‘Not to be exhibited but experienced’: Hélio Oiticica at the De La Warr Pavilion
We look back at the works of the groundbreaking, volatile artist...
October 25, 2023
In 1970, the artist Hélio Oiticica wrote ‘The Possibilities of Creleisure’, an essay-manifesto calling for the combination of creativity, leisure, and belief (creer, in the languages of his native Brazil). Oiticica’s advocation of ‘leisure-pleasure-making’ in part reflected his personal hedonism – his tastes for sex, drugs, and samba dancing – and a not-too-radical anti-capitalism. But it has also provoked others to rethink the boundaries of the conventional museum space.
Fifteen years after Oiticica’s last UK exhibition, the De La Warr Pavilion re-interprets his practice in light of our contemporary moment. Drawing on archive materials from Rio de Janeiro, New York, and London – letters, poems, and writings which attest to his prolific output, and total practice – Waiting focuses on the ten years of the artist’s departure and return to Brazil, not forgetting a brief residency in Sussex. Still, Oiticica is most often remembered for his immersive, experiential artworks, created long before they were so quotidian or capitalised upon in mainstream institutions.
Installed on clunking Sony TVs, early Super 8 films embody the artist’s fascination with both the capital city and countercultures. There are shots of cash streaming through offices, of Oiticica standing outside his own flat in New York City, witnessing the place nicknamed ‘Babylon’ for its corrupting influence (while another film draws a classical connection between Rome and Manhattan). The technology of their presentation glows with nostalgia, but other works are wholly new and re-created, in order to be re-interpreted.
Hélio Oiticica (2012), a striking found-footage documentary by the artist’s nephew, filmmaker César Oiticica Filho, visually captures the artist’s relationship with the city. We hear him describe the street as ‘a way to be less old’, to ground him from his ‘dangerous inclination to close myself in with ideas’. His ego is suggested in the opening scenes of scuttling insects, and aerial shots of humans moving through his models like mice in a lab experiment, speaking to his repeated self-perception of being above others.
It also subtly reinforces the notion of the Western city as a place of indulgence. Above all, the artist prized information and learning, and was aware of how its abundance (‘dripping into people’s laps’ or ‘at arm’s reach’) in New York made people ambivalent and ignorant of it. At the same time, he bought into the centralisation of the city, staying close to Manhattan, and calling out Queens, the Bronx, as ‘outside of civilisation’. Nor does it shy from his appetite for cocaine, a drug which first enabled creative liberation, but which gradually seeps into the visual narrative as a slow spiralling out of control.
Oiticica Filho also captures the artist towards the end of his life, a time when he returned to Brazil, and allowed the maresias (sea breeze), running, and drinking juice to meet his needs. Not once do we see him indulge in food on screen, and perhaps that reinforces our reservations to pour a glass when we find an operating orange juice machine in one of the artist’s Penetrables.
Oiticica’s Penetrables are works which sit between sculptures and installations, inviting the viewer inside as a participant, enabling access and direct encounter with artworks. Tropicália (1966-1967), the Penetrable for which the artist is best known, is an exit-less construction which challenged the stereotype of Brazil as a ‘tropical paradise’.
Whilst first displayed in Rio de Janeiro, Oiticica was first inspired to make a labyrinthine structure for Hyde Park, implying the intended audience for this critical work. It travelled to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Tate, where a version remains in the permanent collection; curator Michael Wellen suggests it still poses a ‘problem’ for curators, perhaps due to the inclusion of live parrots.
It is absent from this exhibition, in favour of something a little more low-maintenance, and directly relatable. Filter Project is a maze filled with contrasts, both black-out blinds and permeable net curtains, PVC and coloured glass, filtering and adapting the participant’s view out onto Bexhill’s beach. Similar to Turner Contemporary’s recent exhibition with contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes, the curators here seek to create a conversation between Oiticica’s practice, and the local environment. Recreated too is the buzz of neon, the use of audio in the space, and the contrast between commercial ads contemporary to Oiticica’s experience, and Sky News reels contemporary to ours.
The connection is implicit, in his (still superior) critique of Brazilian minds ‘vulnerable’ to mass media. References to Brazil’s long history of populist politics, which predates the likes of Bolsonaro, challenge how new or unique the the media circus and ‘post-truth’ climate of Western Europe really is. Indeed, the Penetrables were produced in the political context of the country’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, a situation from which Oiticica ‘exiled himself’, and the artist’s contempt for convention – whether artistic or political - was always fuelled by a desire for an abstract freedom.
