the independence of artistic creation in the face of objective knowledge (science) and practical knowledge (moral, political, industrial, etc.)” (4). 107 See for example Paulo Sergio Duarte’s eloquent reading in “Amílcar de Castro—­A Aventura de Coerência,” in Paulo Sergio Duarte: A Trilha da trama e outros textos sobre arte, ed. Luisa Duarte (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 2004), 51–­57. Such analyses follow the model of Soviet avant-­garde practice and the paradigm sketched by Walter Benjamin in his 1934 lecture “The Author as Producer,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2: 1927–­1934, trans. Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap, 2006), 768–­82. Yet Benjamin himself noted that the control of the media by capitalist interests in the West prevented mediums such as the newspaper from realizing the radical potential of the “artist as producer” advanced in the Soviet Union. Affinities between Benjamin’s model and Concretist aims are evident in Cordeiro’s 1956 text “O Objeto,” among others. 108 While historians have often suggested that Neoconcretists operated according to a laboratory model free of market pressures, recent work has shed light on their more complex engagement with design and industry. See Lorenzo Mammì, “Willys de Castro and Amílcar de Castro: Painting and Design,” in Das Verlangen nach Form—­O Desejo da Forma, 270–­75; and Daniela Name and Felipe Scovino, eds., Diálogo Concreto: Design e Construtivismo no Brasil, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: Caixa Econômica Federal, 2008). 109 J. Leonicio, “Uma Nova Obra,” Folha de São Paulo, 2 Caderno, May 15, 1960. 110 Ibid. 111 Paula Pape (daughter of the artist and director of Projeto Lygia Pape), interview with author, Rio de Janeiro, April 25, 2006. Pape’s designs for Piraquê are still in use today. 112 See Morais, “Neoconcretismo: cavar novas linguagens, A gravura como forma de conhecimento” and Francisco Bittencourt, “A Gravura Neoconcreta na Obra de Lygia Pape,” ­Tribuna da Imprensa, Arts Visuais, July 25, 1975.

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113 The lack of orientation in Pape’s prints also aligns her work with the Neoconcrete rejection of frame and base. See Morais, “Neoconcretismo: cavar novas linguagens.” These works likewise demonstrate a clear dialogue with Josef Albers’s prints. 114 Pape frequently referred to her Tecelares as “research” or “knowledge.” See her interview with Morais in “Neoconcretismo: cavar novas linguagens, A gravura como forma de conhecimento.” Clark’s Bichos were likewise frequently described in terms of knowledge and communication. See José Guilherme Merquior, “Galatéia ou a morte da pintura,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, November 26, 1960, 6; and Max Bense, “Lygia Clark’s Variable Objects,” Signals 1, no. 7 (April-­May 1965). 115 Gullar, “Diálogo Sobre o Não-­Objeto,” 5. 116 Ibid. This was likewise cause for consternation for Greenberg in 1960 when he described the limit at which a painting stopped being a picture and became an “arbitrary object,” and a cause for “interest” for Judd when he noted that the three-­dimensional space of contemporary work “opens to anything.” Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Clement Greenberg: the Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brien (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 85–­94; and Judd, “Specific Objects,” 181. 117 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” [1968], in Image-­Music-­Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–­48. See also Anna Sigrídur Arnar, The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 118 Jürgen Habermas influentially described the role of the press in relation to the modern public sphere in his 1962 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). Habermas was interested in the culture of opinions and debate mass media such as the newspaper cultivated; here I understand the possibility of such discourse grounded first in the formal and phenomenological malleability of the newspaper as object. 119 Merquior, “Galatéia ou a morte da pintura,” 6. 120 Ferreira Gullar, “O Tempo e a Obra,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, February 18, 1961, 3. 121 Gullar, interview with Cocchiarale and Geiger in Abstractionismo Geométrico e Informal, 96. See also Gullar’s retrospective account in Experiência Neoconcreta: Momento-­Limite da Arte, in which he notes in particular the theoretical significance of his last two articles for the Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil as gesturing to the limits of the movement as a whole. 122 Interview with author, Rio de Janeiro, May 7, 2006. Indeed, Gullar conceived of a final exhibition in which works of art loaded with bombs would self-­destruct after the show’s opening, a proposal to which Oiticica apparently vigorously objected. On the shift from Gullar’s early affiliation with the avant-­garde and his subsequent affiliation with the political left, see my “Exit and Impasse: Ferreira Gullar and the ‘New History’ of the Last Avant-­ Garde,” Third Text 26, no. 1 (January 2012): 91–­101.

Chapter 2 1

2 3

Mário Pedrosa, “A Cidade nova, síntese das artes” [1959], in Dos murais de Portinari aos espaços de Brasília, ed. Aracy Amaral (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1981), 356. This text repeats a similar formulation from “Utopia—­Obra de Art,” Jornal do Brasil, 1 Caderno, May 21, 1958, 6. On the modernist grid, see Rosalind Krauss, “Grids” [1978], in The Originality of the Avant-­ Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 9–­22. As Theo van Doesburg wrote, “A pictorial element has no other significance than ‘itself’.” “Art Concret,” Art Concret 1 (April 1930): 1.

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4 5 6

7 8

9

10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21

On the institution’s history, see O Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Banco Safra S. A., 1999). Nelson Rockefeller was a key participant in these discussions. Internal document, MAM-­RJ (January 1952). Archives MAM-­RJ. Tomás Maldonado, Internal document, MAM-­RJ (1958), cited in Maria del Carmen Zilio, “O Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro,” in O Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de ­Janeiro, 10. Juscelino Kubitschek, speech at MAM-­RJ, January 21, 1958, cited in Pedro Luiz Pereira de Souza, ESDI: Biografia de uma ideia (Rio de Janeiro: UDUERJ, 1996), 6. Hélio Oiticica, “Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade Brasileira,” in Nova Objetividade ­Brasileira, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: MAM-­RJ, 1967). Oiticica used the term “constructive will” as early as 1965 in an unpublished text on Amílcar de Castro (AHO/PHO 11.sd, 6), and may likewise have been influenced by Joaquín Torres-­García’s notion of a “Constructive Universalism.” See for example Torres-­García’s “Manifesto 2 Construtivo 100%” [1938], in El Taller Torres-­García: The School of the South and its Legacy, ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 58–­69. The International Monetary Fund, itself an organ of international developmentalism, provided financial assistance to complete the building in order to use it as a venue for its 1967 conference. Nova Objetividade Brasileira opened in April 1967 in the Bloco Escola, which served as the museum’s central exhibition space during the completion of the Bloco de Exposições. These final exhibition spaces were officially inaugurated on September 27, 1967. For a chronology of art-­related events in Rio de Janeiro, see Frederico Morais, Cronologia das Artes Plásticas no Rio de Janeiro, 1816–­1994 (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1994). Paulo Bittencourt, one of the museum’s founders, owned Correio da Manhã; his wife, Niomar Muniz Sodré Bittencourt, became the museum’s executive director in 1952. See James Johnson Sweeney, “An Interview with Piet Mondrian,” in Piet Mondrian (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1948), cited in Yve-­Alain Bois, “Piet Mondrian: New York City,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 171. Ferreira Gullar, “O Fim do Quadro?,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, December 17–­18, 1960, 1. Ferreira Gullar, “Objeto? Não-­objeto?,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, April 9, 1960. Gullar, “O Fim do Quadro?,” 1. Ferreira Gullar, “O Lugar da Obra,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, February 11, 1961, 3. Ferreira Gullar, “O Tempo e a Obra,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, February 18, 1961, 3. See for example Mário Pedrosa, “A Significação de Lygia Clark” [1960], reprinted in Lygia Clark, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: MAM-­RJ, 1963). “Amílcar de Castro,” Suplemento Literário Minas Gerais, June 9, 1973. He likewise put it this way, “The sculpture that I make is a search for the origins of sculpture itself.” Frederico Morais, “Amílcar de Castro: Um gesto espontâneo, como se fosse o primeiro,” O Globo, October 29, 1975. Rodrigo Naves, “Uma Ética do Risco,” in Amílcar de Castro (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 1997), 23–­24. The question of scale and participation returns in Clark’s Estruturas Fósforos (Matchbox Structures) of 1964, which consist of miniature sculptures created out of matchboxes that the spectator could manipulate in order to change the sculpture’s overall form. These works were photographed and published in the London-­based journal Signals 1, no. 7 (April-­May 1965), where, deprived of their intimate scale and fragile, quotidian materials, they recall Malevich’s Architectons of the 1920s, themselves suggestive of monumental, scaleless forms. Oiticica, notebook entry, April 16, 1962 (AHO/PHO 0182.59), 99.

259

Notes to Pages 63–84

22 Jorge Guinle Filho, “A Última Entrevista de Hélio Oiticica,” Interview (April 1982): 82. 23 Hélio Oiticica, “A Transição da Côr do Quadro para o Espaço e o Sentido de Construtividade,” Habitat 70 (December 1962): 51. 24 Oiticica, notebook entry, August 7, 1961 (AHO/PHO 0182.59), 37–­39. 25 Ibid. 26 Oiticica, notebook entry, 1961. Oiticica created his first and only “large” nucleus in 1966 from a combination of medium Nuclei NC3, NC4, and NC 6. See his notebook entry of June 14, 1966 (AHO/PHO 0247.66). 27 Oiticica, notebook entry, February 22, 1961 (AHO/PHO 0182.59), 42. Oiticica’s interest in the relations between aesthetic and quotidian space in such architectural structures anticipates Jésus Rafael Soto’s similarly-­named Penetrables, which the Venezuelan artist began to make in 1967, as well as experiments by his fellow Venezuelan Carlos Cruz-­Diez such as his Chromosaturations for a Public Place, installed in 1969 at the at the Odéon Metro, Paris. 28 Vera Martins, “Oiticica: Transformação dialética da pintura,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, May 20, 1961, 2. See also Oiticica, “Projeto Cães de Caça e Pintura Nuclear,” November 1, 1961 (AHO/PHO 0024.61). 29 Ferreira Gullar, “Os ‘Penetráveis’ de Oiticica,” Jornal do Brasil, Caderno B, December 7, 1961, 4. A year earlier, the Museum of Modern Art, New York held Arthur Drexler’s famous Visionary Architecture exhibition, which contained documentation of utopian projects by artists and architects such as El Lissitsky, Buckminster Fuller, Frederick Kiesler, and others. This exhibition traveled to MAM-­RJ in modified form in January 1966. In his exhibition text, Drexler discusses the possibility of uniting dream and reality through these “visionary architectures.” 30 Mário Pedrosa, Os Projetos de Hélio Oiticica, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: MAM-­RJ, 1961), also published in Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, November 25, 1961, 2. Pedrosa also noted the “collective” character of the work in this text. 31 Frederico Morais, “Oiticica: A Poesia Abrigada,” Diário de Notícias, 2nd Seção, October 5, 1967, 3. 32 Although the idea for a capital in the Brazilian interior had circulated since the early nineteenth century, it was not until the early 1950s that land was selected, surveyed, and declared as a federal territory. The competition for a pilot-­plan for the city was announced in September 1956. In 1958, the Concrete poets adopted the terminology for their “Plano-­ Piloto para Poesia Concreta.” 33 The “view from the air” was particularly significant for Brasília’s planners. As a multilingual 1957 report released by the government noted, “Ours will be the first capital built in the new air age and it is symbolic of the fact that the site was chosen on the basis of aerial surveys, sometimes without actual examination of all proposed sites.” J. O. de Meira Penna, “Brazil builds a new capital,” in Brasília (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério das Relações Exteriores, Divisão Cultural, 1957). 34 Lúcio Costa, “Report of the Pilot Plan for Brasília,” in Brasília. 35 These zones corresponded to Le Corbusier’s Athens Charter for the “functional city” ­adopted at CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne) in 1933, which recommended that city planning provide for four basic human functions: work, circulation, living, and the cultivation of body and spirit. See “CIAM: Charter of Athens: Tenets,” in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-­century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 137–­45. See also Costa’s January 1, 1990, letter to Italo Campofiorito in Lúcio Costa: Documentos de Trabalho, ed. José Pessoa (Rio de Janeiro: Edições do Patrimônio, 1998), 291–­94. 36 See for example Sigfried Giedion’s statements made after a study of Brasília’s plan during a Harvard seminar in 1958 in Klaus Franck, The Works of Affonso Eduardo Reidy (New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1960). See also the analysis of Charles Wright and Benamy

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Turkienicz, “Brasília and the Ageing of Modernism,” Cities 5, no. 4 (November 1988): 347–­64. 37 Lúcio Costa, “Brasília foi feita para o homem com fé num Brasil e num mundo melhores: Entrevista a Claudius Ceccon” [1961], reprinted in Lúcio Costa: Encontros, ed. Ana Luiza Nobre (Rio de Janeiro: Azougue Press, 2010), 48. See also Edgar Graeff, “Brasília: dois caminhos para a arquitetura contemporânea,” in Cidade Utopia (São Paulo: Editora Vega, 1979), 21–­40. Costa’s position was in marked contrast to that of Le Corbusier, who had planned the capital city of Chandigarh in 1951 using a system of mathematical proportions based on the human body that he called the Modulor. The Modulor was publicized several times in Brazilian newspapers and journals in the 1950s. See for example “Novo Mundo do Espaço de Le Corbusier,” Habitat 1 (October-­December 1950). On Costa’s relationship to the Corbusian model, see Mathias Gorovitz, Brasília: Uma Questão de Escala (São Paulo: Projeto, 1985). 38 Letter from Costa to Campofiorito, in Lúcio Costa: Documentos de Trabalho, 291. Here Costa noted that the city is a “synthesis of Brazil” in both its positive and negative aspects, expressing the contradictions of Brazilian society. 39 Special issue on Brasília in Habitat 58 (January-­February 1960): 7. 40 J. O. de Meira Penna, “Brazil builds a new capital.” 41 Ibid. 42 See for example Mário Pedrosa, “Reflexões em Torno da Nova Capital” [1957], in Dos murais de Portinari aos espaços de Brasília, 303–­16. 43 In his 1957 report, Costa noted the colonial overtones of the founding mark: “Founding a city in the wilderness is a deliberate act of conquest, a gesture after the manner of the pioneering colonial tradition . . .” “Report of the Pilot Plan for Brasília.” 44 See Norma Evenson’s comprehensive analysis of Brasília in Two Brazilian Capitals: Architecture and Urbanism in Rio de Janeiro and Brasília (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); and Frederico de Holanda, “Brasília: The Daily Invention of the City,” Ekistics: The Problems and Science of Human Settlements 56, nos. 334–­35 (January-­February-­March-­April 1989): 75–­83. 45 Cidade Livre was rechristened Núcleo Bandeirante in 1961. 46 The conference was held in October 1959, followed in March 1960 by an exhibition of a prefabricated house by Sérgio Rodrigues built with local materials. See Mário Pedrosa, “Casa individual pré-­fabricada,” in OCA Casa Individual Pré-­Fabricada, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: MAM-­RJ, 1960). See also ‘”Uma casa experimental de nossa era,” Habitat 60 (May-­ June 1960): 17–­22. 47 Special issue “Aspectos Humanos da Favela Carioca,” O Estado de São Paulo, April 1960; see also “Urbanismo e habitação popular,” Habitat 74 (December 1963): 39–­46. 48 Efforts to deal with “the favela problem” date to the 1940s, when the government constructed “proletarian parks,” rechristened “conjuntos habitacionais sociais” in 1962 with the inauguration of COHAL (Companhia de Habitação Popular). See Marcelo Baumann Burgos, “Dos parques proletários ao Favela-­Bairro: As políticas públicas nas Favelas do Rio de Janeiro,” in Um Século de Favela, eds. Alba Zaluar and Marcos Alvito (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 1998). 49 Hélio Oiticica, “Bases Fundamentais Para uma Definição do ‘Parangolé,’” November 1964 (AHO/PHO 0035.64), 4. On the relationship between Oiticica’s work and the architectural and conceptual logic of the favela, see Paola Berenstein Jacques, Estética da Ginga: A Arquitetura das Favelas Através da Obra de Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro: Casa de Palavra, 2001). 50 In São Paulo, the exhibitions Propostas 65 and Propostas 66 similarly foregrounded new figurative idioms such as pop and new realism. 51 The organizing team consisted of Oiticica, Rubens Gerchman, Pedro Escosteguy, Mauricio Nogueiro Lima, and Hans Haudenschild, with collaborators Cordeiro, Carlos Vergara, Luiz Gonzaga, Pedrosa, Mario Barata, Morais, and G. Vergara dos Sertes. The discussions

261

Notes to Pages 84–96

52 53 54

55

56 57

58 59

60

61

62

63 64

­included several symposia and newspaper articles. See for example Oiticica’s statement “Situação da Vanguarda no Brasil” written on the occasion of Propostas 66 (AHO/PHO 0248.66) and published as “Propostas-­66: Vanguarda no Brasil,” Correio da Manhã, 2 Caderno, December 29, 1966, 2; and Frederico Morais, “A Institucionalização da Vanguarda Brasileira,” Diário de Notícias, December 14, 1966, 2 Seção, 1. Antonio Manuel, interview with author, Rio de Janeiro, March 5, 2006. Unfortunately there are no extant photographs of this portion of the installation. Oiticica, “Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade.” On the reintroduction of antropofagia in the 1960s, see Carlos Basualdo, ed., Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture 1967–­1972, exh. cat. (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2005) and Bina Maltz, Jerônimo Teixeira, and Sérgio Ferreira, Antropofagia e Tropicalismo (Porto Alegre: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, 1993). Bishop Sardinha shipwrecked off the coast between Bahia and Pernambuco and was ritually sacrificed along with his crew by members of the Caeté tribe. In his “Manifesto Antropófago,” Oswald de Andrade likely implies that they were Tupí for dramatic effect, as the Tupí, who also practiced cannibalism, were Brazil’s most populous tribe before the arrival of the Portuguese. See de Andrade, “Manifesto Antropófago,” Revista de Antropofagia 1, Diário de São Paulo (1928). Oiticica, “Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade.” Hélio Oiticica, “Tropicália,” March 4, 1968 (AHO/PHO 0128.68), 1. On the key role of Tropicália within Oiticica’s oeuvre, see also Sérgio Bruno Martins’s compelling analysis in “The Constructive,” in Constructing an Avant-­Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–­1979 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 51–­78, as well as my own “The Myths of Hélio Oiticica,” in Alejandro Anreus, Robin Greeley, and Megan Sullivan, eds., A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art (London: Wiley Blackwell Publishing, 2016). “Hélio Oiticica Retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, until April 6: Oiticica talks to Guy Brett,” Studio International 177, no. 909 (March 1969): 134. Oiticica wrote of Tropicália as an “exercise of the ‘image’ in all its forms.” He further described the television as follows: “When you sit down on a stool in the inside the television images come out as if they were sitting on your lap. . . . The terrible feeling I had inside was of being devoured by the work. . . .” Hélio Oiticica, 25 February-­6 April 1969, Whitechapel Gallery. On television’s sensory logic, see Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Sabeth Buchmann has also treated the relationship between technology and subjectivity in Tropicália and Oiticica’s later Cosmococas in Denken gegen das Denken: Produktion, Technologie, Subjektivität bei Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer und Hélio Oiticica (Berlin: PoLYpeN, 2007). For the history of television during the years of the military government, see Sérgio Mattos, The Impact of the 1964 Revolution on Brazilian Television (San Antonio: V. Klingensmith Independent Publisher, 1982). When the Brazilian national communication company was established in 1965, its motto was “Communication is integration.” Brazilian television’s roots are likewise intertwined with its history of modern art: TV Tupi was inaugurated in São Paulo in 1951 and backed by the media mogul Assis Chateubriand, who had founded MASP in 1947. An exhibition dedicated to television was also held at that museum in 1951. Roberto Schwarz, “Culture and Politics in Brazil, 1964–­1969” [1970], in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 126–­59. On the relationship between Oiticica and tropicalismo, see Basualdo, ed., Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture, 1967–­1972. Schwarz, 143. Ibid., 142. Schwarz notes that his reading was indebted to Walter Benjamin’s formulation of allegory in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963).

