 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Hélio Oiticica and the notion of the popular in the 1960s
Michael Asbury
Michael Asbury is currently researching a PhD on Hélio Oiticia at Camberwell College of Art, London
Recently I gave a paper at an art history conference which dealt with Hélio
Oiticica’s work in relation to the social-cultural transitions which
occurred in Brazil from the 1950s to the 60s. [1] This transition entailed
a shift from a positivist belief in the process of modernisation to an often
politically engaged concern with the popular. In the arts, this led to the
development from the orthodox constructivist-oriented concretism to neoconcretism,
and finally to Oiticica’s engagement with the people of the shanty
towns or favelas. The intention of such a historical overview was to argue
against recent interpretations of Oiticica’s work which posit him
as a paradigmatic figure in Brazilian contemporary art, purporting a Brazilian
aesthetic tradition from the early modernists to the contemporary. During
the panel discussion which followed, I was reminded by another panellist
of Mário Pedrosa’s claim in 1965/6 that Oiticica’s work
was post-modern. This paper - a reworked version of the previous presentation
- is a response to that remark.
The shift from the 1950s utopian belief whereby underdevelopment could be
overcome by forced industrialisation, to the questioning in the 1960s of
the hierarchies of social classes and categories of cultural production
- high art versus popular culture - does indeed seem coherent with the -
now not so recent, and apparently never ending - post-modern debate. I apologise
for bringing this up once more!
Although the remark at the conference posited Oiticica as precursor of postmodernist
issues, I tend to agree with Beverley and Oviedo, that: “There is
something about the very idea of a Latin American postmodernism that makes
one think of that condition of colonial or neo-colonial dependency in which
goods that have become shop-worn or out of fashion in the metropolis are
[...] exported to the periphery, where they enjoy a profitable second life.”
[2]
We must also acknowledge that Oiticica’s posthumous itinerant international
retrospective [3] was the result on the one hand, of dedicated individuals
- such as Guy Brett - while on the other hand, it was also a symptom of
the art world’s unease towards issues such as modernity’s
inherent Eurocentric historicisation. A view which arose from post-colonial
studies’ critique of modernity’s association with teleological
notions of historical progress, implicit in the so-called grand-narratives.
However, while certain sectors of the academic debate provided a critique
of the totalising, Western, white, heterosexual, male, premises of the historical
construction of modernity, postmodernism could also be accused of providing
a cynic, undifferentiated and fragmented alternative with little to offer
in terms of strategies for historical practices and coherent resistances
against the increasingly globalised/totalised structures of capitalism.
Let us not forget that postmodernism also gave us exhibitions such as Magiciens
de la Terre [4], where undifferentiated Western and primitive art were shown
disconnected from social cultural contexts. Such exhibitions tend towards
a formalism which in a sense ironically replicates high modernist views
of art as a specialised domain of aesthetics. Briefly, exhibitions such
as Magiciens de la Terre attempt to reconcile the Western and its Other
through Western ideals of the aesthetic.
For a non-Brazilian public the notion of otherness in relation to Oiticica’s
work is twofold: first, he is an artist from Brazil, a country that still
conjures fantasies of exoticism in the European imagination. Second, Oiticica,
although from a middle-class background, developed a strong connection with
the Brazilian ‘Other’: the underprivileged, predominantly black,
socially excluded people of the favela. (There are also a third and forth
dimension to the issue of otherness and marginalisation in connection with
his work/life: these were homosexualism and drugs.)
However, before the issue of otherness can be discussed, it is necessary
to place the claim that Oiticica’s work is post-modern along side
another of Pedrosa’s statements - possibly the most notorious - that
Brazil is a country condemned to modernity. The latter was set in the context
of the construction of Brasilia and carries with it the weight of the positivist
- or as it is known: developmentalist - ideology of the 1950s. Admittedly,
Pedrosa’s position tended far more towards a defence of modern architecture
and abstract art than of government rhetoric, but the spirit of rationalism
and positivism was equally pervasive in the arts. It is reasonable to assume
that Oiticica’s post-modern label indicated for Pedrosa a post-constructive
phase. A phase in which art had transcended the domain of an avant-garde
which was concerned primarily with aesthetics. An art that transcended the
museum.
Oiticica began his work as an artist in the abstract constructivist orientated
Grupo Frente in Rio de Janeiro. For culture as a whole - art, literature,
music, and cinema -, the 1950s was a period of incredible growth, both creative
and structural.