The bright colours recall those of Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, in her arts and leisure centres designed for working-class districts of São Paulo. But remarkably, Filter Project doesn’t feel out of context on display at the De La Warr Pavilion. Its location ensures it is another place where privileged city dwellers may travel to ‘do’ art, but it’s also an interesting curatorial choice for autumn, as it encourages return with the changing weather, to see how perspectives from the inside out might change.
Oiticica’s works remain as relevant as ever today, in highlighting our continued discomfort and coded behaviours in museums. Spectatorship pervades the experience of the Parangolés (1964) – binary-blurring textile sculptures or capes, more personal structures for participation – as detached from their context. Oiticica may have conceived the Parangolés as layers, though ones which transform and reveal the body, but most will no doubt remove these wearable political banners unchanged.
Central to both the Penetrables and Parangolés is music; reflected in the documentary with interspersed scenes of samba and football in the favelas, highlighting the rhythm and movement common to both – and implicitly, the importance of Black cultures, and bodies, often appropriated by white Brazilians on the global stage.
Sérgio B. Martins, a critic, art historian and professor living in Brazil, refers to the ‘residual Primitivism’ of his practice, something typically ascribed to Western European art, evident in his fetishisation of the favela. Simultaneously, the Parangolés were most fully, or authentically, embraced by participants in America, shrugged off by socioeconomic elites in Brazil’s cities. These complexities aren’t mentioned here to focus on the Pavilion’s own public programme, which includes making recreations for local communities back in Brazil.
It concludes – or pauses - in COSMOCOCA, Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s program in progress and effort at expanded, ‘quasi-cinema’. The curation leans into the anti-imperial politics behind the works; the transformation of cocaine, as a substance extracted from Latin America, and appropriated in Western society, and the artists’ academic engagement with the likes of Sigmund Freud. But it is as much an indulgence in the music and popular culture which informed Oiticica’s practice - appropriated images of Marilyn Monroe and Yoko Ono are soundtracked by the music of Jimi Hendrix, an icon for the artist, who ‘changed the relationship between public and performer’.
Hendrix’s position between worlds – both respected and shunned, when he ‘created’ Woodstock – is explored in great depth in the documentary, indulging in his sexual performance. ‘People felt they were raped in some sense,’ remarks the artist, over images of shocked, and mesmerised, faces of white women. COSMOCOCA was not publicly displayed until 1992, due to the illegality of the drug. Now, fifty years since it was first conceived, the various installations in the series will be simultaneously shown across global institutions, as part of a ‘world tour’ which will return to its infamous swimming pool in LA, and to Hunter College, New York, where the series - like so much of Oiticica’s works - was realised.
COSMOCOCA perfectly captures the tensions in his relationship with ‘the West’. Increasingly, his works referenced rock music; The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, rather than samba. Frederico Coelho highlights how he maintained a comfortable distance from New York’s contemporary art community, a theme touched on only lightly in the curation: ‘The East always looked upon [Western] European ‘white madness’ with indifference or incomprehension,’ Oiticica writes in his manifesto.
Yet again, Oiticica Filho’s documentary adds layers to our understanding; we hear the artist complain of ‘banal’ and performative Happenings in New York, decentring experiential art from its Western focus. Oiticica suggests the city was less free for artists, with smaller buildings, and less transformative cultural spaces than Brazil (no mention of Lina Bo Bardi, again.) He also challenged existing/conventional models as static, and resisted the tendency in the 1970s to display his works as ‘sculptures’, maintaining the movement and changes in their use.
It was a Guggenheim Scholarship that enabled Oiticica to travel to New York and study film, becoming both a part of conventional institutions, and him to appropriate transnational artistic networks, for own purposes. Oiticica was already engaged with the work of Andy Warhol – predating the city icon’s works in his representations of Brazil’s drag communities.
The film subtly reflects this, acknowledging Warhol as a contemporary, without paying him much attention. Indeed, Oiticica was more acutely aware of the double standards facing migrants to the city. ‘Duchamp didn’t exhibit in New York,’ he asserts, whilst non-white artists seeking visas wouldn’t be accepted if making work for their countries, only for display in the US; an extractive relationship with art and artists from the ‘Global South’.