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65 “Declaração de princípios básicos da vanguarda,” Jornal do Comércio, Artes Plásticas, May 28, 1967, 4. Oiticica, Clark, Pape, Gerchman, Vergara, Morais, and Antonio Dias were among those who signed. 66 Pedrosa, “Utopia—­Obra de Art” [1958], in Dos murais de Portinari aos espaços de Brasília, 318. 67 Pedrosa here notes the influence of Bertrand Russell on his formulation. See ibid., 319. 68 Several of the structures contained within Eden—­such as the “Caetano-­Gil” tent and the “Iemanjá” or “Cannabiana” penetrables—­have referential names. Such references, however, do not formally recall their sources, as Tropicália does of the favela. Oiticica also renamed or eliminated several structures with culturally-­specific references, such as “Homenagem a Cartola” (subsequently “Myth-­Opened Area”), “Conjunto de Berços Cosme e Damião (sub­ sequently “Nests”), “Piscina Ogum,” “Noel Rosa,” and so on, thus reducing the potential for an allegoric or national reading of the environment. 69 Oiticica, “Eden,” in Hélio Oiticica, 25 February-­6 April 1969, Whitechapel Gallery. This text was drawn from a letter to Brett discussing the artist’s ideas for the exhibition. 70 On Eden’s relationship to Herbert Marcuse, see Waly Salomão, Qual é o Parangolé? e Outros Escritos (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2003). Salomão notes that Oiticica had been introduced to the philosopher by fellow artist, poet, and designer Rogério Duarte. See also Oiticica’s letter to Lygia Clark, October 15, 1968 (AHO/PHO 1031.68); and Luke Skrebowski, “Revolution in the Aesthetic Revolution: Hélio Oiticica and the Concept of Creleisure,” Third Text 26, no. 1 (January 2012): 65–­78. 71 Oiticica first began to formulate his notion of “creleisure” in a text of January 14, 1969 (AHO/ PHO 0367.69) that appears to originally have been a diary entry. He formalized and expanded on these initial thoughts in his statement in Charles Spencer, “Hélio Oiticica on the Discovery of Creleisure,” Art and Artists 4, no. 1 (April 1969): 2–­4, and subsequently in a text written in Paris on May 10, 1969 titled “As Possibilidades do Crelazer” (AHO/PHO 0305.69), later published in Revista de Cultura Vozes (August 1970), both of which refer to the “sensorial” experience of Eden. In these texts, “creleisure” is a catalyst for behavioral change and expansion. 72 Brazilian artist Nuno Ramos has elaborated such a critique in “À espera de um sol interno,” in Ensaio Geral: Projetos, Roteiros, Ensaios, Memórias (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 2007), 121–­23. 73 Salomão, Qual é o Parangolé?, 73, 72. 74 As Gilles Deleuze has written of the epistemological function of the diagram in Michel Foucault’s thought, it “produces a new kind of reality, a new model of truth.” Foucault, trans. Séan Hand (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988), 35. Foucault’s most concrete discussion of the diagram appears in relation to the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975], trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). See also Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s extension of the concept in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980], trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); and David Joselit, “Dada’s Diagrams,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 221–­39. 75 The Brazilian artist Sérgio Camargo had introduced Keeler and Brett to Oiticica’s work in Paris. Brett approached Bryan Robertson, director of Whitechapel Gallery, about a solo exhibition; Robertson eventually invited Oiticica to have a show in the fall of 1968 (AHO/ PHO 1279.67). After Robertson’s resignation, the exhibition was postponed until March 1969 under the new director Mark Glazebrook. Oiticica began to describe some of the structures for the Whitechapel exhibition to Brett in April 1967 while at work at Tropicália, but it was not until October that he suggested the environment for these structures as Eden, which he then described as “an experimental campus.” See his letters to Brett of April 12, 1967 (AHO/ PHO 0598.67) and October 24, 1967 (AHO/PHO 0599.67). On Oiticica’s sojourn in London, see Oiticica in London, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2007).

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Notes to Pages 96–104

76 Oiticica was displeased with how the subsequent tropicalismo trend had transformed his work as a series of commodified images and sought to distance himself from the trend. As he wrote, “Bourgeois, subintellectuals, cretins of all types, proselytizing tropicalismo, tropicália (it’s become fashion!)—­in short, transforming into an object of consumption that which they don’t directly understand” (AHO/PHO 0128.68), 3. 77 Hélio Oiticica, “Barracão Idea,” 1969 (AHO/PHO 1664.69). This document notes that Oiticica had begun to think of the idea in early 1967 while he was conceiving of the concept “Supra­sensorial.” Oiticica describes Barracão as both “an island in Brazilian social structure” and “a workable plan, a growing plan, a creplan, far away from any ideal social structure, utopic, and so on.” [English in original.] Oiticica fell sick in November 1967, accounting for the gap in documents relating to Eden between late 1967 and early 1968. In December, Oiticica was also occupied with the symposium “The Appearance of the Suprasensorial,” organized by Morais in Brasília. 78 Oiticica, diary entry, August 13, 1961 (AHO/PHO 0182.59), 62–­66. 79 Among the books collected in the Oiticica family library is Jay Hambidge, The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), which reproduces a series of articles published from 1919–­20 in the magazine Diagonal that expound a theory of ­“dynamic symmetry.” The accompanying diagrams demonstrate affinities with Oiticica’s earliest study for Eden and likewise emphasize the diagonal of the square as a generating element. 80 Oiticica, letter to Guy Brett, April 1968 (AHO/PHO 1024.68), 4. 81 Theo van Doesburg’s axonometrics were illustrated in Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 20, 1960. My gratitude to Kristina Luce for an illuminating conversation regarding axonometrics and architectural projection. 82 See Ferreira Gullar, “Ballet Concreto, Arte Nova,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, August 31, 1958, 1. 83 Morris injured himself during a rehearsal; consequently, he manipulated the structure with a string at the work’s official performance at the Living Theater in New York. See Paul Cummings, “Interview with Robert Morris,” March 10, 1968, transcript in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; cited in James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 280n28. 84 Pape has noted a relation between her 1958 work and Morris’s Box for Standing of 1961 in her interview with Glória Ferreira in Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape (Rio: Caixa Econômica Federal, 1999). Luiz Camillo Osorio likewise mentions a relation between Pape’s and Morris’s works in “Lygia Pape: Experimentation and Resistance,” Third Text 20, no. 5 (September 2006): 571–­83. Brett has noted the near chronological coincidence, yet striking conceptual distinctions, between Oiticica’s 1969 Whitechapel exhibition and Morris’s 1971 Tate Gallery show, which included structures for participation but was closed within days due to injuries amongst the viewing public. (Lecture at Harvard University, March 10, 2001.) See also 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 (Cambridge: Harvard University Art Museums, 2001), 105–31. 85 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part II” [1966], reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 11. 86 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” [1967], reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 129. 87 Hélio Oiticica, “Crelazer,” January 14, 1969 (AHO/PHO 0367/69), 1. 88 “Hélio Oiticica Retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, until April 6: Oiticica talks to Guy Brett,” 134. 89 Charles Sanders Peirce, “Chapter 6 Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmatism (1. Signs),”

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in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vol. 4, The Simplest Mathematics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 415. 90 Haroldo de Campos, “Ideograma, Anagrama, Diagrama: Uma Leitura de Fenollosa,” in Ideograma: Lógica, Poesia, Linguagem [1977] (São Paulo: EdUSP, 2000), 41. 91 Haroldo de Campos, “Da Fenomenologia da Composição à Matemática da Composição,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, June 23, 1957, 1. Oiticica had entered in contact with the Concrete poets while still in Rio in the late 1960s and became increasingly close with Haroldo while living in New York. 92 Ezra Pound, Cantares, trans. Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Educação e Cultura, Serviço de Documentação, 1960). 93 De Campos, “Ideograma, Anagrama, Diagrama,” 45, 42. 94 As de Campos notes, while Saussure argued that Chinese characters displayed the maximum character of arbitrariness in his “Course on Linguistics,” his unresolved study of anagrams suggested an “amendment” to this postulate. 95 See Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics” [1958], in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960). 96 De Campos, “Ideograma, Anagrama, Diagrama,” 79. 97 Robert Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Non-­Sites” [1968], reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 364. 98 I am indebted to David Hays on this point of connection to the narrative of creation in Genesis. 99 Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim, vol. 1, Language [1923] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 107. Oiticica’s grandfather, José Oiticica, a noted philologist and anarchist, lectured at the University of Hamburg from 1929–­30, where Cassirer was appointed rector in 1929. José Oiticica was an influential force in Oiticica’s early education and likely exposed him to Cassirer. Cassirer was also an influence for Pedrosa and Gullar, whose “Manifesto Neoconcreto” cites Suzanne Langer, Cassirer’s student and principal disseminator of his ideas. 100 Hélio Oiticica, “Londocumento,” August 27, 1969 (AHO/PHO 0304.69). 101 Hélio Oiticica, “LDN,” September 18, 1969 (AHO/PHO 0384.69). Oiticica worked on the cell-­nest idea throughout 1969 and part of 1970. Almost all of these instantiations conform to the 2 x 1 x 1 meter module. Oiticica mentioned Barracão in his application for a Guggenheim Fellowship in November 1969 (AHO/PHO 1054.sd), suggesting that he was already interested in realizing the idea in New York. See also his letter to Guy and Carol Brett of July 11, 1969, in which he writes, “I find this very stimulating, of building the nests over and over, and they can stay where they are built; I wonder what will come out in Rio with them of course there they will develop into the Barracão, or maybe will never be built . . .” (AHO/ PHO 0547.69). 102 See Vito Acconci’s interview in Marcos Bonisson’s video, Héliophonia (2000). Architectural historian Guilherme Wisnik has cogently argued that Oiticica’s “domestification” of public life in Eden offers a model through which to think the larger dynamics of public, private, and political in Brazilian architecture and urbanism of the late 1960s and early 1970s more broadly. See his “Public Space on the Run,” Third Text 26, no. 1 (2012): 117–­29. 103 Kynaston McShine, telegram to Hélio Oiticica, March 1, 1970 (AHO/PHO 1351.70). 104 Hélio Oiticica, statement in Information, exh. cat., ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: ­Museum of Modern Art, 1970), lowercase in original. 105 Ibid. 106 On “udigrudi” cinema see Robert Stam, “On the Margins: Brazilian Avant-­Garde Cinema,” in Brazilian Cinema, ed. Randal Johnson and Robert Stam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); and Ismail Xavier, Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Brazilian Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

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Notes to Pages 104–119

107 Hélio Oiticica, “Subterrânia,” September 21, 1969 (AHO/PHO 0382.69). On the “subterranean” as a critical position, see also Celso Favaretto, A Invenção de Hélio Oiticica (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1992), 201. In 1971 Oiticica developed maquettes for a new series of projects for Penetráveis he named Subterranean Tropicália Projects, published as plans in Changes 70 (February 15, 1972). 108 Hélio Oiticica, “Subterrânia,” O Pasquim 68 (October 7–­13, 1970). 109 Hélio Oiticica, “Subterrânia 2,” October 29, 1969 (AHO/PHO 0382.69-­a), 1. 110 In this sense it is distinct from dissident surrealist Georges Bataille’s concept of bassesse. See Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–­1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), in particular “The Big Toe” [1929]. 111 As Oiticica wrote of Barracão, “it rises up from the inside and searches out the light of the sun.” “Londocumento.” 112 My gratitude to David O’Brien for noting the link between the cubic volume of the hand­ barrow and the abstract unit of the grid noted in this chapter’s introduction. 113 Luciano Figueiredo has written compellingly on Oiticica’s appropriation of activities as well as objects in his essay “‘the world is the museum’: Appropriation and Transformation in the Work of Hélio Oiticica,” in Mari Carmen Ramírez, ed., Hélio Oiticica, The Body of Color, exh. cat. (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2007), 105–­25. 114 For an account of this incident, see O Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro. 115 Roberto Pontual, “MAM: Reconstrução,” Arte Hoje 2, no. 17 (November 1978). Prior to the fire, a number of articles had remarked on the need to rethink the cultural institution of the museum. See for example Sonia Streva, “As Vanguardas já Nascem Cansadas,” Arte Hoje 1, no. 12 (June 1978): 51–­53. 116 Resende’s critique was published as part of a dialogue on the function of museums in the article “Não se Constroem Museus Sem Ideias,” Arte Hoje 1, no. 10 (April 1978): 52–­55; Pedrosa, Os Projetos de Hélio Oiticica. 117 Aracy Amaral, ed., Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro na Arte (1950–­1962), exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo: MAM-­RJ and Pinacoteca do Estado, 1977). On ensuing debates, see various statements in “No Concretismo, O Perfil de uma Década,” Arte Hoje 1, no. 2 (August 1977): 10–­17. In 1975, Pape also exhibited an extensive selection of her Neoconcrete prints at the Maison de France in Rio. 118 Roberto Pontual, América Latina: Geometria Sensível, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: MAM-­RJ, 1978). 119 Hélio Oiticica, “Ready Constructible,” August 21, 1978 (AHO/PHO 1706.78). 120 Aleksandr Rodchenko, “A Laboratory Passage Through the Art of Painting and Constructive-­ Spatial Forms Toward the Industrial Initiative of Constructivism, 1917–­1921 Automonograph,” in Aleksandr Rodchenko: Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings, ed. Alexander N. Lavrentiev, trans. Jamey Gambrell (New York: Museum of Modern Art of New York, 2005), 128. Gullar mentions Rodchenko’s Spatial Constructions in his “Movimentos Russos III,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, November 21, 1959, 3. 121 Brancusi’s Endless Column exists in several versions, first appearing in the form of a base for another sculpture, then as an independent, roughly human-­sized sculpture in 1918, and then in increasingly large environmental scales. All versions are united by the rhomboid element’s basic ratio of 1:2:4 (narrow point, width, length). The columns had been recently illustrated in Brazil in “O Nascimento da Nova Escultura,” Arte Hoje 1, no. 6 (December 1977): 20–­23. Oiticica, however, took pains to distinguish Ready Constructible from Endless Column in his text of November 5 1979. Here he noted that the work had “nothing to do also with the brancusian exercise of the endless column since this was the limit-­non-­limit of the problem of sculpture as such,” “Ready Constructible” (AHO/PHO 0088.78), 3. 122 On Andre’s engagement with constructivism see Maria Gough, “Frank Stella is a Constructivist,” October 119 (Winter 2007): 94–­120. Gough notes that the 1971 MoMA exhibition of

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Rodchenko’s work represented his Spatial Constructions in photographs. One of these works likewise appears in an article by the curator Jennifer Licht, with whom Oiticica was in contact with in the early 1970s (“Rodchenko, Practicing Constructivist,” ARTnews 70, no. 2 [April 1971]: 62). 123 Barbara Rose, “A Retrospective Note,” in David Bourdon, Carl Andre Sculpture 1959–­1977 (New York: Jaap Rietman, 1978), 10. Gough likewise suggests this consequence: “Andre’s ‘recovery’ of Rodchenko’s work at the same time reburied it by hypostatizing it as an autonomous aesthetic.” “Frank Stella is a Constructivist,” 113. See also Jeffrey Inaba, “Carl Andre’s Same Old Stuff,” Assemblage 39 (August 199): 36–­61. For an analysis of the relationship between Andre’s materials and the specter of labor, see Julia Bryan-­Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 124 In a 1980 interview, Oiticica returned to this formulation, noting that there were various types of maquettes within his oeuvre. Some were scaled and could be constructed, but others “are without scale, and can be constructed or not. I think that the majority of these things will not leave this stage of the maquette. I see the maquette not as a pre-­stage but as an already finished work.” Guinle Filho, “A Última Entrevista de Hélio Oiticica,” 82. On an index card from May 19, 1979, Oiticica also noted an idea for a “para-­bólide” which would “refer to the bólides of the 60s (the bólides-­c aixas) and is at the same time a ­m aquette without scale (the utopian-­monumental),” thus suggesting that the notion of a “maquette without scale” was part of a wider return to his work of the early 1960s. “O Para-­Bólide,” May 19, 1979 (AHO/PHO 1459.79). 125 De Castro realized his first cut-­and-­fold sculpture at monumental scale in 1978 as well. His work was also included in the Geometría Sensível exhibition at MAM-­RJ—­one of the only works to survive that fire. 126 Hélio Oiticica, “Ready Constructible,” November 5, 1979. 127 Ibid. Residents of the Favela of Esqueleto were relocated—­many against their wishes—­to Vila Kennedy, one of COHAB’s tracts of mass housing. During this process, a mysterious and possibly politically motivated fire destroyed the remaining structures of Esqueleto, forcing all of its residents to comply with the relocation. 128 Ferreira Gullar, “Brancusi e o Problema da Base na Escultura,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, April 9, 1960, 4–­5. 129 Oiticica, “Ready Constructible,” November 5, 1979, 3. 130 Ibid.

Chapter 3 1 Hélio Oiticica, “Ready Constructible,” November 5, 1979 (AHO/PHO 0088.78), 4. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 2. 4 Ibid., 3. Oiticica does not appear to have been aware of Duchamp’s own declaration of the “definitively unfinished” status of The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–­23. Although one of Duchamp’s cubist paintings was shown in the 2nd São Paulo Bienal of 1953, his readymades were not exhibited in Brazil until 1965 at the 8th São Paulo Bienal. Oiticica’s Bólides as well as examples of American minimalism were also shown at this bienal. 5 Thierry de Duve, “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” Artforum 24, no. 9 (May 1986): 110–­21, expanded in Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), chapter 3. 6 Marcel Duchamp, unpublished interview with Georges Charbonnier, Paris. Radio Telévision Française, 1961, cited in de Duve, “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” 113. 7 On postwar and contemporary experiments with readymade color see Ann Temkin ed., Color Chart, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008).