The developmentalist nationalist rhetoric of the Juscelino Kubitscheck’s
government - from 1956 to 61 - claimed that Brazilians could no longer accept
destiny as a negative entity. There was a generalised feeling that the country
was in the process of overcoming underdevelopment through forced industrialisation:
a period in which the arts and in particular architecture became symbolic
of modernity itself.
However, if Brasilia stands as a monument to the positivism of the 1950s,
the inauguration of the new capital in 1960 also indicates the demise of
the developmentalist ideology. For instance, the shanty towns which housed
the people who worked on the city’s construction tarnished its utopian
credibility right from the start.
The presidential election in 1961 and subsequent resignation - 7 months
later - of Jânio Quadros put in power the leftist vice-president João
Goulart. The change of government saw a liberalisation in politics accompanied
by an increase in trade union activities, the movement for agrarian reform,
plans for a radical scheme of alphabetisation, a nation-wide cultural and
political mobilisation by the student’s union and in the arts, a sometimes
antagonistic concern for notions of the popular.
One of the most radical repercussions that this transition entailed in the
arts was its effect on Ferreira Gullar, a poet and art critic who under
Pedrosa’s influence became the theoretician of the neoconcrete movement.
Two years after publishing the Neoconcrete Manifesto [5] and the Theory
of the Non-Object [6], Ferreira Gullar abandoned the neoconcrete group to
become involved with a movement of popular engagement, the CPC (Centres
for Popular Culture), organised by the national students Union.
The CPC attempted to bring political consciousness to the masses through
the use of culture. This occurred through the presentation of theatre plays,
particularly in the shanty towns. From neoconcrete poet concerned with formal
experimentation in language, Ferreira Gullar reinvented himself as a politically
engaged playwright. Convinced that the avant-garde was essentially elitist,
he attempted to create a popular and accessible theatre.
Years later, in an interview, Gullar discussed arriving at the impasse which
led him to abandon the movement:
“At the time I was [...] the theoretician of the group, examining and speculating non-stop. When I realised the direction in which we were heading I proposed an exhibition to destroy everything. [...] The proposal was to place explosives behind or within all the works. People would see the works, at 6pm we would ask them to leave the gallery because the exhibition was about to finish, then we would explode the exhibition.” [7]
The proposed destruction of the works acted as affirmation of the importance
of the idea - or concept - over the object of art, traditionally placed
within the museum. It seems therefore paradoxical that Gullar rejected Oiticica’s
subsequent performative art.
For Gullar, the neoconcrete experience tended to transform art into ideas
and as such the movement had reached its own limits. Although Oiticica’s
relation to popular culture was very different in nature, the influence
which Gullar’s critical position had on Oiticica should not be underestimated.
[8]
Neoconcretism, having opened the way for an art concerned with its surrounding
and the perceptual approach of the viewer, became recognised as the catalyst
for contemporary art in Brazil. This is also one of the main factors in
the associations of Oiticica’s work with the postmodern: it represents
the rupture with the strictly contemplative art which preceded it. Ronaldo
Brito’s seminal text on the movement interprets neoconcretism as the
‘Peak and Rupture’ [9] of the constructive tradition in Brazil.
He argued that the movement held two distinct tendencies: one of implicit
humanism which tended to inform industrial design qualitatively while preserving
the specificity and aura of the work of art; the other more disruptive,
distancing itself from the constructive tradition through a dramatic transformation
of art’s function and raison d’être. Therefore, although
the constructivist tendency was positivist in character, the adoption of
dada-like strategies - what Oiticica called anti-art - introduced a confrontational
dimension to a section of the neoconcrete production. In Oiticica’s
post-neoconcrete work, the questioning of art’s function did not replace
his constructive development, it integrated it. However, by emphasising
the constructive element of Oiticica’s post-neoconcrete work, certain
historical surveys have overshadowed important shifts which occurred between
neoconcretism and the experimental and performative art of the mid and late
1960s.
Other than Gullar’s anti-modern position following his abandonment
of the avant-garde - a position which did not recognise Oiticica’s
post-neoconcrete phase as operating within the domain of art -, there are
two distinctive views of Oiticica’s work which have subsequently developed:
the traditionalists who emphasise the constructive or modernist character
of the work, and those who tend to stress the post-neoconcrete, the anti-art
side of the work; in other words, the post-modern. However, it could be
said that during the 1960s Oiticica proposed a non-dialectical synthesis
of the constructive and the anti-art - the classical and the romantic, or
the Apollonian and Dionysian.