Waiting would have us think of Oiticica as a renegade, living exclusively in the moment, but no doubt, this was a man conscious of legacy. ‘In Brazil, nothing is permanent,’ he remarks, at the same time acknowledging his use of photography for cataloguing, as a means to ‘reconstruct my past’. Academic Irene V. Small suggests him as a ‘self-archivist’; indeed, his invention and constant creation may have been the product of historical insecurity – or an understanding of how non-Western art histories are often excluded from the canon.
By the 1970s, Oiticica was confident that his work was wholly original, ‘a watershed’, to academic Sérgio B. Martins. ‘I feel like I’m sitting on dynamite,’ the artist said, another nod to an ego. In 2009, many of his works were destroyed by fire, and he died young, in the process of creation; the documentary closes with the constant creation of detailed architectural models, perhaps his greatest source of pride.
Still, he was already well-known, and beyond risk of posthumous obscurity. The disaster took place in the same year as a major exhibition in Houston, Texas, and the beginnings of the artist’s online archive. The same cannot be said of the historical legacy of the Brazilian avant-garde more widely, and networks of artists practising in Neo-Concretism, and later Western minimalism and constructivism, in which Oiticica positioned himself too. Glimpses in the documentary of the influential women, and wives of his, contemporaries, and his early abstract works, don’t satisfy.
Waiting is wonderful, but Oiticica Filho’s film is an exhibition all of itself. In a bid to better get to know his uncle, the filmmaker stays close to his subject, creating a similarly non-conventional artwork. The artist’s constant movement is reflected in dynamic filming - the camera shaking during samba dancing scenes - and, without talking head interviews, the artist’s complexities are laid out in their own words. Oiticica was disinterested in editing, something he considered to be an ‘old technique’, but his estate has represented his history perfectly. For an artist who started his study in film, it is fitting that he has at least two documentaries (the first, by Ivan Cardoso), and a screening room at the Embassy of Brazil in London to his name.
Brazil’s art history is as large and diverse as its geography; even within the movements mentioned, many artists were not connected, which makes it all the more disappointing that Western knowledge and representation remains limited to so few. But Waiting’s legacy will be to prompt more critical thinking about the celebrated diversity of the country, authenticity, and how we experience and access art – and yes, to drink in life like orange juice, bits and all.
Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun is on view at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 January 2024.
Hélio Oiticica (2012) screened at the De La Warr Pavilion, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker César Oiticica Filho and Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion, on 23 September 2023, and is available to view online.
In 1970, the artist Hélio Oiticica wrote ‘The Possibilities of Creleisure’, an essay-manifesto calling for the combination of creativity, leisure, and belief (creer, in the languages of his native Brazil). Oiticica’s advocation of ‘leisure-pleasure-making’ in part reflected his personal hedonism – his tastes for sex, drugs, and samba dancing – and a not-too-radical anti-capitalism. But it has also provoked others to rethink the boundaries of the conventional museum space.
Fifteen years after Oiticica’s last UK exhibition, the De La Warr Pavilion re-interprets his practice in light of our contemporary moment. Drawing on archive materials from Rio de Janeiro, New York, and London – letters, poems, and writings which attest to his prolific output, and total practice – Waiting focuses on the ten years of the artist’s departure and return to Brazil, not forgetting a brief residency in Sussex. Still, Oiticica is most often remembered for his immersive, experiential artworks, created long before they were so quotidian or capitalised upon in mainstream institutions.
Installed on clunking Sony TVs, early Super 8 films embody the artist’s fascination with both the capital city and countercultures. There are shots of cash streaming through offices, of Oiticica standing outside his own flat in New York City, witnessing the place nicknamed ‘Babylon’ for its corrupting influence (while another film draws a classical connection between Rome and Manhattan). The technology of their presentation glows with nostalgia, but other works are wholly new and re-created, in order to be re-interpreted.
Hélio Oiticica (2012), a striking found-footage documentary by the artist’s nephew, filmmaker César Oiticica Filho, visually captures the artist’s relationship with the city. We hear him describe the street as ‘a way to be less old’, to ground him from his ‘dangerous inclination to close myself in with ideas’. His ego is suggested in the opening scenes of scuttling insects, and aerial shots of humans moving through his models like mice in a lab experiment, speaking to his repeated self-perception of being above others.
It also subtly reinforces the notion of the Western city as a place of indulgence. Above all, the artist prized information and learning, and was aware of how its abundance (‘dripping into people’s laps’ or ‘at arm’s reach’) in New York made people ambivalent and ignorant of it. At the same time, he bought into the centralisation of the city, staying close to Manhattan, and calling out Queens, the Bronx, as ‘outside of civilisation’. Nor does it shy from his appetite for cocaine, a drug which first enabled creative liberation, but which gradually seeps into the visual narrative as a slow spiralling out of control.