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Notes to Pages 119–136

8 9 10 11

12

13

14

15

16

17

These were the Escolinha de Arte and Atêlier Livre de Pintura, respectively. Mário Pedrosa with Ivan Serpa, Crescimento e Criação (Rio de Janeiro: MAM-­RJ, 1954), 39. Ibid., 7. See “Revolta em Prêto e Branco,” Correio da Manhã, 1 Caderno, May 16, 1954, 1, 8, and 1 Caderno, May 20, 1954, 11; and A Arte e Seus Materiais, Salão Preto e Branco: 3º Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna, 1954 (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1985). A petition with 600 signatures was sent to the director of the Ministério de Educação e Saúde, where the exhibition itself was held in the temporary galleries of MAM-­RJ. The Brazilian government created SUMOC, the Superintendência da Moeda e do Crédito, in 1945 in order to exercise domestic monetary control. With Instrução 70 of October 9, 1953, SUMOC inaugurated a tiered system of multiple tariffs aimed at protecting burgeoning national industries and stimulating Brazilian exports on the international market. On this system and import susbstitution industrialization, see João Sidney de Figueiredo Filho, “Políticas Monetária, Cambial e Bancária no Brasil sob a gestão do Conselho da Sumoc, de 1945 a 1955” (master’s thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2005); Sérgio Besserman Vianna, A política econômica no segundo governo Vargas (1951–­1954) (Rio de Janeiro: BNDES, 1987); and Alexandre Kafka, “The Brazilian exchange auction system,” Review of Economics and Statistics 38, no. 3 (August 1956): 308–­22. The categories of the tariff system were arranged according to a general spectrum of processing and necessity: I: raw materials for the pharmaceutical industry and agricultural supplies; II: raw materials; III industrial equipment; IV: less important industrial equipment and consumer goods; and V: all other products. Superintendência da Moeda e do Crédito, Diário Oficial, Seção 1 (August 1954): 13380. In August 1957, Law 3244 reduced the categories from five to two: general (imports of raw materials, capital goods, and essential consumer goods) and specific (goods not considered essential). Instrução 97 of July 29, 1954, moved “prepared paints for watercolor, drawing, and fine painting, in tablets, tubes, or pots” to the “general” category “in order to establish more favorable conditions for importation.” See for example Waldemar Cordeiro, “O Objeto,” AD: Arquitetura e Decoração No 20 (December 1956) and “Arte Industrial,” AD: Arquitetura e Decoração 27 (February-­March 1958); and Décio Pignatari, “Forma, Função e Projeto Geral,” AD Arquitetura e Decoração 24 (July-­Aug 1957). As Ferreira Gullar noted, “The Rio group, with the exception of Lygia Clark, uses oil paint from tubes; the [group of] São Paulo employs ripolin or variants of this type of paint . . .” “1–­0 Grupo de São Paulo,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, February 17, 1957, 9. Cordeiro wrote in “Arte Industrial” that “The conceptions of color and texture confirm the identity of the process, the morphological identity between Concrete art and industry.” Edson Motta, “Perdura o Problema das Tintas,” Forma 2 (August 1954). The exempt category included paper for publishers, maps, books, journals, magazines that treated scientific material, didactic or literary materials, religious materials, and books written in other idioms. Lei 2145/53 (December 29, 1953). Motta taught a traditional painting class alongside Serpa’s more experimental class at MAM-­RJ. See for example Ferreira Gullar, “Duas Faces do Tachismo” [1957], in Abstracionismo Geométrico e Informal: A Vanguarda Brasileira nos anos Cinqüenta, ed. Fernando ­Cocchiarale and Anna Bella Geiger (Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE, 1987), 241–­43; and Mário Pedrosa, “Da Abstração à Auto-­Expressão” [1959], in Mário Pedrosa: Mundo, Homem, Arte em Crise, ed. Aracy Amaral (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1986), 35–­47. See Hélio Márcio Dias Ferreira, Ivan Serpa (Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE, 2004) and Aleca Le Blanc, “A Democratic Education for the Masses: Ivan Serpa at the Museu de Arte Moderna,” in Ivan Serpa: Pioneering Abstraction in Brazil, exh. cat. (New York: Dickinson, 2012), 9-12.

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18 Waldemar Cordeiro, “Teoria e Prática do Concretismo Carioca,” Arquitetura e Decoração 22 (March-­April 1957). 19 Malevich’s White on White (1918) illustrates Ferreira Gullar’s “Tentativa de Compreensão” for the section on Russian Movements in Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, ­November 28, 1959, 3. 20 Oiticica frequently used Ypiranga Fosco paint, intended for interior walls, as well as the Brazilian commercial brand Wanda. See Wynne Phelan’s excellent essay, based on extensive conservation on Oiticica’s works, “To Bestow a Sense of Light: Hélio Oiticica’s Experimental Process,” in Mari Carmen Ramírez, ed., Hélio Oiticica, The Body of Color, exh. cat. (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2007), 76–­77. 21 These variations in pigment saturation have aged differently, with the slightly grayer tones produced through lower pigment concentration now appearing beige. 22 Oiticica read widely during this time; his notes include citations from Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, and Ernst Cassirer, among others. On the influence of Bergson in particular see Mari Carmen Ramírez, “The Embodiment of Color—­‘From the Inside Out,’” in Hélio Oiticica, The Body of Color, exh. cat., 27–­69; Michael Asbury, “O Hélio não tinha Ginga / Hélio couldn’t dance,” in Fios Soltos: A Arte de Hélio Oiticica, ed. Paula Braga (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2008), 27–­65; and Paula Braga, Hélio Oiticica: Singularidade, Multiplicidade (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 2013). 23 Oiticica, notebook entry, December 1959 (AHO/PHO 0182.59), 2. Ramírez has compellingly argued for a wider application of this concept of “inside-­out” within Oiticica’s work in “The Embodiment of Color—­‘From the Inside Out.’” Contrary to the argument of this chapter, however, Ramírez argues that the Bólides initiate a dematerialization of color culminating in the Parangolés. 24 Oiticica, notebook entry, December 1959, 2. 25 Nikolai Tarabukin, “Faktura,” in “Pour une théorie de la peinture” [1916], reprinted in Le Dernier Tableau (Paris: Editions Champ Livre, 1972), 124. See Maria Gough’s close analysis of the term’s shifting meanings in “Faktura: The Making of the Russian Avant-­Garde,” RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (Autumn 1999): 32–­59. 26 Oiticica, notebook entry, December 1959, 4. 27 Oiticica, notebook entry, May 1960 (AHO/PHO 0182.59), 9. 28 Hélio Oiticica, “Inter-­lação das Artes” (AHO/PHO 0182.59), 14–­15, my emphasis. 29 Ibid., 16. 30 As Bergson wrote in Creative Evolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), “The universe endures. The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new” (11). He subsequently wrote of invention in terms of artistic process: “But, to the artist who creates a picture by drawing it from the depths of his soul, time is no longer an accessory; it is not an interval that may be lengthened or shortened without the content being altered. The duration of his work is part and parcel of his work. To contract or to dilate it would be to modify both the psychical evolution that fills it and the invention which is its goal. The time taken up by the invention, is one with the invention itself. It is the process of a thought which is changing in the degree and measure that it is taking form. It is a vital process, something like the ripening of an idea” (240). 31 Hélio Oiticica, “MEDIDAS—­colheres” (AHO/PHO 0191.60), 1. 32 Hélio Oiticica, “Invenções” (AHO/PHO 0191.60), 2–­10. See also Oiticica’s annotations and color studies for the Nuclei (AHO/PHO 0188.sd). All the Invenções held by the Projeto Hélio Oiticica were destroyed in the 2009 fire. 33 As Oiticica wrote, “In the Inventions, which are square plaques that adhere to the wall (30 cm. on each side), color appears in a single tone. The structural problem of color presents

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34

35

36 37 38

39

40 41 42

43

44 45

46 47

48

itself by way of superimpositions . . . the verticality of color in space . . . . In the final layer exposed to vision, there is the influence of earlier layers which lay beneath it.” “A Transição da Côr do Quadro para o Espaço e o Sentido de Construtividade,” Habitat 70 (December 1962): 49. See also his undated text on the Invenções (AHO/PHO 0004.sd). As Ramírez has noted, the Invenções depart from Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square in that Oiticica’s works create color interaction through a single painted surface, rather than extending laterally, as in Albers’s works. “The Embodiment of Color–­‘From the Inside Out,’” 51–­52. Oiticica, notebook entry, October 5, 1960 (AHO/PHO 0121.60), 27–­29. On the significance of this formulation as a throughline in Oiticica’s work, see Carlos Basualdo, “Quelques annotations supplémentaires sur le Parangolé,” in L’Art au Corps: Le Corps exposé de Man Ray à nos jours (Marseille: Musées de Marseille, 1996), 257–­73. Oiticica, “Côr, Tempo e Estrutura,” 5. Hélio Oiticica, “Estudo dos pigmentos” (AHO/PHO 0207.59), 17–­20. Oiticica, notebook entry, March 3, 1961 (AHO/PHO 0182.59), 43–­44. See also Oiticica, notebook entry, August 24, 1961, in which he writes: “Color only exists physically for the artist as a chemical thing, but as a significance it surpasses the limitations of the ‘physical’ despite using matter in order to be made. In painting a surface, the artist does not paint as though he were painting a ‘thing.’ In the actual act of painting, the artist senses that another order, another synthesis, guides him” (AHO/PHO 0187.61), 38. Valentin, who was six years old when he began the lessons, recalls that rather than teach him how to copy models, Oiticica continually urged him “to invent.” Interview with author April 27, 2006, and e-­mail of September 9, 2011. On Oiticica’s relationship with Andreas and his brother Thomas Valentin, see also Call Me Helium 1974/2014, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério de Cultura e Correios, 2014). Oiticica, notebook entry, September 7, 1960 (AHO/PHO 0182.59), 21. Oiticica, notebook entry, August 22, 1962 (AHO/PHO 207.59), 13–­14. Oiticica, notebook entry, July 14, 1961 (AHO/PHO 0182.59), 36. Oiticica here uses the phrasing “. . . é preciso que [a côr] seja desenvolvida . . .” This vivification is in keeping with Bergson’s formulation of an élan vital. A 1965 text by Oiticica titled “A Pintura e a Criança” (Painting and the Child) (AHO/PHO 0067.65) about an art course he was giving at the time contains extensive excerpts from Crescimento e Criação. Pedrosa and Serpa, Crescimento e Criação, 11–­14. Marx used the concept of metabolism in order to theorize the enervating effects of capitalist production on both workers alienated from the fruits of their labor and the land, which is depleted of its natural wealth. Because labor was his privileged optic for articulating an alternative to this exploitation, Marx ultimately retained the notion of land as a resource subsumed to the needs of society. See in particular “Large-­scale Industry and Agriculture,” in Capital: Volume 1, A Critique of Political Economy [1867], trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmonds­ worth: Penguin Classics, 1992), 636–­39. On the significance of Marx’s concept of “metabolic rift” for the theorization of an environmental sociology, see John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (September 1999): 366–­405. Hélio Oiticica, “Andreas Valentin,” July 1968 (AHO/PHO 0136.68), 2. See José Oiticica, A Doutrina Anarquista ao Alcance de Todos [1925] (Rio de Janeiro: Achiamé, 2006); and Tereza Ventura, Nem Barbárie, Nem Civilização (São Paulo: Anna Blume, 2006). The elder Oiticica follows in the tradition of Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s “natural man” in his Emile, or on Education (1762). By all accounts, he was a major influence on his grandson’s intellectual formation. Significantly, a major exhibition of cubist paintings was shown at the 2nd São Paulo Bienal of 1954.

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49 Gullar’s articles were collected and republished as Etapas da arte contemporânea: Do cubismo à arte neoconcreta (Rio de Janeiro: Nobel, 1985). 50 As Oiticica writes in a notebook entry of August 13, 1961, “each time I seek to situate the aesthetic position of my development, historically in relation to its origins, I arrive at the conclusion that it is not only a very strong, individual and personal development, but that it completes a historical context and creates a movement, together with other artists” (AHO/ PHO 0182.59), 61. He continued in a document titled “Testemunho” of 1962, “In late 1959 I began the stage that led me to the liberation of painting into space . . . . This dialectic development of my painting is no less than the consequence of the liberation of painting from representation, which took place through the fundamental experiences of contemporary art initiated by Kandinsky in 1909, and followed soon after by those of Malevich, and then by the one to whom I am directly linked—­those of Mondrian. After Mondrian, who reached the maximum limit of representation, I develop painting toward space, moving beyond the representational plane that had crystallized in painting” (AHO/PHO 0020.62), 1. 51 Hélio Oiticica, “Notas para um trabalho,” June-­July 1962 (AHO/PHO 0182.59), 105–­6. 52 Ibid., 106. 53 Eighty-­nine of Schwitters’s works were exhibited at the Bienal of 1961, including Merzbild 25A Das Sternenbild (1920), MZ 150 Oscar (1920), and MZ 172 Tasten zum Raum (1921). Photographs of Schwitters’s Merzbau in Hannover were also shown. 54 Oiticica, “Notas para um trabalho,” 108. 55 As Schwitters wrote, “In the end, I don’t understand why one couldn’t utilize in a canvas in the same manner in which one uses commercially fabricated colors, materials such as: old tram stubs or metro tickets, pieces of scrap wood, coatroom ‘tickets,’ leftover twine, bicycle spokes, in sum: all the old ‘bric-­a-­brac’ that inhabits heaps of rubbish or the trash pile.” Oiticica likely read this passage in Haroldo de Campos’s article “Kurt Schwitters: Ou O Júbilo do Objeto,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, October 28, 1956, 4. My thanks to Megan Luke for pointing me to the 1927 original, reprinted in Kurt Schwitters, Das literarische Werk, vol. 5, ed. Friedhelm Lach (Cologne: DuMont, 1981), 252. 56 Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of ‘Readymades’” (address delivered at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 1961, on the occasion of the exhibition The Art of Assemblage), sub­sequently published in Art and Artists 4 (July 1966): 47. 57 Indeed, Schwitters’s conception of collage—­as a principle of combination by which various elements were equalized and synthesized into an organic whole—­was much closer to the vitalism that interested Oiticica. See Schwitters, “Die Merzmalerei” [1919], in Kurt Schwitters, trans. John Elderfield, exh. cat. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 50–­51; and Megan Luke’s important study, Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 58 Oiticica, “A Transição da Côr do Quadro Para o Espaço e o Sentido de Construtividade,” 49–­54. Various parts of this text were worked out in diary entries from the year before. See for example his entry of February 16, 1961 (AHO/PHO 0187.61), 7–­11. 59 Ibid., 51. 60 Rosamond Bernier’s interview with Antoine Pevsner, “Pevsner e o Constructivismo,” which credited Pevsner and Gabo with the founding of constructivism, appeared in the Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, January 20, 1957, 9. 61 Oiticica, “A Transição da Côr do Quadro Para o Espaço e o Sentido de Construtividade,” 52. 62 Ultimately, the Soviet Union refused to lend the works, so this exhibition never occurred. 63 Oiticica refers to several of the American abstract expressionist painters who were included in the 1962 exhibition in his Habitat article. 64 Significantly, Oiticica interprets the quality of “action” in Jackson Pollock’s paintings not in terms of individual expression but as releasing the physicality of paint into three-­ dimensional space in a manner parallel to his own explorations with structure.

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65 Pedrosa met Restany in the late 1950s through the international art critics association AICA. See Homenagem a Mário Pedrosa (Rio de Janeiro: Galeria Jean Bogichi, 1980). ­Oiticica may also have met the French critic through the Rio-­based dealer Jean Bogichi. That Oiticica knew Restany by the mid-­1960s is further indicated by his B21 Bólide Vidro 9 “Homenagem a Pierre Restany” of 1965, which may function as an artistic response to Restany’s writings on the nouveaux réalistes. 66 Oiticica, “A Transição da Côr do Quadro para o Espaço e o Sentido de Construtividade,” 52. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. Oiticica returned to a comparison between Klein’s work and his own Invenções in a letter to Carlos Vergara of October 30, 1974, in which he noted that both reoriented the provocation of Malevich’s white-­on-­white paintings towards space (although Klein, he mused, remained within a “metaphysical impasse) (AHO/PHO 1405.74). 69 Yves Klein, “Text for the Exhibition Yves Peintures at Lacoste Publishing House, Oct 15 1955,” in Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, trans. Klaus Ottmann (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2007), 12. 70 Vera Martins, “Carvão: Abandonei as Formas Definidas,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, April 8, 1961, 3. 71 Mário Pedrosa, “Aluísio Carvão” [1961], in Dos murais de Portinari aos espaços de Brasília, ed. Aracy Amaral (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1981), 180. Pedrosa also alludes to the “constructed” quality of Carvão’s color by way of an alchemical metaphor, making reference to the painter’s childhood near the Amazon and his early use of naturally found materials. 72 Aluísio Carvão, interview with Cocchiarale and Geiger, in Abstracionismo Geométrico e Informal, 140–­43. 73 Ferreira Gullar, “Um Alquimista da Côr,” Módulo 60, no. 36 (September 1980): 36. 74 Oiticica, “A Transição da Côr do Quadro para o Espaço e o Sentido de Construtividade,” 52. That Cubocor was a key influence on Oiticica’s thinking is also evidenced by its inclusion in the 1967 Nova Objetividade Brasileira exhibition at MAM-­RJ, which he took a lead role in organizing. 75 Kasimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting,” in Essays on Art, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-­Prus and Arnold McMillin (New York: George Wittenborn, 1971), 33. Malevich’s work and texts appeared repeatedly in the Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil. See for example “O Mundo da Não-­Representação,” October 13, 1957, 3; “Malevith” [sic], April 27, 1958, 3; and “Não-­ objetivismo e Construtivismo,” November 21, 1959, 3. Oiticica noted that his direct inspiration came from a scene in the 1933 film Ganga Bruta, directed by Humberto Mauro, in which the white of the actors’ clothing made their forms radiate with light. “Ivan Cardoso Entrevista Hélio Oiticica,” in Ivampirismo: O Cinema em Panico, eds. Ivan Cardoso and R. Lucchetti (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Brasil-­America, 1979), 72. 76 Jorge Guinle Filho, “A Última Entrevista de Hélio Oiticica,” Interview (April 1982): 82. 77 Oiticica’s fabrication notes for the Invenções indicate that the various vermillions that he used were derived primarily from synthetic versions of the pigment (for example cadmium) rather than from the naturally occurring cinnabar. 78 On the principle of elementarization (and the corresponding operation of integration) in the work of De Stijl artists and architects, see Yve-­Alain Bois, “The De Stijl Idea,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 101–­22. 79 Aleksandr Rodchenko, from the 1939 manuscript “Working with Mayakowsky,” in From Painting to Design: Russian Constructivist Art of the Twenties (Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1981), 191. On the reception of Rodchenko’s trio of canvases in postwar art, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-­Avant-­Garde,” October 37 (Summer 1986): 41–­52.