Oiticica’s involvement with the people and traditions of the Mangueira
shanty town operated initially through dance and the tradition of carnival.
His involvement with popular culture was markedly distinct from that of
Gullar’s in the sense that he did not adopt a position of authority.
Although Oiticica clearly developed a political/ethical programme of engagement
with the popular, its nature was participatory and non-moralistic. His politics
pertained to anarchism rather than Marxism. As opposed to Gullar’s
decisive rupture, Oiticica added this new experience to his artistic production
in the form of new layers of meanings.
I quote Oiticica:
“Before anything else it is necessary to clarify my interest for dance, for rhythm, in my particular case it came from a vital necessity for a disintellectualisation [...]. It was therefore, an experience of greater vitality, indispensable, particularly in the demolition of preconceived ideas and stereotypification, etc. [...] there was a convergence of this experience with the form which my art took in the Parangolé [...].
The collapse of social preconceived ideas, of separations of groups, social
classes etc., would be inevitable and essential in the realisation of this
vital experience [...]. The bourgeois conditioning which I had been submitted
since I was born, undid itself as if by magic [...] I believe that the dynamic
of the social structures were at this moment revealed to me, in all their
crudity [...] [M]arginality [...]would be a total lack of social place [...]at
the same time being a discovery of an individual place as total man in the
world [...].” [10]
It would be reasonable to speculate that behind such a position lies Oiticica’s
reading of Nietzsche. The poet Waly Salomão claimed that “Hélio
had read Nietzsche from the age of 13 and that he liked to repeatedly say
that: ‘I am the son of Nietzsche and a relative of Artaud.’”
[11]
Oiticica’s approach to the popular distinguishes itself from those
on the traditional Left and the Right for its affirmative stance, in a Nietzschean
sense. The orthodox Marxist belief in the necessity to educate the people
into class consciousness displays a position of negation similar to the
notion of redemption in Christianity. Perhaps this explains both the Left’s
and the Right’s rejection of imported mass popular culture, the former
as an anti-imperialist stance, the latter in the spirit of nationalist pride.
After all, if the Right saw Marxism as imported and anti-national - as Roberto
Schwarz has wisely remarked - it was perhaps due to the belief that Fascism
was a Brazilian invention.
What distinguishes Oiticica’s position is his recognition of the problems
of adopting a dialectical position in relation to the question of the Brazilian
popular culture and outside influences.
Guy Brett in Oiticica’s Whitechapel Gallery Catalogue of 1969 wrote
that:
“On one level Tropicália is an environment of blatantly presented tropical images, and it would be easy to take it superficially as a piece of Brazilian folklore. But the hidden level of Tropicália is the process of penetrating it, the web of sensory images which produce an intensely intimate confrontation, specially perhaps with the innermost image of all, in pitch darkness, the universal switched-on TV set. The typical turns into actual in this mythical space.” [12]
Although his installation Tropicália is the obvious connection with
the music movement tropicalismo and what became known as the Festive Left
- a faction of the left usually associated with the arts, who where generally
more open to outside cultural influences -, Oiticica’s Politico-philosophical
position is perhaps more discernible through an analysis of an earlier work
- in fact a series of works - which he made as a homage to his outlaw friend
Cara de Cavalo (a nick name which translated means Horse Face).
I quote Oiticica:
“[…] apart from any subjective sympathy for the person himself, [Homage to Cara de Cavalo] represented for me an ‘ethic moment’ that reflected powerfully on everything I made afterwards: it revealed to me more an ethical problem than anything else related to aesthetics. I want here to homage what I think is the individual social revolt: that of the so-called bandit. Such thinking is very dangerous but something necessary for me: there is a contrast, an ambivalent character in the behaviour of the marginalised man: besides a great sensibility lies a violent character and many times, in general, crime is a desperate search for happiness.” [13]
There is a strong correlation between Nietzschean notions of the tragic and Oiticica’s various homages to Cara de Cavalo. Nietzsche’s notion of the tragic is set against the dialectical and the Christian views through the figures of Dionysus and Apollo in Greek mythology. These are not placed in dialectical opposition - as Deleuze has argued - but are reconciled through tragedy:
“[...] in tragedy Dionysus is the essence of the tragic. Dionysus is the only tragic character, ‘the suffering and glorified God’, his sufferings are the only tragic subject [...] on the other hand, [...] it is Apollo who develops the tragic into drama, who expresses the tragic in a drama. ‘We must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus which ever anew discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images ...’.” [14]
It is precisely this approach to suffering, to pain, that differentiates
Nietzsche’s position to that of the dialectic or the Christian.