Oiticica Filho also captures the artist towards the end of his life, a time when he returned to Brazil, and allowed the maresias (sea breeze), running, and drinking juice to meet his needs. Not once do we see him indulge in food on screen, and perhaps that reinforces our reservations to pour a glass when we find an operating orange juice machine in one of the artist’s Penetrables.
Oiticica’s Penetrables are works which sit between sculptures and installations, inviting the viewer inside as a participant, enabling access and direct encounter with artworks. Tropicália (1966-1967), the Penetrable for which the artist is best known, is an exit-less construction which challenged the stereotype of Brazil as a ‘tropical paradise’.
Whilst first displayed in Rio de Janeiro, Oiticica was first inspired to make a labyrinthine structure for Hyde Park, implying the intended audience for this critical work. It travelled to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Tate, where a version remains in the permanent collection; curator Michael Wellen suggests it still poses a ‘problem’ for curators, perhaps due to the inclusion of live parrots.
It is absent from this exhibition, in favour of something a little more low-maintenance, and directly relatable. Filter Project is a maze filled with contrasts, both black-out blinds and permeable net curtains, PVC and coloured glass, filtering and adapting the participant’s view out onto Bexhill’s beach. Similar to Turner Contemporary’s recent exhibition with contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes, the curators here seek to create a conversation between Oiticica’s practice, and the local environment. Recreated too is the buzz of neon, the use of audio in the space, and the contrast between commercial ads contemporary to Oiticica’s experience, and Sky News reels contemporary to ours.
The connection is implicit, in his (still superior) critique of Brazilian minds ‘vulnerable’ to mass media. References to Brazil’s long history of populist politics, which predates the likes of Bolsonaro, challenge how new or unique the the media circus and ‘post-truth’ climate of Western Europe really is. Indeed, the Penetrables were produced in the political context of the country’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, a situation from which Oiticica ‘exiled himself’, and the artist’s contempt for convention – whether artistic or political - was always fuelled by a desire for an abstract freedom.
The bright colours recall those of Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, in her arts and leisure centres designed for working-class districts of São Paulo. But remarkably, Filter Project doesn’t feel out of context on display at the De La Warr Pavilion. Its location ensures it is another place where privileged city dwellers may travel to ‘do’ art, but it’s also an interesting curatorial choice for autumn, as it encourages return with the changing weather, to see how perspectives from the inside out might change.
Oiticica’s works remain as relevant as ever today, in highlighting our continued discomfort and coded behaviours in museums. Spectatorship pervades the experience of the Parangolés (1964) – binary-blurring textile sculptures or capes, more personal structures for participation – as detached from their context. Oiticica may have conceived the Parangolés as layers, though ones which transform and reveal the body, but most will no doubt remove these wearable political banners unchanged.
Central to both the Penetrables and Parangolés is music; reflected in the documentary with interspersed scenes of samba and football in the favelas, highlighting the rhythm and movement common to both – and implicitly, the importance of Black cultures, and bodies, often appropriated by white Brazilians on the global stage.
Sérgio B. Martins, a critic, art historian and professor living in Brazil, refers to the ‘residual Primitivism’ of his practice, something typically ascribed to Western European art, evident in his fetishisation of the favela. Simultaneously, the Parangolés were most fully, or authentically, embraced by participants in America, shrugged off by socioeconomic elites in Brazil’s cities. These complexities aren’t mentioned here to focus on the Pavilion’s own public programme, which includes making recreations for local communities back in Brazil.
It concludes – or pauses - in COSMOCOCA, Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s program in progress and effort at expanded, ‘quasi-cinema’. The curation leans into the anti-imperial politics behind the works; the transformation of cocaine, as a substance extracted from Latin America, and appropriated in Western society, and the artists’ academic engagement with the likes of Sigmund Freud. But it is as much an indulgence in the music and popular culture which informed Oiticica’s practice - appropriated images of Marilyn Monroe and Yoko Ono are soundtracked by the music of Jimi Hendrix, an icon for the artist, who ‘changed the relationship between public and performer’.