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80 One of Rodchenko’s Black on Black paintings illustrates Gullar’s “Etapas de Arte Contemporânea” in the section on non-­objectivity and constructivism (Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, November 11, 1959, 3). 81 The exhibition was held in May 1957 at Galerie Colette Allendy in conjunction with Klein’s show of paintings at Iris Clert’s gallery, both in Paris. Klein recreated the tray of pigment for his 1961 exhibition in Krefeld, Germany, this time adding a second tray of rose pigment. See Nan Rosenthal, “Assisted Levitation,” in Yves Klein, 1928–­1962, A Retrospective, exh. cat. (Houston: Institute of Fine Arts, Rice University, 1982), 112. 82 See Klein, Overcoming the Problematics of Art, in particular “The Monochrome Adventure,” 137–­73, and “‘The Evolution of Art Towards the Immaterial’: Lecture at the Sorbonne, June 3, 1959,” 71–­98. 83 Klein, “The Monochrome Adventure,” 154. Klein acquired his pigments at the Parisian hardware store of Edouard Adam, a droguiste from whom the artist purchased the synthetic ultramarine pigment he later used for his patented IKB. See Carol C. Mancusi-­ Ungaro, “A Technical Note on IKB,” in Yves Klein, 1928–­1962, A Retrospective. 84 See in particular Klein, “The Monochrome Adventure” and “Notes on Certain Works Exhibited at Galerie Colette Allendy,” 22–­23, in Overcoming the Problematics of Art. In “Assisted Levitation,” Rosenthal has convincingly argued that the objects at the Colette Allendy show functioned as “supplements” to the monochromes exhibited at Iris Clert’s, both illuminating them and revealing their original, and essential, lack. 85 Pontus Hultén, “Paris konst och Jiujitsu” [1957], cited in Rosenthal, “Assisted Levitation,” 112. 86 Klein, “‘The Evolution of Art Towards the Immaterial,’” in Overcoming the Problematics of Art, 93. 87 Klein cited in Klaus Ottman, “Introduction,” in Klein, Overcoming the Problematics of Art, xviii. Significantly, these reliefs include not only the region of Grenoble but also Europe and North Africa, the latter in the midst of anticolonialist struggle. 88 Klein, “The Evolution of Art Towards the Immaterial,” 93. 89 On Klein’s material practice, see Jean-­Paul Ledeur, Yves Klein, Catalogue des éditions et des sculptures éditées (Knokke: Guy Pieters Éditeur, 2000). 90 Patent no. 63471, issued by L’Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle. See Mancusi-­ Ungaro, “A Technical Note on IKB,” 258–­59; and Didier Semin, “Yves Klein, La propriéte intellectuelle en question,” in Yves Klein: Corps, Couleur, Immatérial, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006), 277–­79. 91 Klein, “The Monochrome Adventure,” 142–­43. As if to ritually cement this new configuration of the artistic and the economic, Klein anonymously deposited a votive offering containing raw pigment and gold at the monastery of Saint Rita of Cascia in Umbria in thanks for his success immediately after the 1961 retrospective. See Pierre Restany, “Yves Klein: The Ex-­Voto for Saint Rita of Cascia,” in Yves Klein, 1928–­1962, A Retrospective, 255–­57. On Klein’s appropriation of the Catholic discourse of the trinity, see Camille Morineau, “Le Bleu, l’or et le rose: comment appropriation rime avec sublimation,” in Yves Klein: Corps, Couleur, Immatérial, 156–­63. On Klein’s relationship to the fetishistic structure of the commodity, see Thierry de Duve, “Yves Klein, or the Dead Dealer,” October 49 (Summer 1989): 72–­90; Buchloh, “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-­Avant-­Garde”; and Kaira M. Cabañas, “Let This Be Said and Done,” in The Myth of Nouveau Réalisme: Art and the Performative in Postwar France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 31–­61. 92 Internal document, ESDI: Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (Rio de Janeiro: Secretaria de Educação e Cultura, Estado da Guanabara), 4. See also Pedro Luiz Pereira de Souza, ESDI: Biografia de uma Ideia (Rio de Janeiro: UDUERJ, 1996).

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93 Frederico Morais, “Desenho Industrial 68,” Diário de Notícias, August 15, 1968. See also Vera Pedrosa, “Desenho Industrial,” Correio da Manhã, November 13, 1968. 94 Brazil began to manufacture high-­quality enamels for automobiles in the 1950s. I am grateful to the conservator Edson Motta Filho for an extended conversation on December 11, 2007, regarding paints in Brazil, particularly his father Edson Motta’s lobby to decrease tariffs. 95 A 1964 article illustrated with one of Oiticica’s raw pigment Bólides maps this contra­ dictory dynamic onto the artist himself: “Hélio Oiticica thus departs from the quality of a simple Brazilian to occupy a place in the international world of art, engaging the very crisis in easel painting that challenges his generation.” “Brasileiro Descobre a Côr da Côr,” Jornal do Brasil, Caderno B, July 16, 1964, 2. 96 Hélio Oiticica, “Experiência dos Bólides,” September 19, 1963 (AHO/PHO 007.63), 1–­2. On the Bólides see also Angela Varela Loeb, “Os Bólides do Programa Ambiental de Hélio Oiticica,” ARS 9, no. 17 (2010): 49–­77. Anna Dezeuze has argued that Oiticica’s practice more broadly corresponds to an aesthetics of “bricolage” in her article “Assemblage, Bricolage, and the Practice of Everyday Life,” Art Journal 67, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 31–­37. 97 Oiticica, “Experiência dos Bólides.” 98 Ibid., 1. 99 Hélio Oiticica, “Bólides,” October 29, 1963 (AHO/PHO 1816.63), 1. 100 Ibid. Oiticica saw Rauschenberg as most closely approximating the structural concerns of his own work in his Pilgrim of 1960, which Oiticica describes but does not name. Pilgrim consists of a painting mounted behind a chair. Paint from the canvas continues onto the chair, but because the chair rests in its normal orientation on the floor, Oiticica argues, it is not incorporated within the physical space of the painting as a “sign.” Oiticica further discussed the implications of a “structural” approach to assemblage in relation to Cordeiro’s “Popcreto” works of 1964–­65 in “Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade Brasileira.” Jasper Johns’s use of an American flag as an appropriated noncompositional device must also be considered a “structural” solution—­one, however, that Oiticica does not appear to have considered at the time. 101 Ferreira Gullar, “Teoria do Não-­Objeto,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, December 19–­20, 1959, 1. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., emphasis original. Gullar does not appear to consider Duchamp’s presentation of his readymades, which, in their simple orientation, prevented just such a return “to the common level.” 104 Ibid. 105 Ferreira Gullar, “Diálogo Sôbre o Não-­Objeto,” Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 26, 1960, 4. 106 Oiticica, “Experiência dos Bólides,” 1–­2. 107 Hélio Oiticica’s brother, César, recalls that Hélio saw the rich red earth of B15 Bólide Vidro 4 “Terra” near their house and collected it in bags. 108 Oiticica, untitled note, May 11, 1964 (AHO/PHO 0182.59), 134. 109 Phelan, “To Bestow a Sense of Light: Hélio Oiticica’s Experimental Process,” 100. 110 Ibid. 111 Oiticica, “Bólides,” 2. 112 Duchamp, “Apropos of ‘Readymades,’” 47. 113 William Seitz, curator of MoMA’s 1961 The Art of Assemblage exhibition, wrote in the catalogue for that show that assemblage was based on a principle of “nonconnective juxtaposition” and, in this, had roots in collage and the surrealist objet trouvé. William Seitz, The Art of Assemblage, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961). 114 Oiticica, “Bólides,” 2.

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115 “Marcel Duchamp,” in Katherine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists (New York: Da Capo Press, 1962), 90. David Joselit has argued that the logic of industrialization at the heart of the readymade must be read through the corporeal in Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910–­1941 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). Recently, he has suggested that George Maciunas’s cooking experiments within the context of 1960s Fluxus elaborated a “bio-­readymade” that could literally be metabolized by both the body and consumer systems alike. See “The Readymade Metabolized,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 63–­64 (Spring-­Autumn 2013): 190–­200. 116 On the history of the processing and manufacture of color see John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Philip Ball, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 117 See “Instrução 87” (March 20, 1954), Superintendência da Moeda e do Crédito, Diário Oficial, Seção 1 (March 1954): 4657. Kubitschek’s Programa das Metas included 30 ­“targets.” Target 26 highlighted mineral exports and called for an increase from 2.5–­8 to 30 million tons over the next five years. Brazil continues to be a leading exporter of iron ores. In his recollections of the “Salão Preto e Branco,” artist Glauco Rodrigues remarked, “The pigments of good quality that one finds in Brazil are the earths and ochres . . . I began to think that scale of painterly tones would come to be [exclusively] those of earths and ochres.” A Arte e Seus Materiais, Salão Preto e Branco, 45. 118 To Klein’s ultramarine IKB and its metaphor of the infinite sky, Oiticica offered up the subterranean finitude of the earth. My gratitude to Irving Lavin for this observation. 119 Oiticica made studies for several additional and unrealized “Estar” Bólides, each of which would have contained environmental materials such as earth, asphalt, or even marble. See “Estudos para Bólides-­vidro (‘Estar’),” November 7, 1965 (AHO/PHO 2043.65); and “Cinco Novos ‘Estares,’” November 21, 1967 (AHO/PHO 2047.67). On the relation of these studies to the Bólide order as a whole, see Loeb, “Os Bólides do Programa Ambiental de Hélio Oiticica.” 120 Oiticica, “Bólides,” 1. 121 Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act” (speech delivered at American Federation of Arts, Houston, April 1957), published in Art News 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957): 28–­29. 122 The quote “The spectator makes the picture” appears to have been first attributed to Duchamp in Dalia Judovitz, “Rendezvous with Marcel Duchamp: Given,” in “Duchamp Centennial,” special issue, Dada/Surrealism 16 (1987): 187. The rhetorical gesture doubtless stems from his 1957 Houston statement. De Duve has argued Duchamp and Seurat are joined in their “equal contempt for the hand, la patte . . .” “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” 115. On the doubly expressive and mechanical nature of Seurat’s brushstroke, see Meyer Schapiro, “Seurat and La Grande Jatte,” Columbia Review 17 (November 1935): 9–­16. 123 Oiticica, letter to José Ortiz, August 15, 1978 (AHO/PHO 1488.78), 2. 124 Phelan, “To Bestow a Sense of Light: Hélio Oiticica’s Experimental Process,” 99. 125 Guinle Filho, “A Última Entrevista de Hélio Oiticica,” 82. 126 Arthur Amora, an inmate at Nise da Silveira’s famous Centro Psiquiátrico de Engenho do Dentro, produced one of the city’s first instances of geometric abstraction around 1950 when he derived an ink composition from the patterns of dominos; Pedrosa likely knew of this composition. See Mário Pedrosa, Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Nacional de Arte, 1980). 127 See Mário Pedrosa, “Arte, Necessidade Vital” [1947] and “Forma e Personalidade” [1951], in Textos Escolhidos, ed. Otília Arantes, vol. 2 Forma e Percepção Estética (São Paulo: EdUSP, 1996), 41–­57, 179–­220. 128 Pedrosa and Serpa, Crescimento e Criação, 8–­9. 129 Ibid., 23.

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130 Oiticica, “Experiência dos Bólides,” 1. 131 Ibid., 1–­2. 132 Oiticica, “A Pintura e a Criança,” 4. 133 Oiticica, letter to Guy Brett, published in Hélio Oiticica, 25 February-­6 April 1969, White­ chapel Gallery, exh. cat. (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1969). English in original. 134 The individual pictured in Seja Marginal Seja Herói is Alcir Figueira da Silva, who committed suicide in 1966 to avoid police capture. Oiticica used a newspaper photograph of ­Figueira da Silva in a related Bólide, B44 Bólide Caixa 21 Caixa-­poema 3 “Porque a impossibilidade?” Harry Laus’s article, “Oiticica: Marginal da Arte” (Jornal do Brasil, Caderno B, July 20, 1966, 2), included a close-­up of B33 Bólide Caixa 18 and described Oiticica as a “marginal man” situated at the limits of two conflicting cultures: he “divides his life between a normal work in an office and an intimacy with another civilization which is the favela of Mangueira.” Oiticica himself commented on the relation between the two outlaws in ­Frederico Morais, “Heróis e Anti-­Heróis de Oiticica” Diário de Notícias, April 10, 1968, 2nd Section, Artes Plásticas, 3. 135 Waly Salomão, Qual é o Parangolé? e Outros Escritos, (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2003), 53. 136 Morais, “Heróis e Anti-­Heróis de Oiticica.” 137 Ibid. 138 Oiticica, letter to Guy Brett, in Hélio Oiticica, 25 February-­6 April 1969, White­chapel Gallery. 139 Janice Perlman, The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 251. As Perlman wrote, “the marginality paradigm is based on an equilibrium or integration model of society. Not only are the myths untrue; the model is invalid as well. Marginality theory assumes that in a functioning system the interconnections between sub-­portions tend to be mutually satisfactory and beneficial to all. It is perfectly possible, however, to have a stable system which is balanced to the advantage of some precisely through the explicit or implicit exploitation of others” (244). 140 Morais, “Heróis e Anti-­Heróis de Oiticica.”

Chapter 4 1

2

3 4 5

In a note of June 1965, Oiticica also listed accumulation, organic growth, seriation, encasement, suspension, disposal, reflection, containment, and discharge as “structural categories pertaining to the Parangolé.” “A Criação da ‘Capa,’” May 6, 1965 (AHO/PHO 2085.65), 1. This text is the basis for Oiticica’s subsequent text “Anotações Sobre o Parangolé,” ­November 25, 1964 (AHO/PHO 0070.64). Claudir Chaves in “‘Parangolé’ impedido no MAM,” Diário Carioca, August 14, 1965, 7, cites from and refers to by name Oiticica’s “Bases Fundamentais do ‘Parangolé.’” Vera Pacheco Jordão in “Parangolé no MAM,” Coluna Artes Plásticas, O Globo, August 16, 1965, likewise refers readers to “the document titled ‘Anotações sobre o Parangolé’, in which the artist analyzes the psychological-­perceptive function of these works . . .” Oiticica’s photograph of Miro appears in an untitled article of September 1, 1965, in Diário de Notícias, while the photograph of Eduardo appears in David Medalla’s article “Space Suit by Fischer, Parangolé by Oiticica,” Signals (August-­October 1965): 14. Hélio Oiticica, “Bases Fundamentais Para uma Definição do ‘Parangolé,’” November 1964 (AHO/PHO 0035.64), 1. Hélio Oiticica, “Anotações Sobre o Parangolé” (AHO/PHO 0070.65), 2. Renato Rodrigues da Silva, following Guy Brett in “Fait sur le corps: Le Parangolé de Hélio Oiticica,” Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 51 (Spring 1995): 33–­45, has noted that the reversibility inherent to the Parangolé also conditions the order’s processes of

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­conceptual signification. See his “Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé, or the Art of Transgression,” Third Text 19, no. 3 (May 2005): 213–­31. See in particular Hélio Oiticica, “Posição e Programa,” July 1966 (AHO/PHO 0247.66) and “Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade Brasileira,” as well as early critical treatments of Oiticica’s work such Celso Favaretto, “A música nos labirintos de Hélio Oiticica,” Revista USP 4 (Dec-­Jan-­Feb 1990): 45–­56; and Catherine David, “The Great Labyrinth,” in Hélio Oiticica, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro, Rotterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, Minneapolis: Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Witte de With, Galerie National du Jeu de Paume, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Walker Art Center, 1992), 248–­59. Oiticica first went to Mangueira at the end of 1963 with the sculptor Jackson Ribeiro in order to see a samba ensaio, or rehearsal. Ribeiro, together with Amílcar de Castro, helped construct its processional carros alegóricos (floats) for the 1964 carnival. See Hélio Oiticica, “Como cheguei à Mangueira,” n.d. (AHO/PHO 1863.sd). Though Oiticica’s exploration of sexuality is implied in writings such as his “Poética Secreta” of 1964 (AHO/PHO 0348.64), explicit references only appear in his writings of the late 1960s and 1970s. Friends have often recounted the importance of Mangueira for Oiticica’s burgeoning sexuality. See for example Lygia Pape’s interview in Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape (Rio de Janeiro: Caixa Econômica Federal, 1999), as well as excerpts from her interview with Paola Berenstein Jacques in Estética da Ginga: A Arquitetura das Favelas Através da Obra de Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro: Casa de Palavra, 2001), 27. Oiticica first appears to have addressed the marginal position of the artist in society in a 1962 diary entry ([AHO/PHO 0182.59], 77–­82) informed by his contemporaneous reading of Ernst Cassirer’s 1927 The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. It was not until Oiticica’s 1965 text “A Dança na Minha Experiência,” however, that he connected this experience specifically to that of marginalized groups within society. Hélio Oiticica, “A Dança na Minha Experiência,” November 12, 1965 (AHO/PHO 0192.65), 13. Paula Braga has treated the relationship between Oiticica’s work and Nietzsche’s thought in “Hélio Oiticica and the Parangolés: (Ad)dressing Nietzsche’s Übermensch,” Third Text 17, no. 1 (2003): 43–­52. Oiticica, “A Dança na Minha Experiência,” 6. Ibid. I have discussed this dynamic at greater length in “The Myths of Hélio Oiticica,” in Alejandro Anreus, Robin Greeley, and Megan Sullivan, eds., A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art (London: Wiley Blackwell Publishing, 2016). The CPC of the União National dos Estudantes (National Students Union, or UNE) was founded in 1961. Ferreira Gullar served as president of its Rio branch between 1962 and 1964. His political break with the vanguard is best conveyed in his 1964 essay “Cultura Posta em Questão,” reprinted in Cultura Posta em questão; Vanguarda e Subdesenvolvimento: Ensaios Sobre Arte (Rio de Janeiro: José Olimpio Editora, 2002). Opinião 65, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: MAM-­RJ, 1965). The exhibition was organized by the Brazilian-­based gallerist Jean Bogichi and the French critic Ceres Franco and included both young Brazilian and French artists. See Chaves, “‘Parangolé’ impedido no MAM.” See Luciano Figueiredo’s account of this event in “The Other Malady,” Third Text nos. 28–­29 (Autumn-­Winter 1994): 105–­16. The incident was originally reported in Paulo Reis, “Bienal abre em clima de tensão,” Jornal do Brasil, October 13, 1994, 10. See for example Susan Hiller’s response to the display of Oiticica’s works at the artist’s first international traveling exhibition in her review, “Earth, Wind and Fire, Hélio Oiticica,” Frieze (November–­December 1992): 26–­31; and Anna Dezeuze, “Tactile Dematerialization, Sensory Politics: Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés,” Art Journal 63, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 58–­71.