“In Dionysus and in Christ the martyr is the same, the passion is
the same. It is the same phenomenon but in two opposed senses. On the one
hand, the life that justifies suffering; on the other the suffering that
accuses life, that testifies against it, that makes life something that
must be justified. For Christianity the fact of suffering in life means
primarily that life is not just, that it is even essentially blameworthy.
For Dionysus “it is life which takes charge of justification, ‘it
affirms even the harshest suffering’. [...] it does not resolve pain
by internalising it, it affirms it in the element of its exteriority.”
[15]
Oiticica’s activity across the boundaries of cultural hierarchies
operates at this level. He expresses the Dionysian tragic - the ambivalent
condition of music, dance and suffering in the favela - within the Apollonian
drama - that of the idealism of art.
In ‘Seja Marginal seja Heroi’ there is a condensation of all
these elements. The Christ figure is transformed into a Dionysian character
by the slogan ‘Be Marginal be a Hero’. Moreover, the hero in
this case is not a working class hero in the Marxist sense where there is
a sacrifice of life for the greater cause. He is someone who celebrates
life through the adversity he finds himself in.
As Oiticica wrote in one of his Parangolés: From adversity we live.
Indeed, the Parangolé itself is the embodiment of the Nietzschean
Dionysus set in the Apollonian drama. This ambiguity which is essential
to the concept of the work itself is indicative also of its continuous relevance
and critical nature.
The inauguration of the Parangolé was performed at the opening night
of the Opinião 65 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de
Janeiro. 1965 was the year in which Brazil witnessed in the arts the arrival
of the American Pop Art and French Nouveau Realisme tendencies, and the
Opinião 65 exhibition not only demonstrated the adherence of Brazilian
artists to these tendencies but exhibited Brazilians alongside French artists.
It was also the year after the military coup d’état and much
of the art displayed political concerns and themes. Gullar who reviewed
the exhibition, claimed that it presented itself as marking a rupture and
that “it reveal[ed] something new which [was] occurring in the domain
of art, a new characteristic which [was] expressed in the actual title of
the exhibition: the return of opinionated painters.” [16] (my emphasis)
In the review, Gullar also discussed the issue of internationalism in the
arts. He claimed that art which showed a critical position in relation to
the world should be recommended, while art that displayed aesthetic and
formal preoccupations - such as abstract painting - was representative of
a subjective and elitist attitude.
The fact that Ferreira Gullar did not mention the Parangolé in the
review is indicative of his assumption that Oiticica’s post-neoconcrete
art operated outside the domain of art.
At the opening reception for the Opinião 65 exhibition, Oiticica
arrived accompanied with his friends from the shanty town dressed with the
Parangolé capes and banners only to be refused entry to the museum.
Although Oiticica had been invited to take part in the exhibition, museum
officials were totally unprepared for the form which his participation took.
The poet Waly Salomão has recently described the event as a “precocious
episode of the problematic which today, exactly three decades later, [...]
occupies the centre of international discussions concerning the plastic
arts which can be summarise in the following axiom: the museum is not in
crisis, it is the crisis.” [17]
The term Parangolé was originally a slang word used in the shanty
towns of Rio de Janeiro, a joker-like word belonging to the dialect of rogues.
Having no fixed meaning, its ambiguity served as a coded language.
Parangolés are capes with tactile and visual properties, their significance
as works of art rely on the act of the spectator/participator wearing them;
otherwise they remain as meaningless as the word Parangolé when isolated
from a particular phrase. However, while the term Parangolé disguised
its meaning through ambiguity, Oiticica’s capes uncovered the boundaries
separating narratives of high-art and popular culture.
Today the difficulty of presenting the Parangolé within the museum
context, is - in my opinion - indicative of the continuous pertinence of
the work. Various strategies of exhibiting the Parangolé since Oiticica’s
death have failed. At Documenta X they were hung as art objects which the
viewer was not allowed to touch: this ran entirely against the conceptual
nature of the work. At the 1998 Sao Paulo Biennial - in the spirit of re-establishing
the interaction with the viewer - reproductions were made so that people
could wear them in the gallery. However there was a sense of inadequacy
which was probably due to the austere gallery environment and the lack of
intimacy between the work and the viewer: a sign perhaps of the works alienation
from life. Other display strategies have employed dancers (often from the
favelas) to wear Parangolés in the museum or galleries. This tends
to be at best a spectacularisation of the work and at worst exploitative
of the dancers. An exception was when in one those demonstrations/performances
with hired dancers at another Sao Paulo Biennial, a Dutch curator unaware
of the event shouted ‘get out’ to the surprised dancers. [18]
For a short moment the confrontational character of the Parangolé
resurfaced without the burden of nostalgia. This incident aside, the museum’s
failure to exhibit the Parangolé is also indicative of the works
continuous subversive power, in that it highlights the museum’s own
limitations.