Hendrix’s position between worlds – both respected and shunned, when he ‘created’ Woodstock – is explored in great depth in the documentary, indulging in his sexual performance. ‘People felt they were raped in some sense,’ remarks the artist, over images of shocked, and mesmerised, faces of white women. COSMOCOCA was not publicly displayed until 1992, due to the illegality of the drug. Now, fifty years since it was first conceived, the various installations in the series will be simultaneously shown across global institutions, as part of a ‘world tour’ which will return to its infamous swimming pool in LA, and to Hunter College, New York, where the series - like so much of Oiticica’s works - was realised.
COSMOCOCA perfectly captures the tensions in his relationship with ‘the West’. Increasingly, his works referenced rock music; The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, rather than samba. Frederico Coelho highlights how he maintained a comfortable distance from New York’s contemporary art community, a theme touched on only lightly in the curation: ‘The East always looked upon [Western] European ‘white madness’ with indifference or incomprehension,’ Oiticica writes in his manifesto.
Yet again, Oiticica Filho’s documentary adds layers to our understanding; we hear the artist complain of ‘banal’ and performative Happenings in New York, decentring experiential art from its Western focus. Oiticica suggests the city was less free for artists, with smaller buildings, and less transformative cultural spaces than Brazil (no mention of Lina Bo Bardi, again.) He also challenged existing/conventional models as static, and resisted the tendency in the 1970s to display his works as ‘sculptures’, maintaining the movement and changes in their use.
It was a Guggenheim Scholarship that enabled Oiticica to travel to New York and study film, becoming both a part of conventional institutions, and him to appropriate transnational artistic networks, for own purposes. Oiticica was already engaged with the work of Andy Warhol – predating the city icon’s works in his representations of Brazil’s drag communities.
The film subtly reflects this, acknowledging Warhol as a contemporary, without paying him much attention. Indeed, Oiticica was more acutely aware of the double standards facing migrants to the city. ‘Duchamp didn’t exhibit in New York,’ he asserts, whilst non-white artists seeking visas wouldn’t be accepted if making work for their countries, only for display in the US; an extractive relationship with art and artists from the ‘Global South’.
Waiting would have us think of Oiticica as a renegade, living exclusively in the moment, but no doubt, this was a man conscious of legacy. ‘In Brazil, nothing is permanent,’ he remarks, at the same time acknowledging his use of photography for cataloguing, as a means to ‘reconstruct my past’. Academic Irene V. Small suggests him as a ‘self-archivist’; indeed, his invention and constant creation may have been the product of historical insecurity – or an understanding of how non-Western art histories are often excluded from the canon.
By the 1970s, Oiticica was confident that his work was wholly original, ‘a watershed’, to academic Sérgio B. Martins. ‘I feel like I’m sitting on dynamite,’ the artist said, another nod to an ego. In 2009, many of his works were destroyed by fire, and he died young, in the process of creation; the documentary closes with the constant creation of detailed architectural models, perhaps his greatest source of pride.
Still, he was already well-known, and beyond risk of posthumous obscurity. The disaster took place in the same year as a major exhibition in Houston, Texas, and the beginnings of the artist’s online archive. The same cannot be said of the historical legacy of the Brazilian avant-garde more widely, and networks of artists practising in Neo-Concretism, and later Western minimalism and constructivism, in which Oiticica positioned himself too. Glimpses in the documentary of the influential women, and wives of his, contemporaries, and his early abstract works, don’t satisfy.
Waiting is wonderful, but Oiticica Filho’s film is an exhibition all of itself. In a bid to better get to know his uncle, the filmmaker stays close to his subject, creating a similarly non-conventional artwork. The artist’s constant movement is reflected in dynamic filming - the camera shaking during samba dancing scenes - and, without talking head interviews, the artist’s complexities are laid out in their own words. Oiticica was disinterested in editing, something he considered to be an ‘old technique’, but his estate has represented his history perfectly. For an artist who started his study in film, it is fitting that he has at least two documentaries (the first, by Ivan Cardoso), and a screening room at the Embassy of Brazil in London to his name.
Brazil’s art history is as large and diverse as its geography; even within the movements mentioned, many artists were not connected, which makes it all the more disappointing that Western knowledge and representation remains limited to so few. But Waiting’s legacy will be to prompt more critical thinking about the celebrated diversity of the country, authenticity, and how we experience and access art – and yes, to drink in life like orange juice, bits and all.
Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun is on view at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 January 2024.
Hélio Oiticica (2012) screened at the De La Warr Pavilion, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker César Oiticica Filho and Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion, on 23 September 2023, and is available to view online.