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18 Rodrigues da Silva, for example, has written that the Parangolé’s fundamentally “trans­ gressive” character “explains why the proposition is not fit for the context of museums, the institutionalization of art history, and academic debate. It belongs in the streets where social conflicts are declared openly.” “Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé, or the Art of Transgression.” 19 To my knowledge there is no scholarship that traces an explicit generative relation between Oiticica’s job at the Museu Nacional and the taxonomic practices he applied to his own work. By contrast, a metaphoric link between Oiticica’s meticulous organizational practices and his father’s profession as a taxonomist is not uncommon. See for example the eloquent tributes to Oiticica by Haroldo de Campos, who describes his sensibility as an “organized delirium,” and Waly Salomão, who notes the importance of experimental aspects of science within the artist’s approach to art. De Campos, “Hang-­glider of Ecstasy,” in Hélio Oiticica, exh. cat., 217–­21; and Salomão, “Qual é o Parangolé?,” in Hélio Oiticica: Qual é o Parangolé? e Outros Escritos (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2003). Oiticica himself does not appear to have referred explicitly to the taxonomic methods he learned at the Museu Nacional as informing his practice. 20 The first extant record of Oiticica as assistant to his father is in a report of May 1961 to the zoological section of the museum, in which José Oiticica Filho comments on the speed at which his son had learned how to complete the tasks at hand. José Oiticica Filho, “Relatório relativo ao período de março a julho de 1961,” May 12, 1961 (Archives of the Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, typed document). The last payment notice for Oiticica’s work is from early 1965, suggesting that he continued to work past his father’s death on July 26, 1964. 21 Hélio Oiticica, “Ondas do Corpo de Antonio Manuel” [1978], in Hélio Oiticica: Encontros, eds. Cesar Oiticica Filho, Sérgio Cohn, and Ingrid Vieira (Rio de Janeiro: Azougue Press, 2009), 194. 22 See Esther Emílio Carlos’s column “Atelier,” in Diário Notícias, August 7 and 10, 1965; Vera Pacheco Jordão, “Opinião 65,” O Globo, August 18, 1965; and, even earlier, “Panorama,” Jornal do Brasil, Caderno B, September 18, 1964, 4. 23 Paul Keeler’s June 15, 1965 letter to Oiticica (AHO/PHO 1269.65) inviting him to exhibit in the group show Soundings Two at Signals Gallery was reprinted in a brief article, “Hélio Oiticica,” Diário de Notícias, Atelier, July 1, 1965, with the following introduction: “This great young artist, original creator, unique in his great genius and unusual artistic fertility, vanguardist who is considered one of the best in the international scene, is being discovered abroad . . . .” 24 Bogichi’s statement was subsequently published in “Artes Visuais,” Jornal do Brasil, ­Caderno B, August 20, 1965, 9. 25 As Oiticica wrote to the artist David Medalla on August 21, 1965, regarding the introduction of the Parangolé, “unfortunately it hasn’t been a great thing concerning the ‘participation’ of the public—­even the most intelligent ones haven’t understood the necessity of this participation. It has been, on the other side some sort of scandal among the ‘habitués’ of exhibits, and it was almost necessary in the opening in the Museum for them to call the police . . .” (AHO/PHO 0586.65), English in original. 26 See Salomão, Qual é o Parangolé?, 37–­38. 27 Oiticica, “Bases Fundamentais Para uma Definição do ‘Parangolé,’” 1. 28 On Schwitters’s shifting conception of the fragment vis-­à-­vis autonomy, see Megan Luke, Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 29 Oiticica, diary entry, February 17, 1965 (AHO/PHO 0187.61), 5; and Jorge Guinle Filho, “A Última Entrevista de Hélio Oiticica,” Interview (April 1982): 82. 30 Guinle Filho, “A Última Entrevista de Hélio Oiticica”; and Aracy Amaral, “Tentativa de diálogo” [New York, October 1977] in Hélio Oiticica: Encontros, 161. 31 Amaral, “Tentativa de diálogo,” 162.

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32 This transition was likewise of key importance to Marcel Duchamp, who repeatedly ­invoked the bride as a figure of liminality. See David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel ­Duchamp 1910–­1941 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998); and Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 33 Guinle Filho, “A Última Entrevista de Hélio Oiticica,” 82, my emphasis. 34 See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Purposes Set Forth,” in On Morphology [1807] in Goethe: Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (New York: Suhrkamp, 1988), 63. Karl Friedrich Burdach independently coined the term morphology in 1800. For a history of early morphology, see Lynn Nyhart, Biology Takes Form: Animal Morphology and the German Universities, 1800–­1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and E. S. Russell, Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1917). 35 Ibid. 36 José Oiticica Filho, “Relatório relativo ao período de agosto a dezembro de 1961” (Archives of the Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, typed document). This report notes that Oiticica Filho had finished a publication for the Boletim do Museu Nacional entitled “Tipo de Saturnicides no United States National Museum 21—­Gênero Oiticica Michener, 1949 e Cicia gênero novo. (Lepidoptere, adelocephalidae).” As Oiticica Filho wrote, “The unfolding of the Oiticica into two genera, much like the unfolding of the Bouvierina (in process) led me to a more extended study of these groups and has thus greatly delayed the conclusion, for the aims of publication, of the respective works.” 37 See Michel Foucault’s foundational study, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1966] (New York: Vintage, 1994). 38 For an overview of species debates in the wake of Darwinian evolution, see Gordon R. McOuat, “Species, Rules, and Meaning: The Politics of Language and the Ends of Definitions in Nineteenth-­Century Natural History,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 27 (1996): 473–­519. 39 Ernst Mayr put forward the “biological species concept” in his 1942 Systematics and the Origin of Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). On the ongoing debate about the “species problem,” see position papers and responses to Mayr and Michael Ghiselin in a special issue of Biology and Philosophy 2, no. 2 (April 1987), particularly Mayr, “The Ontological Status of Species: Scientific Progress and Philosophical Terminology” (145–­67). See also Joel Cracraft, “Species Concepts and the Ontology of Evolution,” Biology and Philosophy 2, no. 3 (July 1987): 329–­46; Magnus Lidén and Bengt Oxelman, “Species: Pattern or Process?” Taxon 38, no. 2 (May 1989): 228–­32; and Robert A. Wilson, ed., Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Cambridge: MIT, 1999). 40 José Oiticica Filho, “Uma nova espécie do genero Eacles Hübner, 1920 (Lepid. Syssphingidae),” Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz (August 1938): 281–­330. Oiticica Filho here cites the French biologist Lucien Cuénot: “Dans le cas difficiles, il est préférable d’être diviseur.” For a treatment of the problem of overlapping taxa and hybrid species contemporaneous to Oiticica’s apprenticeship at the Museu Nacional, see also Charles D. Michener, “Some Future Developments in Taxonomy,” Systematic Zoology 12, no. 4 (1963): 151–­72. 41 Oiticica Filho, “Relatório relativo ao período de março a julho de 1961.” 42 Ibid. 43 The Bilaterais have secondary names but do not correspond to a systematic order. Similarly, the Relevos Espacias have numbers but appear primarily to correlate to Oiticica’s numerous maquettes. 44 Oiticica, diary entries (AHO/PHO 0182.59), 37, 60, 99, 101. 45 Klee, whom Oiticica deeply admired, maintained a numerical coding system throughout his life. Schwitters’s designation system, meanwhile, provided for both chronology and

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differentiation between relief assemblages (designated “A”) and large collages (designated “B”). Oiticica was surely also influenced by his father, who was a successful amateur photographer in addition to being an entomologist. Unlike his son, however, Oiticica Filho did not incorporate Linnaean systems within his photographic codes. Instead, his largely numerical codes corresponded to a sequence of techniques or impressions. In Derivação 13b (6)-­62, a photograph shown at Oiticica Filho’s 1962 exhibition at Galeria IBEU in Rio, for example, “13” refers to the work’s number within the Derivação series (works “derived” from conventional photographic negatives, as opposed to negative-­less photographs); “b” refers to a technique such as solarization enacted upon the original negative; “(6)” refers to a subsequent variation such as a negative impression; and “-­62” refers to the year. The numerical sequence thus encodes a series of technical operations rather than conveying nested modalities, as in Oiticica’s binomial system Bólide Caixa, Bólide Vidro, Parangolé Estandarte, Parangolé Capa, etc. Oiticica’s taxonomic codes were fully in place by the time he prepared to send works to London for his scheduled solo exhibition at Signals gallery in 1966. See also his list of works for his exhibition at Galeria G4 in 1966 (AHO/PHO 1510.sd). 46 Oiticica, “Bases Fundamentais Para uma Definição do ‘Parangolé,’” 1. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid, 3. 49 The unpredictable, non-­hierarchical aspect of evolution is often overshadowed by a reductive reading of Darwin’s evolutionary theories. In Les Coraux de Darwin, trans. Christian Joschke (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2008), Horst Bredekamp argues that Darwin’s early, unpublished diagrams for his 1859 The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (New York: Penguin, 1985) offer an unpredictable, rhizomatic model of evolution, one that departs significantly from the hierarchical “tree of life” most commonly attributed to his theories. This nonteleological model of evolution provides a compelling analogue to Oiticica’s own concept of “program-­in-­progress.” 50 Oiticica, “Bases Fundamentais Para uma Definição do ‘Parangolé,’” 2–­3. 51 For distinct perspectives on Oiticica’s relationship to Mangueira and the production of alterity see Braga, “Hélio Oiticica and the Parangolés”; and Michael Asbury, “O Hélio não tinha Ginga / Hélio couldn’t dance,” in Fios Soltos: A Arte de Hélio Oiticica, ed. Paula Braga (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2008), 27–­65. 52 See the columns “Homem para Homem,” Correio da Manhã, February 15, 1964 and February 23, 1964; Maurício Rabello, “Gente por aí,” Correio da Manhã, September 20, 1964; and “Linhas Cruzadas,” O Globo, December 26, 1964. 53 See AHO/PHO 1844.sd. Oiticica participated in carnival desfiles with Mangueira from 1965 through 1968, and then again in 1979 and 1980. 54 For a history of the CPC see Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda, Impressões de Viagem: CPC, Vanguarda e Desbunde 1960/1970 (Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2004). The CPC’s ideological stance emerged in part from the ideology of developmentalism put forward by the Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiras (ISEB) in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The sociologist Carlos Estavam Martins, author of the CPC’s 1962 manifesto on “revolutionary popular art,” had previously been an integrant of ISEB. On the ISEB, see Navarro de Toledo, ISEB: Fábrica de Ideologias (São Paulo: Atica, 1977); Navarro de Toledo, ed., Intelectuais e política no Brasil: A Experiência do ISEB (Rio de Janeiro: Revan, 2005); and Laurence Hallewell, “ISEB Intellectuals, the Left, and Marxism,” Latin American Perspectives 25, no. 1 (1998): 109–­35. 55 See “Anteprojeto do Manifesto do Centro Popular de Cultura” [March 1962], reprinted in Buarque de Hollanda, Impressões de Viagem, 135–­68. The CPC defined three kinds of art: “arte do povo” (art of the people, or folk art); “arte popular” (mass or industrialized art); and “arte popular revolucinária” (revolutionary popular art). The CPC only approved of the last type. Interestingly, folklore became a subject of academic interest at this same time. The inaugural issue of Revista Brasileira de Folclore was issued in September 1961.

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56 In a 1980 interview regarding this period, Oiticica put it this way: “Messages, in the ­pamphleteering sense, don’t have efficacy . . . [T]he majority of the time, they are not revolutionary, and at most reformist.” Carlos Alberto Pereira and Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda, eds., Patrulhas Ideológicas, Marca Reg.: Arte e Engajamento em Debate (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1980), 144. 57 Roberto Schwarz, “Culture and Politics in Brazil, 1964–­1969” [1970], in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 126–­59. For a more recent analysis of this period see Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 58 Oiticica, undated note (AHO/PHO 1637.sd), English in original. 59 Oiticica, “Anotações Sobre o Parangolé,” 1. 60 In “Inconformismo Estético, Inconformismo Social: Hélio Oiticica,” Educacão e Filosofia Uberlandia 4, no. 8 (January-­June 1990): 151–­58, for example, Celso Favaretto writes that, “the transformation of art into behavior [in Oiticica’s work] liberates repressed possibilities, frees up individuality, confuses expectations: manifesting the power of transgression” (157–­58). This interpretive thread is particularly strong in early treatments of the artist’s work; perhaps for this reason, it has held wide influence on popular perceptions of ­Oiticica’s work. A more nuanced articulation of this dynamic has been suggested by Emma ­Sidgwick, who argues, following Suely Rolnik and Felix Guattari in Molecular Revolution in Brazil (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), that the emergent vivência (life experience) of the body in Clark and Oiticica’s work constitutes a rejection of the coercive regime of bodily practices articulated across Brazilian history including slavery, capitalism, and the dictatorship. “Vivência: From Disciplined to Remade Lived Experience in the Brazilian Avant-­Garde of the 1960s,” Subjectivity 3 (2010): 193–­208. 61 Hélio Oiticica, statement in Information, exh. cat., ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: ­Museum of Modern Art, 1970), lowercase in original. 62 See for example Amaral, “Tentativa de Diálogo.” 63 Hélio Oiticica, “parangolé síntese,” July 26–­December 26, 1972 (AHO/PHO 0201.72), 1. 64 Ibid., 3. 65 Oiticica, who by Brazilian conventions would be considered white, noted in a 1970 interview, “There was a time when I longed . . . to be black . . . . Here the old racism, sambístico, the sense of inferiority, had already entered. I felt inferior by virtue of the fact of color, principally in Brazil. I wanted to be black, completely black.” Marta Alencar, Sergio Cabral, Paulo Francis, Luiz Carlos Maciel, Nelson Motta, and Flavio Rangel, “Entrevista de Hélio Oiticica com Capinam,” Pasquim (August 6, 1970), 12. 66 Oiticica, letter to Carlos Vergara, February 18, 1971 (AHO/PHO 1095.71), 2. While in New York, Oiticica filmed and photographed at least two gay-­pride and feminist marches in the early 1970s. 67 Carlos, “Atelier,” August 10, 1965. 68 Ibid. 69 Marcel Mauss, “Body Techniques” [1934], in Sociology and Psychology: Essays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). 70 In one of the rare articles that appeared on Oiticica’s work during his stay in New York, Jacqueline Barnitz wrote, “His propositions consider the whole person as a receptacle for input-­output experience, as an actor in his environment with a behavioral choice.” “Hélio Oiticica’s Propositions,” Arts Magazine (September-­October 1972): 46–­48. 71 “Ivan Cardoso Entrevista Hélio Oiticica,” in Ivampirismo: O Cinema em Panico, eds. Ivan Cardoso and R. Lucchetti (Rio de Janeiro, Editora Brasil-­America, 1979), 68. 72 See Oskar Schlemmer, “Man and Art Figure,” in The Theater of the Bauhaus, ed. Walter Gropius, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 17-46.

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Notes to Pages 195–210

The 1957 MAM-­RJ exhibition traveled from the São Paulo Bienal that same year. 73 See Katherine Ott, David Serlin and Stephen Mihm, eds., Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (New York: New York University Press, 2002). 74 See Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception [1945], trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), particularly “The Body as Object and Mechanistic Physiology.” 75 Hélio Oiticica, “Parangolé” (AHO/PHO 1637.sd), 1, English in original. 76 “Ivan Cardoso Entrevista Hélio Oiticica,” 69. 77 Oiticica’s first statement concerning “anti-­art” occurs in “Posição e Programa,” which he wrote in the context of the discussions about the state of the Brazilian avant-­garde leading up to the 1967 exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira. Here he stated that the Parangolé was “anti-­arte par excellence” (2). This text was expanded in his article “Parangolé: Da Anti-­Arte às Apropriações Ambientais,” GAM: Galeria de Arte Moderna 6 (May 1967): 27–­31, where the stance was further linked to the Parangolé. Yet even here he voices skepticism about a purely ontological framework: “The problem of knowing if art is ‘this’ or ‘that’ no longer exists—­there is no definition of what art is” (27). 78 Mayr, Systematics and the Origin of Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist. 79 On the relationship between the performativity of gender and sexual materiality as an effect of power, see Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 80 By the late 1960s, the influence of the North American gay rights movement began to be felt in Brazil, partially displacing these earlier codes. On gender roles in Brazil see James N. Green, Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-­Century Brazil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 81 See for example Don Kulick, “The Gender of Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes,” American Anthropologist 99, no. 3 (September 1997): 574–­85. 82 Stoller used the term in Stockholm at the 23rd International Psycho-­Analytic Congress and subsequently elaborated the concept in Sex and Gender (New York: Science House, 1968). 83 In this, Oiticica anticipated key aspects of queer studies. See in particular debates around performativity and transgender status in Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 1 (1993): 17–­32; and Jay Prosser, “Judith Butler: Queer Feminism, Transgender, and the Transubstantiation of Sex,” in Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 21–­60. Guy Brett presciently observed, “Hélio was gay, and a gay sexuality could be traced in his work, but all his proposals related to sexuality seem to be non-­divisive, transsexual.” Hélio Oiticica, exh. cat. (1992), 233. 84 Ceres Franco, Opinião 65, exh. cat. 85 Bringing “the people” to the museum was very much in line with the aims of the CPC, and one is reminded that Gullar was a key link between that organization and “Grupo Opinião.” In his article on the opening of Opinião 65, Chaves cited Gullar on the subject: “We are still long from attaining this ideal museum, since even today the direction of museums remains content when it attracts figures of the social elite, while it should be concerned with bringing the people to the museum.” Chaves, “‘Parangolé’ impedido no MAM.” In “Parangolé: Da Anti-­Arte às Apropriações Ambientais,” Oiticica himself indicated a desire to collaborate with Gullar on future collective Parangolé events. 86 Medalla, “Space Suit by Fischer, Parangolé by Oiticica,” 14. In his 1965 text “Dança na Minha Experiência,” Oiticica likewise noted, “I believe that the dynamics of social structures were revealed to me in their crudity, in their most immediate expression, foretold in this process of rejecting so-­called ‘social’ layers,” 8. 87 Oiticica, “Parangolé: Da Anti-­Arte às Apropriações Ambientais,” 30.

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88 These works are listed in the inventory compiled in preparation for Oiticica’s 1969 White­ chapel Gallery exhibition, subsequently reproduced in that catalogue (AHO/PHO 1505. sd), 3. 89 Hélio Oiticica, “The Discovery of Hermaphrodipotesis,” January 19, 1969 (AHP/PHO 0493.69), 1. See also Oiticica’s letter to his “Tropicália Family,” June 5, 1970 (AHO/PHO 747.70), in which he notes his satisfaction with having formulated the concept. As he wrote, “I hate straight people; they don’t exist . . . . [S]ex is an abstraction; it possesses no limits; the idea of 2 sexes is an oppressive, naturalist, idealist creation of repressive societies that only seeks to stratify everything through heterosexual life, in order to maintain the natural ‘order’ of things, but they forget that before the division of sex, there had to have been . . . hermaphrodite beings . . . .” 90 Oiticica, “The Discovery of Hermaphrodipotesis,” 2. 91 Zarathustra orders the shepherd to “Bite the head off! Bite it off!” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Graham Parker (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 137. On the ouroboros as a symbol of the alchemical in Nietzsche’s thought, see Richard Perkins, “Analogistic Strategies in Zarathustra,” in The Great Year of Zarathustra (1881–­1981), ed. David Goicoechea (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 316–­38. On Oxumaré, see Reginaldo Prandi, Mitologia dos Orixás (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2001), 224–­29; and Luis Nicolau Parés, The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 234–­40. My gratitude to the Brazilian author Miriam Alves for pointing me to the iconography for Oxumaré. 92 See Oiticica’s notes on the work, May 25, 1967 (AHO/PHO 111.67). For an analysis of Oiticica’s works in relation to Afro-­Brazilian candomblé practices, see Sidgwick, “Vivência: From Disciplined to Remade Lived Experience in the Brazilian Avant-­Garde of the 1960s”; and Simone Oshtoff, “Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés: Nomadic Experience in Endless Motion,” in Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 224–­40. 93 On photographic processes of racialization, see Alessandra Raengo’s compelling study, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Hanover: Dartmouth, 2013). My gratitude to Jennifer Greenhill for suggesting this to me. 94 Hélio Oiticica, “Brasil Diarréia,” 1970 (AHO/PHO 328.70), 2. 95 Ibid., 3 96 “Apocalipopótese” was organized by Oiticica and Rogério Duarte and included various participatory works including those by Antonio Manuel and Lygia Pape. See Hélio Oiticica, “Apocalipopótese” (AHO/PHO 387.69), written while he was at the University of Sussex, October 22–­29, 1969. The capes were also included in an experimental class Oiticica taught at the 92nd Street YMCA in New York in 1972; in an art manifestation titled “Encontros” in Pamplona, Spain (realized by Leandro Katz, an artist and friend of Oiticica’s); and in 1979 in Recife, Brazil. 97 3 → ∞: New Multiple Art, 19 November 1970–­3 January 1971, exh. cat. (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1969), English in original. The title references Duchamp’s observation that to make three of anything was in principle to mass produce it. 98 An undated note by Oiticica demonstrates the relation between these two propositions: “to build experiments,” ”a) “built in body” capes / cloth: pieces in length: different pieces / -­make the first experiment in studio / -­assemble a group to make a groupal one / b) Barracão cells / wood: [measurements of pieces to make cells]” (AHO/PHO 1779.sd). 99 Oiticica, letter to Hugh Shaw (Arts Council of Great Britain), September 19, 1970 (AHO/ PHO 0755.70), 1, English in original. 100 Ibid. 101 Oiticica, “Parangolé: Da Anti-­Arte as Apropriacões Ambientais,” 28.

