By CELSO FAVARETTO & PAULA BRAGA
Excerpt, selected by the authors, from the recently released book
Hélio Oiticica always referred to his activity as a program in progress. From his proposal of “death of painting” to “anti-art” and environmental demonstrations,[I] His program became denser, in texts and propositions, from the years of involvement with neoconcretism to his idea of a “beyond art”.
In the intensity of the drive that drives his experiences after the “end of the painting” – as he says, “in the sense of the painting-picture transformed into something else”, so that “the painting would have to go out into space, be complete, not on the surface, in appearance, but in its profound integrity”[ii] –, the conceptualization of the environmental, already indicated in the diary's writings since the early 1960s, led him to a sequence of proposals for structural opening up until the proposition of “environmentalization”.
Even though a 1960 model for the Hunting Dogs Project be a precursor of environmental structures, it is with the Environmental Manifestation I, from 1966, at Galeria G4, Rio de Janeiro, which brought about a radical change in the program – which Mario Pedrosa would place under the sign of what he called “post-modern art”. The environmental manifestation Tropicalia, established in the exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira, in 1967, embodies the environmental program, participating in one of the most critical and creative moments of the Brazilian avant-garde, as a meeting of artistic experimentation and cultural criticism.
Tropicalia It is the apex of the program and of the fundamental category of participation, with which the sought-after relationship of structure-experience is articulated, that is, the transmutation of art into proposals to be experienced by the participant without any predetermination. This radical redefinition of what art is justifies, in Oiticica's writings, the use of the term anti-art; the artist refers to Décio Pignatari's text, “Theory of Artistic Guerrilla Art”[iii], to establish the relationship between the experimental and life: “[…] the experimental exercise of freedom evoked by Mário Pedrosa does not consist in the 'creation of works' but in the initiative of assuming the experimental […] Décio Pignatari: the vision of structures leads to anti-art and life; the vision of events (works) leads to art and distancing from life”[iv].
The growing opening of the structural towards the behavior-structure, towards the “beyond-environment”, will erupt in the proposition of Crelazer, a key concept that emerges in Oiticica's thinking with the Eden, project assembled in WhitechapelGallery, in London, between February and April 1969, in which he incorporates the conception of life-art as a non-repressive activity.
In Hélio Oiticica's environmental program, Eden It is a turning point in the process of transmutation of art, as he formulates in the text of the exhibition catalogue: “for me all art comes to this: the need for a suprasensory meaning of life, of transforming the processes of art into sensations of life”. Transmuted, art in Oiticica will also be political, as it opposes all forms of programmed desublimation.
All of Oiticica’s experimentation forms a coherent program that problematizes the Brazilian and international situation of creation, and develops as a version of contemporary production that explores the provisionality of aesthetics and resignifies collective creation, the marginality of the artist, and the politics of art. The basic tendency of the program is to transform art into something else; into “exercises for behavior,” operated by participation. Now, the very virtue of behaviors is to manifest themselves as powers of pure living, exploring the movement of life as a creative manifestation.
No in progress program In the environmental sphere, behaviors release repressed possibilities, loosen individuality, and confuse expectations; they manifest the power of transgression. By discrediting long-range projects and historical conceptions based on regularities, and affirming the power of transgression, Oiticica broke, in that situation, with the proposals for resistance under development in the country, pointing to alternative, underground practices.[v]
A visionary impulse to revalue art, Hélio Oiticica’s experimentation takes place as an open program, triggered by the project of transforming painting into an environmental structure. Operating displacements, subordinating ruptures to continuity, the program advances by denying and incorporating propositions. In the evolution of this experimentation, which is not fixed, music and dance are intrinsic to the propositions, operators of passages and signs of transformability, an image of invention. Allusively, or by analogy, they appear in predominantly plastic-visual experiences; explicitly, they integrate the new “environmental order”, triggered by the “discovery of the body” in parangolé.
The experimental trajectory unleashed by Hélio Oiticica, based on neoconcrete propositions, as a solution to the problems and impasses triggered by the crisis in painting, led him to the invention of spatial structures in which he sought to resolve the issues of structure, color, space and time, already introducing the category of participation, which pointed to the shift of art towards behaviors, with the valorization of the body and life experiences.
By identifying a broad and heterodox “constructive tendency” in modern and contemporary art, rejecting the “formalist” determinations of constructive developments, Hélio Oiticica revisits research by Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian; Schwitters and Duchamp; Pollock, Wols, Yves Klein and Rothko; and Lygia Clark and other neoconcrete artists, formulating an original “sense of construction” that, for him, “opens the most positive and varied paths to which all the sensibility of modern man aspires, that is, those of transforming one’s own existential experience, one’s own daily life, into expression”.[vi]
From this perspective, a sequence of experiences is triggered, aimed at the disintegration of the frame and the overcoming of painting by launching it into “real space”: Metaschemas, inventions e Spatial Reliefs, Nuclei, penetrable, Bolides, Parangolés. As a single development, these proposals provide an anamnesis of modern research into the transformation of plastic space and the rapprochement between art and life, and invent a new proposal: Environmental Manifestations.
With them, Oiticica proposes another aesthetic space, which no longer refers to the individuality of creation and contemplative reception. A space of actions and behaviors, this new space presupposes the destruction of the forms of evidence of painting, maintaining only the possibility of founding structural relations that shelter “new senses of space and time.”
*Celso Favaretto is an art critic, retired professor at the Faculty of Education at USP and author, among other books, of The invention of Helio Oiticica (Edusp).
Paula Braga is a professor of philosophy at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC). She is the author of, among other books, Hélio Oiticica, singularity, multiplicity (Perspective).
Reference
Celso Favaretto and Paula Braga. Environmental demonstrations, by Hélio Oiticica. New York, New York, 2024, 88 pages.
Notes
[I] Throughout the text, words and expressions in quotation marks, without author citation, belong to Hélio Oiticica's lexicon.
[ii] Hélio Oiticica, “February 16, 1961”, in Aspire to the Great Labyrinth, 1986, pp. 26-27. File HO 0187/61
[iii] Décio Pignatari, “Theory of Artistic Guerrilla Warfare” [1967], in Countercommunication. São Paulo, Perspective, 1971.
[iv] Helio Oiticica, “Experimenting the Experimental”, 1974, p. 6; and César Oiticica Filho (org.), Hélio Oiticica: The Museum is the World,2011. File ho 0380/72.
[v] Hélio Oiticica, “Underground 2”, in Aspire to the Great Labyrinth, 1986, p. 127. on. cit., 2011. File no. 0382/69.
[vi] Hélio Oiticica, “The Transition of the Color of the Painting to the Space and the Sense of Constructiveness”, in Aspire to the Great Labyrinth, 1986, pp. 54 ff. Archive ho 1861/62.
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