In 1970, the artist Hélio Oiticica wrote ‘The Possibilities of Creleisure’, an essay-manifesto calling for the combination of creativity, leisure, and belief (creer, in the languages of his native Brazil). Oiticica’s advocation of ‘leisure-pleasure-making’ in part reflected his personal hedonism – his tastes for sex, drugs, and samba dancing – and a not-too-radical anti-capitalism. But it has also provoked others to rethink the boundaries of the conventional museum space.
Fifteen years after Oiticica’s last UK exhibition, the De La Warr Pavilion re-interprets his practice in light of our contemporary moment. Drawing on archive materials from Rio de Janeiro, New York, and London – letters, poems, and writings which attest to his prolific output, and total practice – Waiting focuses on the ten years of the artist’s departure and return to Brazil, not forgetting a brief residency in Sussex. Still, Oiticica is most often remembered for his immersive, experiential artworks, created long before they were so quotidian or capitalised upon in mainstream institutions.
Installed on clunking Sony TVs, early Super 8 films embody the artist’s fascination with both the capital city and countercultures. There are shots of cash streaming through offices, of Oiticica standing outside his own flat in New York City, witnessing the place nicknamed ‘Babylon’ for its corrupting influence (while another film draws a classical connection between Rome and Manhattan). The technology of their presentation glows with nostalgia, but other works are wholly new and re-created, in order to be re-interpreted.
Hélio Oiticica (2012), a striking found-footage documentary by the artist’s nephew, filmmaker César Oiticica Filho, visually captures the artist’s relationship with the city. We hear him describe the street as ‘a way to be less old’, to ground him from his ‘dangerous inclination to close myself in with ideas’. His ego is suggested in the opening scenes of scuttling insects, and aerial shots of humans moving through his models like mice in a lab experiment, speaking to his repeated self-perception of being above others.
It also subtly reinforces the notion of the Western city as a place of indulgence. Above all, the artist prized information and learning, and was aware of how its abundance (‘dripping into people’s laps’ or ‘at arm’s reach’) in New York made people ambivalent and ignorant of it. At the same time, he bought into the centralisation of the city, staying close to Manhattan, and calling out Queens, the Bronx, as ‘outside of civilisation’. Nor does it shy from his appetite for cocaine, a drug which first enabled creative liberation, but which gradually seeps into the visual narrative as a slow spiralling out of control.
Oiticica Filho also captures the artist towards the end of his life, a time when he returned to Brazil, and allowed the maresias (sea breeze), running, and drinking juice to meet his needs. Not once do we see him indulge in food on screen, and perhaps that reinforces our reservations to pour a glass when we find an operating orange juice machine in one of the artist’s Penetrables.
Oiticica’s Penetrables are works which sit between sculptures and installations, inviting the viewer inside as a participant, enabling access and direct encounter with artworks. Tropicália (1966-1967), the Penetrable for which the artist is best known, is an exit-less construction which challenged the stereotype of Brazil as a ‘tropical paradise’.
Whilst first displayed in Rio de Janeiro, Oiticica was first inspired to make a labyrinthine structure for Hyde Park, implying the intended audience for this critical work. It travelled to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Tate, where a version remains in the permanent collection; curator Michael Wellen suggests it still poses a ‘problem’ for curators, perhaps due to the inclusion of live parrots.
It is absent from this exhibition, in favour of something a little more low-maintenance, and directly relatable. Filter Project is a maze filled with contrasts, both black-out blinds and permeable net curtains, PVC and coloured glass, filtering and adapting the participant’s view out onto Bexhill’s beach. Similar to Turner Contemporary’s recent exhibition with contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes, the curators here seek to create a conversation between Oiticica’s practice, and the local environment. Recreated too is the buzz of neon, the use of audio in the space, and the contrast between commercial ads contemporary to Oiticica’s experience, and Sky News reels contemporary to ours.
The connection is implicit, in his (still superior) critique of Brazilian minds ‘vulnerable’ to mass media. References to Brazil’s long history of populist politics, which predates the likes of Bolsonaro, challenge how new or unique the the media circus and ‘post-truth’ climate of Western Europe really is. Indeed, the Penetrables were produced in the political context of the country’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, a situation from which Oiticica ‘exiled himself’, and the artist’s contempt for convention – whether artistic or political - was always fuelled by a desire for an abstract freedom.