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Notes to Pages 211–227

Coda 1

Hélio Oiticica, “Posição e Programa” [1966], expanded in “Parangolé: Da Anti-­Arte às Apropriações Ambientais,” GAM: Galeria de Arte Moderna 6 (May 1967): 28. 2 See in particular “Estado de alerta,” Red Conceptualismo del Sur, accessed July 20, 2014 http://conceptual.inexistente.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65:ho. 3 On such shifts, see Martha Buskirk’s important study, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). 4 Marcel Duchamp, “Note 35 (recto)” [1937], in Notes, trans. Paul Matisse (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983). 5 Author’s conversation with Tanya Barson, Curator of International Art, Tate Modern, ­London, March 27, 2010. 6 Peter Parshall, “Imago Contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance,” Art History 16, no. 4 (December 1993): 554–­79. 7 See A Coleção Duda Miranda (Belo Horizonte: Incentivo à Cultura Belo Horizonte, 2007); and Marilá Dardot Magalhães Carneiro, “A De Arte: A Coleção Duda Miranda” (master’s thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2003). Miranda was the invention of Brazilian artists Marilá Dardot and Matheus Rocha Pitta. 8 In this they dialogue with a rich history of the modernist replica, from Marcel Duchamp’s 1964 handcrafted editions of his “original” readymades to Sturtevant’s sustained practice of reperformance and remakes, beginning in the 1960s. 9 “Duda Miranda entrevistado por Marilá Dardot e Matheus Rocha Pitta,” in A Coleção Duda Miranda. 10 Oiticica, “Parangolé: Da Anti-­Arte as Apropriacões Ambientais,” 28. 11 The occasion for the action was the event Kleemania, which Oiticica helped organize to celebrate the centennial of Paul Klee’s birth. See Hélio Oiticica, “Projeto in Progress,” February 3, 1929 (AHO/PHO 0123.78). 12 Hélio Oiticica, “Account sobre devolver a terra a terra,” January 1, 1980 (AHO/PHO 30.80), 1. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Guy Brett, “To Return Earth to Earth: A Paradox of Containment,” Cahier (Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art) 2 (June 1994): 13. 16 Ibid., 14. 17 Hélio Oiticica, “Natal 1959” (AHO/PHO 0182.59), 6, English in original. Oiticica here cites Mondrian’s 1937 text “Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art.” 18 Andreas Valentin, interview with author, April 27, 2006. 19 See Oiticica, untitled note, 1978 (AHO/PHO 116.78). Interestingly, Mondrian and Oud disagreed about precisely the realizability of such “plastic realities” in the present. See Carel Blotkamp, Mondrian: The Art of Destruction (New York: Harry Abrams, 1995), 146–­48. 20 Oiticica, untitled note (AHO/PHO 116.78), and interview with Lygia Pape, “Fala, Hélio” [1978], in Hélio Oiticica: Encontros, eds. Cesar Oiticica Filho, Sérgio Cohn, and Ingrid Vieira (Rio de Janeiro: Azougue Press, 2009), 184. While Valentin and Oiticica staged this set of photographs, the actual photograph published in Jornal do Brasil, which features a different backdrop, was taken by staff photographer Luis Carlos David. 21 Cleusa Maria, “Hélio Oiticica Está de Volta,” Jornal do Brasil, Caderno B, March 8, 1978, 1. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid.

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. abstract expressionism, 138, 149 abstraction, 12, 67, 74, 109, 114, 117–­18, 137, 139, 148–­50, 176, 192, 210–­12, 226. See also geometric abstraction Acconci, Vito, 117 Aguilar, Gonzalo, 252n23 Albers, Josef, 270n34 Alÿs, Francis, 232, 232 Amaral, Aracy, 4 “Ambulent Architecture” (Schlemmer), 211 América Latina: Geometria Sensível (exhibition), 122 Amor, Mónica, 247n31 Amora, Arthur, 275n126 Andrade, Oswald de, 12, 98, 262n55 Andre, Carl, 125–­26, 126 “Anotações Sobre o Parangolé” (Annotations on the Parangolé) (Oiticica), 182, 218 anthropophagy, 96, 98, 100 “Apocalipopótese” (event), 224 “Appearance of the Suprasensorial, The” (symposium), 264n77 Architectons (Malevich), 78, 259n20 archive, 4, 17, 229–­31, 244n11 Argentina, 23, 54 Arp, Jean (Hans), 23, 148, 257n94 Arquitetura e Decoração (magazine), 39 Arquiteturas Fantásticas (Clark), 83, 83 Arquivos do Museu Nacional (journal), 198, 216, 218 Art of Assemblage, The (exhibition), 274n113 Arte Concreto-­Invención, 10, 54 Arte Madí, 10, 54, 257n94 “Arte Neoconcreta Agora” (Neoconcrete Art Now) (Gullar), 18, 19 “Art and Objecthood” (Fried), 110 Asbury, Michael, 249n53, 256n90, 280n51 Associação Brasileira de Agências de Propaganda, 255n76

Ato Institucional n˚ 5 (Institutional Act n. 5) (AI-­5), 184, 204, 249n51 autonomy, 6, 43, 52–­53, 65, 87, 98, 116, 144; of art, 11, 15, 24–­25, 51, 59, 77, 129; of color, 165; of fold, 64; of non-­objects, 64 avant-­garde, 3, 5, 11, 13, 17, 23, 27, 57, 77–­78, 89, 94, 98, 126, 139, 141, 148–­49, 157, 160, 190, 226, 235–­36; in Brazil, 6, 16, 96, 101, 117, 138, 187; and constructive, 76; as defined, 12 Babylonests (Oiticica), 117 Bachelard, Gaston, 89 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 11–­12 Balé Concreto (Pape), 109, 110 Barata, Mario, 261n51 Barcelona (Spain), 235 Bardin, Desdémone, 96, 130, 131, 153, 184, 185, 189, 190, 208 Barnitz, Jacqueline, 281n70 Barracão (Shack) (Oiticica), 104, 107, 117, 264n77, 265n101, 266n111, 283n98 Barrio, Artur, 230 Barsotti, Hércules, 250n3 Barthes, Roland, 4–­5, 64 “Bases Fundamentais Para uma Definição do ‘Parangolé’” (Fundamental Bases for the Definition of a Parangolé) (Oiticica), 182, 198, 218–­19 “Bases para uma classificação dos adornos plumários dos índios do Brasil” (Bases for a Classification of Brazilian Indian Feather Adorn­ment) (Ribeiro), 198, 198 Bastos, Oliveira, 40 Bauhaus, 23, 210 Bec du Hoc, Grandchamp, Le (Seurat), 172 Belluzzo, Ana Maria, 252n40 Benjamin, Walter, 13, 257n107 Bergson, Henri, 8, 140, 142, 269n22, 269n30, 270n42

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Bichos (Clark), 19, 21, 54, 64, 77, 105, 152, 230, 100–­101, 103, 178, 184, 224, 236, 249n53; 257n99; as fantastic architecture, 83, 83; fold, ­modernity of, 15, 71–­72, 75, 83, 92, 94, 101, function of in, 82–­83 120, 123, 134, 175; modernization, failed Bilaterais (Bilaterals) (Oiticica), 55, 57, 65, 194; attempt at, 100; museums, and media industry, Bilateral Equali, 20; Bilateral Teman, 56 allegiance between in, 48; paints, tariffs on, Bill, Max, 8–­9, 23–­24, 29–­33, 30, 36–­38, 75, 161 136; pigment, tariffs on, 168–­69; underground Bittencourt, Niomar Muniz Sodré, 48, 259n10 of, 119; utopian aims of, 15 Bittencourt, Paulo, 48, 259n10 Brett, Guy, 104, 107, 179, 235, 249n49, 263n75 Bogichi, Jean, 187–­88, 190, 220, 272n65 bricks, 15, 89, 122, 124, 127, 132, 154, 169 Bólide series (Oiticica), 15–­16, 134, 153, 153, 197, Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), The (Duchamp), 267n4 199–­200, 215, 218, 233, 235, 267n4, 279n45; Area Bolides, 108; B2 Bólide Caixa 2 “Platônico” Brito, Nascimento, 48, 59 Brito, Ronaldo, 23, 121, 246n27 (Platonic), 174; B7 Bólide Vidro 1 (B7 Glass Broodthaers, Marcel, 6 Bolide 1) (1963), 153–­54, 155, 160–­64, 166, Buenos Aires (Argentina), 10, 23, 251n12 169; B8 Bólide Vidro 2, 209; B11 Bólide Caixa Buren, Daniel, 6 9, 171, 174–­75, 174, 231; B12 Bólide Vidro 3 Bürger, Peter, 245n18 “Em memória de meu pai” (In memory of my father), 164, 164, 166, 169; B15 Bólide Vidro Cabeleiras Parangolé (Headdress Parangolé) 4 “Terra” (Earth), 165, 165, 169, 274n107; (Oiticica), 199 B18 Bólide Vidro 6–­Metamorfose, 135; B21 Caetano-­Gil Tent (Oiticica), 108 Bólide Vidro 9 “Homenagem a Pierre Restany,” Calder, Alexander, 256n92 272n65; B31 Bólide Vidro 14 “Estar” (To be), Calirman, Claudia, 249n51 165, 170, 170; B32 Bólide Vidro 15, 173, 173; Camargo, Sérgio, 263n75 B33 Bólide Caixa 18 “Homenagem a Cara de Caminhando (Walking) (Clark), 253n50 Cavalo” Caixa-­poema 2 (B33 Box Bolide 18 “Homage to Horseface” Box-­poem 2), 6, 177–­80, Candangos, Os (Giorgi), 93 Cannabiana (Oiticica), 108 177, 182–­83, 276n134; B34 Bólide Bacia 1 (B34 Cantos (Pound), 112 Basin Bolide 1), 169, 169, 171; B36 Bólide 19 Cara de Cavalo (Manuel Moreira), 6, 177–­80, 177, Apropriação 1 (B36 Bolide 19 Appropriation 182–­83 1), 120, 121; B38 Bólide Lata 1 Apropriação 2 Carneiro, Countess Maurina Pereira, 19, 44 “Consumitivo” (B38 Bolide Can 1 Appropriation carnival, 16, 182–­85, 200–­205, 207, 219, 223, 2 “Consumitive”), 228, 229; B39 Bólide Luz 1 277n7, 280n53 Apropriação 3 (B39 Bolide Light 1 Appropriation 3), 195; Bólide Basins, 206; Bólide Bed, Carvão, Aluísio, 12, 136, 137, 139, 150–­53, 152, 108, 162–­63, 175–­77, 195, 206; Bólide Boxes, 250n3, 272n71 206–­7; Bólide Glasses, 206–­7; children, as ideal Cassirer, Ernst, 8, 116, 161–­62, 265n99, 277n9 users of, 176–­77; color perception, 175; list Casulos (Cocoons) (Clark), 53, 105 of, 195; taxonomy, adoption of, 195; as trans-­ Centro Psiquiátrico de Engenho do Dentro, objects, 162–­63, 175 252n20 “Book, Spiritual Instrument, The” (Mallarmé), 43 Centros Popular de Cultura (Centers for Popular Box for Standing (Morris), 264n84 Culture) (CPCs), 96, 184–­85, 203–­5, 282n85 Borges, Jorge Luis, 232 Chastel, André, 92 Braga, Paula, 277n10, 280n51 Chateaubriand, Assis, 48 Brancusi, Constantin, 124–­25, 125, 129, 266n121 “Chinese Written Character as a Medium of “Brasil Diarréia” (Oiticica), 224 Poetry, The” (Fenollosa), 112–­13 Brasília (Brazil), 15, 71, 79, 80, 91, 98, 100, 103–­4, Chromosaturations for a Public Place (Cruz-­Diez), 112, 114, 260n32, 260n33; as contradictory 260n27 utopia, 90; laborers of, 94; plan of, as symbolic, Cidade Livre (Free City), 94. See also Núcleo 90, 92–­94; as positivist utopia, 101; satellite Bandeirante towns outside of, 95; scale of, 90, 92 Clark, Lygia, 4, 6, 10, 12, 19, 21, 25, 34, 37–­39, 49, Brazil, 3, 8, 14, 19, 21, 24–­29, 44, 49, 57, 59–­60, 50, 51–­53, 51, 59, 64, 77, 79, 82–­83, 83, 104–­6, 72–­73, 90, 118, 127, 135, 137, 141, 150, 160–­ 116, 136, 137, 140, 152, 194, 220–­21, 222–­23, 61, 176, 179, 186, 205, 220, 232, 243n2, 250n7, 222, 230, 247n33, 250n3, 253n50, 255n81, 255n73, 255n76, 262n55, 274n94, 275n117; 259n20, 268n14, 281n60; external space, 36; avant-­garde in, 6, 16, 96, 98, 101, 117, 138, folded information, 33; Gestalt forms, use of, 187; color strike in, 136; as conceptual site, 33; graphic marks, use of, 33; on non-­objects, 117; Concretism, implications of in, 23, 136; 54; organic line, 33–­34 developmentalism, adoption of, 75–­76, 120, Clark, T. J., 246n26 132, 168, 180; dictatorship in, 16–­17, 96, Coelho, Frederico, 249n50

286

cognitive organization: “good form,” 26, 38 color, 15–­16, 20, 29, 53, 60–­61, 65, 87, 131–­33, 138–­41, 143–­44, 149, 151, 154, 170, 172–­73, 177, 182, 200, 204; as abstract organizing principle, 202; aesthetic of, 163–­65; autonomy of, 165; body of color, 134, 146–­48, 150, 152–­53, 157, 160, 168–­69, 171, 174, 176, 178, 180, 215; constructive sense of, 161, 166; form, as identical with, 152; inventing of, 142; materiality of, 148, 152, 167; as pure, 156; as readymade, 166–­67, 169–70, 171, 175; spatial valorization of, 163, 170 Column (Two Positions) (Morris), 109, 111 Composição n. 5, Série: Quebra da Moldura (Composition n. 5, Series: Breaking the Frame) (Clark), 10 Concreção 6045 (Concretion 6045) (Sacilotto), 37, 38; folds in, 37 Concrete art, 32, 34, 76, 136–­37; abstraction, and representation, 74; as flat, 59; and gestalt psychology, 26, 31, 35; informational flatness, 31; isomorphic model of, 113; paradox of, 28–­29; and poetry, 22, 26–­27, 39–­40, 42–­43, 45; Russian constructivism, aligning with, 141 Concrete poetry, 26, 39–­40, 42–­43, 255n75, 260n32; newspapers, look of, 45. See also poetry Concretism, 8, 14–­15, 23, 25, 27, 28, 37, 42, 69, 75, 96, 141, 146–­47, 150, 160, 171, 176, 250n7; aesthetic idea, immediacy of, 29; artistic labor, division of, 161; color, rejection of, 139; discipline, requiring of, 26; flatness of, 39, 44; Gestalt form, 36, 50, 52, 57; industrial process, and art, 137; isomorphism of, 31, 43, 48–­51, 53, 57, 59; Neoconcretism, split between, 24, 46, 60, 112, 139, 149; and newspapers, 24; non-­ objects, 57; origin of, 23; readymade objects, 137; as self-­differing, 26; visible form, 51 Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), 260n35 construction, 7, 20–­21, 53, 59, 75, 111, 120, 122–­ 23, 124, 132, 150, 154, 179–­80, 188–­89, 193, 201, 206, 230; and avant-­garde, 126; of body, 16; of buildings, 15, 71–­74, 76, 79, 89, 93–­96, 98, 125–­26; and color, 149; conception of, 152, 156; in favelas, 96, 98, 100, 112; of social space, 117 constructive art, 14, 24, 96, 98, 101, 127, 134, 150 constructive will, 76, 96, 117, 122, 259n8 constructivism, 8, 23, 76, 125, 141, 149, 154 Contra-­Bólide (Devolver a Terra à Terra) (Counter-­ Bolide [To Return Earth to Earth]) (Oiticica), 233, 234, 235; as program-­work in progress, 233 contrafactum (copy), 231–­33 Contrarelevos (Counter-­reliefs) (Clark), 53 Cordeiro, Waldemar, 23, 25–­28, 31–­34, 32, 36, 38, 48–­49, 96, 136, 139, 142, 257n94, 257n107,

261n51, 274n100; Ruptura Manifesto of, 252n39 “corpo da côr” (body of color) (Oiticica): theory of, 134, 146–­48, 150, 152–­53, 157, 160, 168–­69, 171, 174, 176, 178, 180, 215 Correio da Manhã (newspaper), 76, 259n10; demonstration, 203 “Côr, Tempo, e Estrutura” (Color, Time, and Structure) (Oiticica), 57 Costa, Lúcio, 75, 90, 91, 92–­94, 261n37, 261n43 coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard, Un (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance) (Mallarmé), 27, 42, 64; innovations of, 42 Crescimento e Criação (Growth and Creation) (Pedrosa and Serpa), 136, 136, 138, 147, 176 Cromáticas (Chromatics) (Carvão), 151–­52 Cruz-­Diez, Carlos, 260n27 Cubocor (Colorcube) (Carvão), 151–­52, 152, 153 Cummings, E. E., 27 Dada, 148 Damisch, Hubert, 8, 247n32 “Dança na Minha Experiencia, A” (Dance in My Experience) (Oiticica), 183, 186, 200, 277n9, 282n86 Dardot, Marilá, 284n7 David, Luis Carlos, 284n20 “Death of the Author, The” (Barthes), 4 de Campos, Augusto, 42–­43, 45–­47 de Campos, Haroldo, 4, 12, 26, 39, 42, 112–­13, 120, 248n40, 252n23 de Castro, Amílcar, 19, 20, 38, 45, 52, 59–­60, 64, 77, 79, 81–­83, 81, 90, 94, 113, 127, 250n3, 255n81, 277n7; folding, 37–­39; sculpture, production of, 82 de Castro, Willys, 61, 61, 250n3; Laca Industrial Paint, advertising design for, 60 “Declaracão de princípios básicos da vanguarda” (Declaration of the Basic Principles of the Vanguard), 101 de Duve, Thierry, 133, 275n122 Delaunay, Robert, 137–­38 Deleuze, Gilles, 8, 13, 248n37, 263n74 Derivação (Derivation) series (Oiticica Filho), 279 Derrida, Jacques, 8 Desenhos para Brasília (Drawings for Brasília) (Costa), 91 developmentalism, 13, 15, 75–­76, 94, 101, 120, 134–­35, 176, 280n54 Dezeuze, Anna, 244n9, 274n96 Diagonal (magazine), 264n79 Diálogo de Maos (Dialogue of Hands) (Clark), 253n50 “Diálogo Sôbre o Não-­Objeto” (Dialogue on the Non-­Object) (Gullar), 55, 54, 63 Diários Associados, 48, 255n73, 255n74 Dillon, Osmar, 250n3