Oiticica’s connection with Brazil’s internal other is what distinguishes
his position and concurrently connects him with the issues and debates of
the 1960s in Brazil. Moreover, it is the key for uncovering the myth which
posits him as a paradigm for contemporary art in Brazil. To call his work
post-modern is to attach a set of contemporary values and assumptions which
tend to dehistoricise his work: paradoxically, this occurs through the predominantly
foreign desire to posit him as a historical precedent for today’s
art production. A process which appropriates Oiticica as symbolic of otherness
in order to authenticate and thus market an otherwise undifferentiated contemporary
Brazilian art. This undifferentiation pertains to the process of the global
aesthetic market whereby issues, even political ones, are transformed -
through repetition - into marketable artistic trademarks, thus emptying
any conceptual pertinence the work of art might initially propose.
To posit Oiticica as postmodern is thus to impose a dialectical dimension
- modern versus postmodern - which runs counter to the nature of his work.
Oiticica’s position of ambivalence offers a progressive strategy through
critical resistance. It does not operate by means of totalised or linear
notions of history but through his re-evaluation of tradition within the
problematics of contemporaneity. This is evident in his appropriation of
the appropriatory strategy of Antropofagia. Oiticica thus transformed an
exhausted tradition into a relevant and critical stance for the present,
one which is free from any connotations with the idea of redemption. If
Oiticica is to serve as a true historical precursor in the sense that Oswald
de Andrade’s notion Antropofagia stood as a historical precursor during
the 1960s, it is necessary that the Oiticician tradition be re-evaluated
in terms of the contemporary. To do this without restricting it purely to
the field of art is the responsibility of today’s generation of artists
who claim this tradition as their own.
Notes
1 Publication pending: Visual Arts and Culture.
2 Beverly and Oviedo (eds.), The Postmodern Debate in Latin America, Duke
University Press, 1995, p.1.
3 Hélio Oiticica Retrospective Catalogue. Witte With Center for Contemporary
Art, Rotterdam / Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris / Fundació
Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona/Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian,
Lisboa/Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Feb. 1992 - Feb. 1994.
4 Magiciens de la Terre, Centre George Pompidou 1989.
5 Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 1959.
6 Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, December 1959.
7 Ferreira Gullar interview with Glória Ferreira and Luíza
Interlenghi, In: Lygia Clark e Hélio Oiticica. Sala Especial do 9º
Salão Nacional de Artes Plasticas. FUNARTE, 1986 p.60.
8 For an excellent account of Gullar’s influence on Oiticica in this
respect see: Carlos Zilio, Da Antropofagia à Tropicália, In:
O Nacional e o Popular na Cultura Brasileira, Editora Brasilense São
Paulo, 1982.
9 Ronaldo Brito, Neoconcretismo: Vértige e Ruptura do Projeto Construtivo
Brasileiro. In: As Ideologias Construtivas no Ambiente Cultural, Rio de
Janeiro, 1975.
10 Hélio Oiticica, Apiro ao Grande Labirinto, ed. Luciano figueiredo,
Lygia Pape, Waly Salomão, rio de Janeiro Editora Rocco, 1986. Later
reprinted in the 1992-94 Retrospective Catalogue.
11 Waly Salomão, Hélio Oiticica: Qual é o Parangolé,
Perfis do Rio 8, Relume/Dumará, Rio de Janeiro 1996, p.96.
12 Guy Brett, Helio Oiticica Whitechapel Experience Catalogue unpaginated
1969.
13 ibid.
14 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy p.12.
15 ibid.
16 Ferreira Gullar, Opinião 65, Revista Civilização
Brasileira, n. 4, September 1965. Reprinted in: Arte em Revista, n.2, 1979
p.22 (my translation).
17 Waly Salomão, Hélio Oiticica: Qual é o Parangolé,
Perfis do Rio 8, Relume/Dumará, Rio de Janeiro 1996, p.53.
18 See: Luciano Figueiredo, The Other Malady, in: Third Text V 28/29 pp.105-16.
 |
|
 |