The bright colours recall those of Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, in her arts and leisure centres designed for working-class districts of São Paulo. But remarkably, Filter Project doesn’t feel out of context on display at the De La Warr Pavilion. Its location ensures it is another place where privileged city dwellers may travel to ‘do’ art, but it’s also an interesting curatorial choice for autumn, as it encourages return with the changing weather, to see how perspectives from the inside out might change.
Oiticica’s works remain as relevant as ever today, in highlighting our continued discomfort and coded behaviours in museums. Spectatorship pervades the experience of the Parangolés (1964) – binary-blurring textile sculptures or capes, more personal structures for participation – as detached from their context. Oiticica may have conceived the Parangolés as layers, though ones which transform and reveal the body, but most will no doubt remove these wearable political banners unchanged.
Central to both the Penetrables and Parangolés is music; reflected in the documentary with interspersed scenes of samba and football in the favelas, highlighting the rhythm and movement common to both – and implicitly, the importance of Black cultures, and bodies, often appropriated by white Brazilians on the global stage.
Sérgio B. Martins, a critic, art historian and professor living in Brazil, refers to the ‘residual Primitivism’ of his practice, something typically ascribed to Western European art, evident in his fetishisation of the favela. Simultaneously, the Parangolés were most fully, or authentically, embraced by participants in America, shrugged off by socioeconomic elites in Brazil’s cities. These complexities aren’t mentioned here to focus on the Pavilion’s own public programme, which includes making recreations for local communities back in Brazil.
It concludes – or pauses - in COSMOCOCA, Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s program in progress and effort at expanded, ‘quasi-cinema’. The curation leans into the anti-imperial politics behind the works; the transformation of cocaine, as a substance extracted from Latin America, and appropriated in Western society, and the artists’ academic engagement with the likes of Sigmund Freud. But it is as much an indulgence in the music and popular culture which informed Oiticica’s practice - appropriated images of Marilyn Monroe and Yoko Ono are soundtracked by the music of Jimi Hendrix, an icon for the artist, who ‘changed the relationship between public and performer’.
Hendrix’s position between worlds – both respected and shunned, when he ‘created’ Woodstock – is explored in great depth in the documentary, indulging in his sexual performance. ‘People felt they were raped in some sense,’ remarks the artist, over images of shocked, and mesmerised, faces of white women. COSMOCOCA was not publicly displayed until 1992, due to the illegality of the drug. Now, fifty years since it was first conceived, the various installations in the series will be simultaneously shown across global institutions, as part of a ‘world tour’ which will return to its infamous swimming pool in LA, and to Hunter College, New York, where the series - like so much of Oiticica’s works - was realised.
COSMOCOCA perfectly captures the tensions in his relationship with ‘the West’. Increasingly, his works referenced rock music; The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, rather than samba. Frederico Coelho highlights how he maintained a comfortable distance from New York’s contemporary art community, a theme touched on only lightly in the curation: ‘The East always looked upon [Western] European ‘white madness’ with indifference or incomprehension,’ Oiticica writes in his manifesto.
Yet again, Oiticica Filho’s documentary adds layers to our understanding; we hear the artist complain of ‘banal’ and performative Happenings in New York, decentring experiential art from its Western focus. Oiticica suggests the city was less free for artists, with smaller buildings, and less transformative cultural spaces than Brazil (no mention of Lina Bo Bardi, again.) He also challenged existing/conventional models as static, and resisted the tendency in the 1970s to display his works as ‘sculptures’, maintaining the movement and changes in their use.
It was a Guggenheim Scholarship that enabled Oiticica to travel to New York and study film, becoming both a part of conventional institutions, and him to appropriate transnational artistic networks, for own purposes. Oiticica was already engaged with the work of Andy Warhol – predating the city icon’s works in his representations of Brazil’s drag communities.
The film subtly reflects this, acknowledging Warhol as a contemporary, without paying him much attention. Indeed, Oiticica was more acutely aware of the double standards facing migrants to the city. ‘Duchamp didn’t exhibit in New York,’ he asserts, whilst non-white artists seeking visas wouldn’t be accepted if making work for their countries, only for display in the US; an extractive relationship with art and artists from the ‘Global South’.
Waiting would have us think of Oiticica as a renegade, living exclusively in the moment, but no doubt, this was a man conscious of legacy. ‘In Brazil, nothing is permanent,’ he remarks, at the same time acknowledging his use of photography for cataloguing, as a means to ‘reconstruct my past’. Academic Irene V. Small suggests him as a ‘self-archivist’; indeed, his invention and constant creation may have been the product of historical insecurity – or an understanding of how non-Western art histories are often excluded from the canon.