287

Index

“Discovery of Hermaphrodipotesis, The” (Oiticica), 223–­24, 283n89 “Displays” (Mallarmé), 43 Divisor (Pape), 253n50 Drexler, Arthur, 260n29 Duarte, Rogério, 263n70 Duchamp, Marcel, 12, 131, 133, 148–­49, 171–­ 72, 176, 231, 275n122, 279n32, 283n97; and readymades, 133–­34, 162–­63, 166, 168, 267n4, 274n103, 284n8 Eco, Umberto, 4, 244n8 Eden (Oiticica), 84, 102, 103, 106, 108, 109, 114, 115, 120, 122, 127, 263n68, 263n75, 264n79, 265n102; body in, as explicit content, 110; Brasília, symbolic crossing of, 114; “Células” (Cells), drawing, 104, 105, 108, 114; de­ installation of, 109; as diagrammatic system, 104, 112–­13, 116–­17; diary entry for, 105; as experimental campus, 101; first drawings of, 104–­5, 107–­8, 106, 114, 124; mapping, notion of, 112; nest-­cells of, 117–­18; scale of, 110–­11, 116; structures for, study for, 106, 107; three-­ dimensional plan of, 111, 114–­15; unfolding, as act of, 113–­14; as utopia, 101, 103, 115 encounter: 8, 14, 20–­21, 24, 38, 50, 67, 171, 179–­80, 189; chromatic inflection, 11; mimetic recognition, 11; spatial structure, 11; temporal duration, 11; of viewer, 39, 52, 57, 156 Endless Column (Brancusi), 124–­25, 125, 129, 266n121 Endless Ribbon (Bill), 37 epistemology, 14, 16, 17, 27, 104, 114, 120, 186–­ 87, 193, 197, 215–­16, 218–­19, 221, 226–­27, 231; epistemological character, of art, 8, 64; epistemological device, 7; epistemological model, 10–­11, 25, 37, 81, 116, 171, 180; of perception, 2 Equivalent VIII (Andre), 126 Equivalents (Andre), 125 Eros and Civilization (Marcuse), 101 Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (Superior School of Industrial Design) (ESDI), 161 Escola Superior de Propaganda (Superior School of Advertising), 48–­49 Escola Técnica de Criação (School of Technical Creation), 76 Escosteguy, Pedro, 261n51 Escuela del Sur (School of the South), 23 Escultura sem título sobre desenho (Untitled sculpture on drawing) (de Castro), 81 “Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade Brasileira” (General Scheme of the New Objectivity) ­(Oiticica), 96, 274n100 esquerda festiva (festive left), 204 Estação Primeira da Mangueira, 183 Estado de São Paulo, O (newspaper), 95 Estruturas Fósforos (Matchbox Structures) (Clark), 259n20

288

“Estudo dos pigmentos” (Study of pigments) (Oiticica), 144 “Etapas da Arte Contemporânea” (Stages of Contemporary Art) (Gullar), 148 Eu e O Tu, O: Série Roupa-­Corpo-­Roupa (The I and the You: Clothing-­Body-­Clothing Series) (Clark), 222 Europe, 3, 133, 148, 176, 273n87 Experimento “Terra de Cores com Líquidos Vários” (Experiment “Colored Earth with Various Liquids”) (Oiticica), 130, 131, 172–­73 Favaretto, Celso, 281n60 “Favela of Mangueira” (Bardin), 97 favelas, 6, 57, 76, 94–­96, 100, 127, 179, 188, 219, 267n127; in Mangueira, 183, 185, 200–­202, 276n134, 277n7, 277n8; problem of, 261n48 Fenollosa, Ernest, 112, 120; ideogram, theory of, 113 “Fenomenologia da Composição à Matemática da Composição, Da” (From the Phenomenology of Composition to the Mathematics of Composition) (de Campos), 112 Fiaminghi, Hermelindo, 28 Fifteen Variations on a Single Theme (Bill), 29, 30, 30, 31–­32, 38 Figueiredo, Luciano, 243n1, 266n113, 277n16 Figurativismo ao Abstractionismo, Do (From Figuration to Abstraction) (exhibition), 255n74 flatness, 21–­22, 33, 43; and Concretism, 39, 44; foldness, transmutation into, 65, 67–­68; as informational, 31; isomorphic symmetry, 61; newspaper, as embodiment of, 15, 39 Fluxus score, 4, 275n115 fold, 19, 25, 33, 37–­38, 52, 53, 55, 67, 69, 81–­ 82, 83; as aesthetic, 68; and authorship, 5; ­autonomous art object, 5; as dynamic modality, 7–­8; and flatness, 21; formal and social consequences of, 15; as frame, 1–­2, 8, 11, 13–­14, 21–­22, 43, 59; heterogeneity, as vehicle of, 65; as isomorphic, 21; Möbius strip, as epitomized by, 8–­9; of newspapers, 15, 21, 42, 64–­65; in painting, 36; and sculpture, 39; and space, 21; viewing, as embodiment of, 57 Folha da Manhã (newspaper), 49 formalism, 13, 79 Fortes de Almeida, Carlos Fernando, 250n3 Foucault, Michel, 8, 263n74 frame, 2, 6–­8, 11–­15, 26, 30, 34, 43, 50–­51, 53–­54, 59, 63, 67–­68, 77, 87, 103, 105, 116, 128, 131, 181, 226, 235, 238, 257n94; difference, as province of, 10; folding of, 1, 10, 129; and space, 20 France, 243n2 Franco, Ceres, 219 Fried, Michael, 110, 112 Fuller, Buckminster, 260n29 Gabo, Naum, 149 Galeria Bonino, 89

Galeria das Folhas, 49, 51 Galeria G4, 1 Galleria Apollinaire, 150 Ganga Bruta (film), 272n75 Gautherot, Marcel, 80, 93 gender, 184, 215, 218, 223, 282n79; as term, 219. See also genus “Genesis of the Parangolé” (Gênese do Parangolé) (Bardin and Oiticica), 189, 190 genus, 192–­93, 195, 197, 200, 215–­16, 218–­19. See also gender; species geometric abstraction, 3, 8, 14, 21–­23, 26, 54, 76, 96, 122, 138, 141–­42, 149, 176, 248n39, 250n7, 275n126. See also abstraction Gerchman, Rubens, 261n51 Gestalt forms/psychology, 26, 28–­29, 37–­38, 49, 54, 59, 67, 109–­10, 138, 177, 192, 210; art, insufficiency of, 52; information theory, 32 Gil, Gilberto, 249n52 Giorgi, Bruno, 93 Glazebrook, Mark, 263n75 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 19, 25, 52, 192, 195, 251n16 Gonzaga, Luiz, 261n51 Gonzalez-­Torres, Felix, 232 Goulart, João, 95, 96 Greenberg, Clement, 256n92, 258n116 Grenoble (region of), 159, 273n87 Grupo Frente, 33, 135, 138–­39, 151 Grupo Opinião (Opinion Group), 185, 282n85 Guattari, Felix, 248n37, 263n74, 281n60 Gullar, Ferreira, 8, 12, 18, 19–­21, 25, 32–­33, 39, 41, 43–­44, 44, 52, 55, 64, 78–­79, 88–­89, 103, 129, 142, 148, 152, 181, 185, 218, 246n28, 247n30, 247n33, 250n3, 255n81, 256n86, 256n89, 256n92, 257n94, 257n99, 258n122, 268n14, 274n103, 277n13; Concrete poems of, 40, 42; Gestalt perception, 54; Grupo Opinião, link ­between, 282n85; “Manifesto Neoconcreto,” 37, 46, 51, 54, 140, 257n106, 265n99; non-­ objects, 53, 57, 63–­65, 67, 69, 77, 163; readymade, as problematic, 63 Habermas, Jürgen, 258n118 Habitat (magazine), 149, 150, 152 Hambridge, Jay, 264n79 Haudenschild, Hans, 261n51 Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color (exhibition), 231 Hesse, Eva, 230 Hochschule für Gestaltung, 23, 75, 161 Homage to the Square (Albers), 270n34 Ideia Visível (Visible Idea) (Cordeiro), 31–­32, 32, 38, 139. See also visible ideas ideogram: semiotic character of, 113 “Ideograma, Anagrama, Diagrama: Uma Leitura de Fenollosa” (Ideogram, Anagram, Diagram: A Reading of Fenollosa) (de Campos), 112 import substitution, 168

Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, The (Cassirer), 277n9 industrialization, 14–­15, 76, 101, 168, 176, 275n115; of paint, 133 Information (exhibition), 117–­18, 118, 205, 224, 226 informel, 54, 138 Instituto de Arte Contemporânea, 48 Instituto de Arte Infantil (Institute of Children’s Art), 139, 151 International Congress of Art Critics, 92 International Klein Blue (IKB), 150, 159–­60, 275n118 International Monetary Fund, 259n9 Invenções (Inventions) series (Oiticica), 142–­43, 152, 154, 166, 202, 269n33, 270n34, 272n68, 272n77; Invenção 10 “Bizet,” 143; Invenção 37, 144; Invenção 38, 144; Invenção 39, 144; Invenção 40, 145, 164; and vertical color, 150, 170, 209 invention: as concept, 12–­13, 23, 141–­42, 145–­46, 163, 248n39, 269n30 Irigaray, Luce, 8 isomorphism: Gestalt form, 25, 27–­28, 31 Itaú Cultural (foundation), 244n11 Jakobson, Roman, 113 Jardim, Reynaldo, 40, 44–­46, 88, 109, 110, 250n3, 255n81 Jerônimo, 214 Johns, Jasper, 274n100 Jornal do Brasil (newspaper), 15, 21, 37, 44–­45, 45, 47, 48–­50, 59, 64, 236, 284n20; advertising space in, 46–­47; redesign of, 60 Jornal do Comércio (newspaper), 101 Joselit, David, 248n43, 275n115 Judd, Donald, 256n90 Kandinsky, Wassily, 137, 148, 271n50 Kaprow, Allan, 230 Katz, Leandro, 225 Keeler, Paul, 104, 187, 263n75 Kiesler, Frederick, 92, 260n29 Klee, Paul, 137–­38, 148, 195, 279n45, 284n11 Klein, Yves, 12, 134, 150–­52, 151, 157, 159, 160, 171, 173–­74, 272n68, 273n81, 273n83, 273n91, 275n118; “France,” 158; planetary reliefs; 158; pure pigment, 157–­59; Rhodopas M resin, 158–­59 Köhler, Wolfgang, 25, 251n16 Kubitschek, Juscelino, 71, 76, 90, 94; Programa das Metas (Target Plan) of, 168 Laca Industrial Paint, 60–­61; advertising design for, 60 Langer, Suzanne, 265n99 language: and language acts, as two-­sided, 11; poetic functions of, 113 Latin America, 26, 48, 119

289

Index

Latin American art, 3, 6, 11, 12, 230; Latin American conceptual art, 6, 246n21, 246n24. See also avant-­garde; Brazil Lauand, Judith, 39 Le Corbusier, 75, 261n37; Athens Charter, 260n35; Chandigarh, planning of, 261n37; and Modulor, 261n37 Leibniz, Gottfried, 8 Leirner, Isaí, 49 Leonicio, J., 61 Lepidoptera (order of insects), 186, 192, 194, 216, 218, 241 LeWitt, Sol, 4 Lima, Mauricio Nogueiro, 261n51 Linnaeus, Carl, 192–­93, 195 Lisbon (Portugal), 235 Lissitsky, El, 149, 260n29 Living Theater, 264n83 Livro-­Obra (Book-­Work) (Clark), 245n16 Livro-­Poema No. 2 (Osso Nosso) [Book-­Poem No. 2 (Our Bone)] (Gullar), 40, 41 Livro-­Poemas (Book Poems) (Gullar), 40, 42–­43, 257n99 Lololiana (Oiticica), 108 Maciunas, George, 275n115 Made-­On-­The-­Body-­Cape (Oiticica), 224, 225, 230; as human pupa, 226 Maldonado, Tomás, 23, 24, 30–­31, 37, 49, 75–­76, 92, 161 Malevich, Kazimir, 76, 78, 137–­38, 140, 153, 259n20, 271n50, 272n68 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 4, 27, 42, 59, 64; newspaper, relationship to, 42–­43, 255n72 Mangueira, 57, 96, 181, 183, 184, 185, 200–­202, 215, 220, 277n7, 277n8 “Manifesto Neoconcreto” (Neoconcrete Manifesto) (Gullar), 22, 37, 46, 51, 54, 140, 257n106, 265n99 Manuel, Antonio, 96 maquettes, 15, 34, 65, 75, 79, 84, 86–87, 87, 88–­ 89, 94, 106, 122, 126–­27, 229, 267n124 Marchán Fiz, Simón, 6 Marcuse, Herbert, 101, 103 marginality: of artists, 183; myth of, 179; notion of, 178–­79, 276n139; objectification of, 183; paradigm of, 276n139 “Marionette” (Schlemmer), 211 Martins, Sérgio Bruno, 38, 256n89, 262n57 Marx, Karl, 147, 270n45 Matta-­Clark, Gordon, 230 Matter and Memory (Bergson), 140 Mauss, Marcel, 207 Mavignier, Almir, 252n20 McShine, Kynaston, 118 Medalla, David, 187, 219–­20, 278n25 Meireles, Cildo, 232 Mello e Souza, Cláudio, 250n3 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 8, 247n29

290

Merquior, José Guilherme, 64 Metaesquemas (Metaschemes) (Oiticica), 33–­35, 35, 53, 116, 138–­39, 253n46; folding, move toward, 36, 55; Möbius strip, as behavior, 67; rotational symmetry of, 35, 65 minimalism, 109, 256n90, 267n4 Ministério da Educação e Cultura (Ministry of Education and Culture), 52, 75 Ministério da Educação e Saúde (Ministry of Education and Health), 75, 268n11 Minneapolis (Minnesota), 235 Miranda, Duda, 232–­33, 232, 284n7 Miro, 181–­82, 201, 208, 220 Möbius strip: as behavior, 67; fold, epitome of, 8–­ 9, 37; and informational flatness, 37 modernity, 11, 15, 27, 71, 75, 94; and artists, 176; developmentalist ideology, 100; and modern art, 13; and painting, 137; and scale, 78–­79; subterrânia, critique of, 120; as transnational field, 12–­13 Mondrian, Piet, 6, 12, 23, 76–­77, 103, 137–­38, 141–­42, 150, 235–­36, 238, 271n50 monochrome, 1, 140, 142, 150–­52, 156, 159–­60 Morais, Frederico, 89, 261n51, 264n77 morphology, 192, 215–­16, 226 Morris, Robert, 109–­10, 111, 264n83, 264n84 Mosquito (of Mangueira), 57, 58, 59, 68, 220 Motta, Edson, 137–­38, 146, 173 Motta Filho, Edson, 274n94 Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro) (MAM-­RJ), 23, 52, 71, 72, 74, 78, 83, 88–­89, 94, 96, 100–­101, 135–­36, 149, 152, 161, 181–­82, 187, 189, 201, 210, 260n29, 268n11; construction of, 15, 73, 76, 121–­22, 127, 128; fire at, 121–­22; maquette of, 79; roots of, 75 Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Museum of Art of São Paulo) (MASP), 23, 255n73, 255n74 Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo) (MAM-­SP), 48 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), 231 Museu Mineiro, 232 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 75, 117, 205, 224, 260n29 Museu Nacional, 186, 188, 191, 193–­94, 198, 200, 226 Myth-­Opened Area (Oiticica), 108, 116 National Institute of Geography (France), 158 “Natureza Afetiva da Forma na Obra de Arte, Da” (The Affective Nature of Form in the Work of Art) (Pedrosa), 25, 251n16 Naves, Rodrigo, 82 Neoconcretism, 8, 14–­15, 20, 22–­23, 25, 36, 39, 48, 53–­54, 69, 76, 77, 79, 96, 128, 135, 141, 148, 150, 250n7, 253n53; Concretism, split between, 46, 60, 112, 139, 149; enfolding, 54; experiential research, emphasis on, 8; as expressive organism, 52; folding of, 44, 59, 68,

77, 81, 82, 129; and folds, 21; Gestalt form, 26; and newspaper, 24; and non-­objects, 65, 98, 104; organic quality of, 12; participation, invitation of, 64–­65; scale, concept of, 77; spatiality, concerns with, 60; time and space, relationship with, 21 “Neoconcretismo: Vértice e Ruptura no Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro” (Neoconcretism: Apex and Rupture in the Brazilian Constructive ­Project) (Brito), 121, 246n27, 250n8, 253n53 “Neoplasticismo VII,” 78 neoplasticist art, 76, 138 Nest-­Cells (Oiticica): studies for, 107 Nests (Oiticica), 117–­18, 118, 224, 226 Netherlands, 243n2 New Multiple Art (exhibition), 224 newspapers, 43, 59; aims of, 64; in Brazil, 43–­44; and Concrete poetry, 45; empty space, treatment of, 45; flatness of, 21, 39, 64; folds of, 21, 42, 64–­65; as public space, 64; social potential of, 64 Niemeyer, Oscar, 75 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 183, 223, 277n10, 283n91 non-­objects: 53, 54, 57, 63–­65, 67, 69, 77, 98, 104, 163; virtuality of, 83 North Africa, 273n87 “Notas para um trabalho” (Notes for a Work) (Oiticica), 148 Nova Objetividade Brasileira (New Brazilian Objectivity) (exhibition), 76, 96, 101, 104, 222, 259n9, 282n77 “Nova Teoria das Cores” (Jordan), 46 Nuclei series (Oiticica), 79, 85, 92, 117, 143, 195, 197, 207, 218; agency, as alternative model of, 12; as frame and fold, 10–­11; NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 (NC1 Small Nucleus 1), x, 1–­3, 8, 10–­ 14, 25, 65, 66, 67–­68, 84, 86–­87, 116, 120, 194; Nuclei NC3, 87; Nuclei NC4, 87; Núcleo (Nucleus), 86, 194, 196; Núcleo em lona (Nucleus in sailcloth), study for, 196, 196, 201 Núcleo Bandeirante, 261n45. See also Cidade Livre “Objeto, O” (The Object) (Cordeiro), 257n107 Objetos Ativos (Active Objects) (de Castro), 61, 61 Oiticica (butterfly), 192–­93 Oiticica, César (brother of Hélio), 139, 274n107 Oiticica, Hélio, x, 1–­2, 7–­8, 13–­14, 20, 22, 25, 35, 37, 40, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59–­60, 65, 67, 68, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 83, 85, 87, 88, 99, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 115, 118, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130, 131, 135, 135, 137, 139, 143, 145, 151, 153, 155, 164, 165, 169, 170, 173, 174, 177, 181, 182, 196, 197, 199, 202, 205, 208, 209, 210, 212–­13, 214, 221, 225, 228, 234, 237, 238, 250n3, 258n122, 263n75, 267n124, 274n100, 274n107, 281n60, 283n89, 284n20; aesthetic emancipation, concern with, 3; artist-­ outlaw, identification with, 178; artist’s patte

(hand), emphasis on, 175–­77; background of, 3; banner, political associations of, 204; as black, identification with, 281n65; body of color, theory of, 134, 146–­48, 150, 152–­53, 157, 160, 168–­69, 171, 174, 176, 178, 180, 215; Brazilian avant-­garde, characteristics of, 96, 98; carnival, as principal dancer (passista) of, 183, 185, 201; carnival, desfile (procession) of, 183, 201–­2, 280n53; cell, notion of, 117; children’s point of view, return to, 176–­77; chromatic development, 147, 183, 196, 202; color, aesthetic character of, 144–­46; color, inventing of, 142, 144; color practice of, 134, 139–­46, 148–­54, 156–­ 57, 166–­71, 175; constructive nucleus, 182; “creleisure,” notion of, 103–­4, 112, 120, 263n71; on dance, 205–­6; death of, 229; development, conception of, 147; discrete objects, rejection of, 3; durée, influence of on, 140; and esqueleto (skeleton), 127; external space, 36; favelas, engagement with, 6, 94, 96, 98, 100–­101, 104, 107, 117, 127, 182–­83, 200–­201, 207, 219, 226, 276n134, 277n7, 277n8; fire, in family home, 3, 5, 229–­30, 233; folded information, 33; Gestalt forms, use of, 33–­34; as global citizen, 117; graphic marks, use of, 33; identity, as performative event, 206; and informel, 54; inside-­out dynamic of, 140–­41; “invention,” notion of, 12, 141–­42, 145–­46; in London, 3, 16, 101, 104, 112, 116, 187, 223, 224; madeness, notion of, 132–­33; making, art of, 141; and maquettes, 267n124; as “marginal man,” 276n134; military dictatorship, relationship to, 16–­17; and modernism, 12; morphology, adoption of, 16; at Museu Nacional, 186, 188, 191, 193–­94, 200, 226, 278n19; in New York, 3, 16, 116–­17, 122, 206, 224, 236, 244n6, 248n40, 265n91, 265n101, 281n66, 281n70; paint, materiality of, 138; painting-­in-­general, 175–­76; participatory paradigm of, 16; and perception, 36; pigment, use of, 142–­46, 152, 154, 156–­57, 161, 163–70, 173–­74; pivotal role of, 3; plan, in work of, 84; poem capes, 205; program-­in-­progress, 3–­4, 244n6, 280n49; protest capes, 205; ready-­ constructible color, 134, 171–­72, 175–­76, 178; readymade objects, use of, 15, 161–­63, 166–­ 71, 175–­77; retrospective of, 243n2; in samba ensaio, 184; scale, approaches to, 84, 87, 88–­89, 92; “second death” of, 230; in Serpa’s class, 135, 138; social marginality, of artists, 183; structural element of, 5; subterrânia, concept of, 119–­20, 119, 224, 275n118; taxonomy, adoption of, 16, 87, 186–­87, 192–­200, 206, 278n19; trans-­objects, concept of, 162–­63; tropicália movement, association with, 249n52, 264n76; undated sketch of, 70; vertical color, 142, 150; viewer’s reception, emphasis on, 3; watching-­ wearing cycle, 180, 182–­83, 218, 224; wearable works, 16; weekly schedule of, 191. See also individual works

291

Index

Oiticica, José (grandfather of Hélio) 147, 265n99 Oiticica Filho, José (father of Hélio), 166, 167, 191–­ 94, 198, 216, 278n20, 279n45; insect galleries, 187 Opinião 65 (Opinion 65) (exhibition), 96, 181, 184–­85 Opinião 66 (Opinion 66) (exhibition), 96 opticality, 131 Oud, J. J. Pieter, 236 outsider art: geometric abstraction, link with, 176 Ovo Linear (Linear Egg) (Clark), 49, 51, 52, 59, 104–­6, 116; gestation, as space of, 50; Möbius strip, as likened to, 49–­50 Owens, Craig, 6 Oxumaré (deity), 223–­24 paint, 33, 55, 60–­61, 88, 133, 137–­40, 142–­46, 148–­50, 159, 161, 164–­65, 167–­68, 170–­71, 173, 209; painting-­in-­general, 136, 175–­76; and pigment, 154, 158, 166 Palatnik, Abraham, 33 Palermo, Blinky, 134 Pape, Lygia, 37, 60–­61, 62, 63, 109–­10, 110, 112, 136, 194, 247n29, 250n3, 253n50, 255n81, 258n114, 264n84; Piraquê cookie wrappers, designs for, 62 Parangolé (Oiticica), 14, 16, 96, 180–­81, 185–­ 87, 197–­98, 202, 204, 221, 224–­25, 230–­31, 253n50, 278n25; anti-­art, as proclamation of, 215, 227, 282n77; art, new genus of, 215; bodily emancipation, signifying of, 201; body, as composite, 226; body, unfolding of, 215; capes, 209, 211, 218, 220; emancipation, as instrument of, 220; emergence, as embodiment of, 216, 226; fantasia (costume), contrast with, 207; favela, as poeticization of, 219; favela architecture, character of, 182; inauguration of, 185, 215; interpretations of, 219–­20; as morphological, 216; as myth, 184; pamphlet mock-­up, 182; phantom limb, 211; as protest, 220; protest capes, 205; self-­othering of, 183; sociosexual pairing, 215–­16, 218–­19; spatial positions of, 206; as term, 188–­90, 196, 200–­201, 207, 218; transgressive character of, 278n18; as trousseau, 218; use-­without-­aim, 218 Parangolé “Jornal” (“Newspaper” Parangolé) (Oiticica), 237 Parangolé series (Oiticica), 279n45; Cabeleiras Parangolé (Oiticica), 199; P1 Parangolé Estandarte 1 (P1 Parangolé Standard 1), 201–­2, 202, 203–­5, 207, 220; P2 Parangolé Bandeira 1 (P2 Parangolé Flag 1), 185, 207; P3 Parangolé Tenda 1 (P3 Parangolé Tent 1), 189, 196, 196, 202, 207; P4 Parangolé Capa 1 (P4 Parangolé Cape 1), 181, 208, 209, 209; P5 Parangolé Capa 2, 209–­10, 210, 211, 211, 212, 213, 211, 215, 222; P7 Parangolé Capa 4 “Lygia Clark,” 192; P8 Parangolé Capa 5 “Mangueira,” 214,

292

215; P15 Parangolé Capa 11 “Incorporo a Revolta” (I Embody Revolt), 220, 221; P17 Parangolé Capa 13 “Estou Possuido” (I Am Possessed), 223–­24; Parangolé Capes, 206; Parangolé Jornal (Newspaper Parangolé), 236; Parangolé Standards, 206; Parangolé Tents, 206 Paris (France), 235 Paris Biennale (1967): protest capes at, 205 Parshall, Peter, 231 participation, 2–­3, 5, 12, 19, 64, 79, 83, 89, 96, 153, 185, 219, 230, 278n25; as emergent paradigm, 16–­17; as epistemological event, 14; as participatory art, 6 Pedrosa, Mário, 25, 27, 71–­72, 76, 89, 92, 93, 94, 100, 101, 103, 121, 127, 136–­37, 136, 147, 149–­51, 171, 220, 252n20, 256n86, 256n89, 261n51, 265n99, 272n65, 272n71; childhood art education, control in, 176; Gestalt form, interest in, 26, 29 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 112–­13 Penetrables (Soto), 260n27 Penetrável series (Oiticica), 84, 88–­89, 107, 110, 143, 149, 152–­53, 195, 207; Penetrável Parangolé, 196, 201; PN1 Penetrável 1 (PN1 Penetrable 1), 85; PN2 A Pureza e um Mito (PN2 Purity Is a Myth), 98; PN3 Imagétical, 98; study for, 197 “Perdura o Problema das Tintas” (The Problem of Paints Persists) (Motta), 137 Perlman, Janice, 179; marginality paradigm, 276n139 Perrault, John, 206 Pevsner, Antoine, 76, 149 Phelan, Wynne, 166, 173, 269n20 phenomenology, 1–­2, 8, 11–­12, 15, 20, 24, 38–­39, 50, 52, 55, 57, 59, 64, 68–­69, 88, 134, 138, 141–­ 43, 148, 156, 163, 179, 218, 236 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Cassirer), 116 Picasso, Pablo, 148 pigment, 11, 16, 131, 140–­43, 145–­46, 152, 156, 162, 168, 171–­73, 179, 181, 209, 211, 233, 241; as raw, 15, 132, 134, 144, 154, 157–­61, 163–­65, 169–70, 174–­75, 178, 180, 200; as readymade, 166–­67 Pigment pur bleu (Pure Blue Pigment) (Klein), 157, 157 Pignatari, Décio, 23, 27, 29, 136, 255n75 Pilgrim (Rauschenberg), 274n100 Piraquê (cookie company), 61, 63; designs for, 62 plan, 71–­72, 75, 79, 83–­84, 92, 94, 101, 104, 106–­ 8, 110–­17, 119–­20, 132; Brasília pilot-­plan, 43, 90, 93, 100, 260n32; concept of, 73; as ideal diagram, 112 Planetary Relief “Region of Grenoble” (RP 10) (Klein), 159 Planos em Superfície Modulado No. 1 (Planes in Modulated Surfaces No. 1) (Clark), 33–­34, 34, 38; folding, move toward, 36 Platonic forms, 37–­38

Poema Enterrado (Buried Poem) (Gullar), 88 Poetics of Space (Bachelard), 89 poetry: and language, 113; and syntax, 113. See also Concrete poetry Pollock, Jackson, 12, 150, 271n64 Pontual, Robert, 121–­22, 250n3 Portinari, Candido, 250n7 “Posição e Programa” (Position and Program) (Oiticica), 282n77 Pound, Ezra, 27, 112 1˚ Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta (1st National Exhibition of Concrete Art), 22, 27, 27, 28, 31–­34, 39, 40, 45, 57, 76 Primeiro Televisão (The First Television) (exhibition), 255n73 “Proclamation of the Parangolé” (Proclamação do Parangolé) (Bardin and Oiticica), 189, 190 Projeto Cães de Caça (Hunting Dogs Project) (Oiticica), 88, 88, 89, 92, 94, 106, 112, 127 Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro na Arte (Brazilian Constructive Project in Art) (exhibition), 121 “Poem Capes” (Oiticica), 205 “Protest Capes” (Oiticica), 205 Prouvé, Jean, 92 Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color (Rodchenko), 154, 156, 156 Pyramid (Square Plan) (Andre), 125 Pyre (Element Series) (Andre), 125, 126

Ribeiro, Jackson, 96, 277n7 Richter, Gerhard, 134 Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), 8, 14–­15, 20, 22, 28, 34–­35, 39–­40, 94, 96, 112, 121–­22, 135, 139, 149, 183, 186, 220, 236; favelas of, 76, 95, 127, 179, 188, 219 Riveira, Tania, 246n28 Robertson, Bryan, 263n75 Robho (journal), 257n101 Rocha Pitta, Matheus, 284n7 “‘Rock n’ Roll’ da Poesia, O” (The Rock n’ Roll of Poetry), 40 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 122–­24, 124, 126, 128, 154, 156–­58, 156, 160 Rodrigues, Glauco, 275n117 Rodrigues, Sérgio, 261n46 Rolnik, Suely, 281n60 Rose, Barbara, 126 Rotterdam (Netherlands), 235 Russian constructivism, 125, 141, 154. See also constructivism

Sacilotto, Luís, 37–­39, 37, 253n51 “Salão Preto e Branco” (Black and White Salon) (exhibition), 137, 168 Salomão, Waly, 103, 178, 188, 263n70 São Paulo (Brazil), 14, 22, 35, 39–­40, 76, 121 São Paulo bienals: in 1954, 137; in 1959, 149; in 1961, 149–­50; in 1994, 186; eighth bienal, “Quadro Começa Quando Você Chega, O” 267n4; first bienal, 23; second bienal, 267n4; (The Picture Starts When You Arrive), 28 sixth bienal, 148, 188 Qual é o Parangolé? (What is the Parangolé?) Sardinha, Bishop, 98, 100, 262n55 (Salomão), 188, 263n70, 278n19 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 113, 265n94 Quebra da Moldura (Breaking the Frame) (Clark), scale, 15, 20, 72, 77–­79, 89, 92, 94–­95, 101, 106–­ 10, 34 7, 110, 122, 126–­27; as content, 81–­84; and scalelessness, 81, 82, 87, 90 Ramírez, Mari Carmen, 6, 243n3, 246n21, 248n42, Schapiro, Meyer, 92, 204 269n22, 269n23 Schlemmer, Oskar, 210, 211 Rauschenberg, Robert, 12, 162, 274n100 Schwarz, Roberto, 100, 104, 204, 248n44, 262n64 Ready Constructible (Oiticica), 15, 75, 123, 128, Schwitters, Kurt, 12, 134, 148–­49, 152, 166–­67, 132–­34, 145, 154, 233; additive principle of, 188, 195, 271n55, 271n57, 279n45 124; as diagram, 129; framing, notion of, 129; Sêcos (dry ones) (Oiticica), 138 as maquette without scale, 122, 126–­27; notes 2˚ Exposição de Arte Neoconcreta (2nd Exhibition for, 122 of Neoconcrete Art), 20, 57 readymade, 167, 274n115; act of making, 15–­16; Seitz, William, 274n113 body of color, 16; color, engagement with, 133–­ Seja Marginal Seja Herói (Be an Outlaw Be a 34; and Duchamp, 133–­34, 162–­63, 166, 168, Hero) (Oiticica), 178, 249n52, 276n134 267n4, 274n103, 284n8; objects, 63, 132, 149, Sem título (Untitled) (de Castro), 38 163; as problematic, 63 Sem título (Untitled) (Valentin), 146 “Recentness in Sculpture” (Greenberg), 256n92 Sem título de Francis Alÿs, por Duda Miranda Reidy, Affonso Eduardo, 75 (Untitled of Francis Alÿs, by Duda Miranda) relational aesthetics, 3, 243n4 (Miranda), 232 Relevo Espacial (Spatial Relief) (Oiticica), 20, 57, Sem título (Série Branca) (Untitled, White Series) 58, 59, 65, 68, 85, 86–87, 116, 194, 202, 209 (Oiticica), 139, 140 Renaissance, 92, 168, 231 Série Branca (White Series) (Oiticica), 54, 139–­40, Resende, José, 121 142, 145–­46, 149, 169, 173 Respire Comigo (Breathe with Me) (Clark), 221–­ Série Vermelho (Red Series) (Oiticica), 156 22 Serpa, Ivan, 33, 75, 135–­39, 136, 145, 147, 151, Restany, Pierre, 150, 272n65 176

293

Index

Seurat, Georges, 171–­72, 172, 176, 275n122 “Transição da Côr do Quadro Para o Espaço e o Sidgwick, Emma, 281n60 Sentido de Construtividade, A” (The TransiSignals (gallery), 104, 187 tion of Color from Canvas into Space and the Signals (journal), 219, 259n20 Sense of Construction) (Oiticica), 149 Silva, Alcir Figueira da, 276n134 Tripartite Unity (Bill), 8–­9, 23, 38; Möbius strip, as based on, 36–­37 Silva, Rodrigues da, 278n18 Tropicália (Oiticica), 101, 104, 108, 118, 224, Silveira, Nise da, 252n20 262n59, 263n68, 263n75; favelas, inspired by, Smithson, Robert, 114, 232 94, 96, 100; as map, 112; as national allegory, Snare Pictures (Spoerri), 166 100; television, networked entity of, 98, 100; Sodré, Nelson Werneck, 255n70 Tropicália, Penetrables PN2 and PN3, 99 Soto, Jesus Rafael, 260n27 tropicalismo, 100, 104 Soviet Union, 257n107, 271n62 Tu m’ (Duchamp), 133, 133, 134 Spanúdis, Theon, 250n3, 255n81 Tupí peoples, 98, 100 Spatial Constructions (Rodchenko), 122–­24, 124, 128 species, 189, 192–­93, 195, 197, 201, 215–­16, 218, União National dos Estudantes (National Students Union) (UNE), 277n13 226, 231, 233; speciation event, 186, 200. See Unidades (Units) (Clark), 49, 50, 53, 105, 140 also genus United States, 3, 176, 243n2 Sphingidae (family of butterfly), 191–­93 University of Sussex, 117, 224 Spoerri, Daniel, 166 Untitled Blue Monochrome (IKB 67) (Klein), 151 subjectivity, 16, 26, 40, 50, 59, 172 utopia: as critical, 101; as positivist, 101 “subterrânia” (subterranean) (Oiticica), 6, 119–­20, 119, 132, 134, 165, 171, 224, 266n107, 275n118 “Utopia—­Work of Art” (Pedrosa), 101 utterance, 11–­13 Superfície modulado (Modulated Surface) (Clark), 33 Valentin, Andreas, 145, 146, 147, 154, 177, 234, Superintendência da Moeda e do Crédito (SUMOC), 268n11 235–­36, 237, 238, 270n39, 284n20 Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil (newsvan Doesburg, Theo, 23, 29, 78, 264n81 paper), 19, 21–­22, 24–­25, 34, 39–­40, 42–­43, Vantongerloo, Georges, 78 44, 46, 49, 52–­53, 55, 57, 65, 67, 76–­78, 78, Veloso, Caetano, 249n52 110, 142, 148; art in, as folded, 60; blank space Venice (Italy), 168 in, 45–­46; Concrete poems, publishing of, 45; Verde Erva (Green Herb) (Gullar), 40, 41 as cultural tool, 44; as design laboratory, 45; Vergara, Carlos, 261n51, 272n68 Gestalt principles, applying of toward, 45 Vergara dos Sertes, G., 261n51 Vieira, Décio, 250n3 Tarabukin, Nikolai, 141 visible ideas: 32–­33, 43, 49 Tate Modern, 126, 230–­33 Visionary Architecture (exhibition), 260n29 Tatlin, Vladimir, 149–­50, 257n94 Volume-­Constructions (Vantongerloo), 78 Tauber-­Arp, Sophie, 148 taxonomy, 16, 87, 186, 192–­98, 216, 226; as logic, Ward’s Natural Establishment Inc., 166 4, 187, 189, 200–­201, 206, 215–­16, 218–­19, Warhol, Andy, 134 278n19, 279n45 watching-­wearing cycle, 180, 182–­83, 218–­20, Teatro Integral (Integral Theater) (Jardim), 88 223–­24, 226 Tecelares (Weavings) (Pape), 61, 62, 63, 258n114 Weissmann, Franz, 39, 250n3, 255n81 “Teoria do Não-­Objeto” (Theory of the Non-­Object) Whitechapel Gallery, 84, 101, 102, 103, 104, (Gullar), 53 108, 109, 112, 114, 115, 116, 224, 226, 263n75, 3˚ Exposição de Arte Neoconcreta (exhibition), 68 264n84 3˚ Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna (3rd National Wisnik, Guilherme, 265n102 Salon of Modern Art) (exhibition), 136 Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), 150 “Testemunho” (Testimony) (Oiticica), 271n50 “Tipos de Saturnioidea no United States National Ypiranga paint, 269n20; advertisement for, 140, Museum 5—­Gênero Arseunura Duncan, 1841” 140 (Oiticica Filho), 217 Yves, Le Monochrome (Klein), 157 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 223 topology, 5, 7–­9, 11–­14, 37, 112 Zevi, Bruno, 92 Torres-­García, Joaquín, 23, 122, 248n39

294