By the 1970s, Oiticica was confident that his work was wholly original, ‘a watershed’, to academic Sérgio B. Martins. ‘I feel like I’m sitting on dynamite,’ the artist said, another nod to an ego. In 2009, many of his works were destroyed by fire, and he died young, in the process of creation; the documentary closes with the constant creation of detailed architectural models, perhaps his greatest source of pride.
Still, he was already well-known, and beyond risk of posthumous obscurity. The disaster took place in the same year as a major exhibition in Houston, Texas, and the beginnings of the artist’s online archive. The same cannot be said of the historical legacy of the Brazilian avant-garde more widely, and networks of artists practising in Neo-Concretism, and later Western minimalism and constructivism, in which Oiticica positioned himself too. Glimpses in the documentary of the influential women, and wives of his, contemporaries, and his early abstract works, don’t satisfy.
Waiting is wonderful, but Oiticica Filho’s film is an exhibition all of itself. In a bid to better get to know his uncle, the filmmaker stays close to his subject, creating a similarly non-conventional artwork. The artist’s constant movement is reflected in dynamic filming - the camera shaking during samba dancing scenes - and, without talking head interviews, the artist’s complexities are laid out in their own words. Oiticica was disinterested in editing, something he considered to be an ‘old technique’, but his estate has represented his history perfectly. For an artist who started his study in film, it is fitting that he has at least two documentaries (the first, by Ivan Cardoso), and a screening room at the Embassy of Brazil in London to his name.
Brazil’s art history is as large and diverse as its geography; even within the movements mentioned, many artists were not connected, which makes it all the more disappointing that Western knowledge and representation remains limited to so few. But Waiting’s legacy will be to prompt more critical thinking about the celebrated diversity of the country, authenticity, and how we experience and access art – and yes, to drink in life like orange juice, bits and all.
Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun is on view at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 January 2024.
Hélio Oiticica (2012) screened at the De La Warr Pavilion, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker César Oiticica Filho and Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion, on 23 September 2023, and is available to view online.
In 1970, the artist Hélio Oiticica wrote ‘The Possibilities of Creleisure’, an essay-manifesto calling for the combination of creativity, leisure, and belief (creer, in the languages of his native Brazil). Oiticica’s advocation of ‘leisure-pleasure-making’ in part reflected his personal hedonism – his tastes for sex, drugs, and samba dancing – and a not-too-radical anti-capitalism. But it has also provoked others to rethink the boundaries of the conventional museum space.
Fifteen years after Oiticica’s last UK exhibition, the De La Warr Pavilion re-interprets his practice in light of our contemporary moment. Drawing on archive materials from Rio de Janeiro, New York, and London – letters, poems, and writings which attest to his prolific output, and total practice – Waiting focuses on the ten years of the artist’s departure and return to Brazil, not forgetting a brief residency in Sussex. Still, Oiticica is most often remembered for his immersive, experiential artworks, created long before they were so quotidian or capitalised upon in mainstream institutions.
Installed on clunking Sony TVs, early Super 8 films embody the artist’s fascination with both the capital city and countercultures. There are shots of cash streaming through offices, of Oiticica standing outside his own flat in New York City, witnessing the place nicknamed ‘Babylon’ for its corrupting influence (while another film draws a classical connection between Rome and Manhattan). The technology of their presentation glows with nostalgia, but other works are wholly new and re-created, in order to be re-interpreted.
Hélio Oiticica (2012), a striking found-footage documentary by the artist’s nephew, filmmaker César Oiticica Filho, visually captures the artist’s relationship with the city. We hear him describe the street as ‘a way to be less old’, to ground him from his ‘dangerous inclination to close myself in with ideas’. His ego is suggested in the opening scenes of scuttling insects, and aerial shots of humans moving through his models like mice in a lab experiment, speaking to his repeated self-perception of being above others.
It also subtly reinforces the notion of the Western city as a place of indulgence. Above all, the artist prized information and learning, and was aware of how its abundance (‘dripping into people’s laps’ or ‘at arm’s reach’) in New York made people ambivalent and ignorant of it. At the same time, he bought into the centralisation of the city, staying close to Manhattan, and calling out Queens, the Bronx, as ‘outside of civilisation’. Nor does it shy from his appetite for cocaine, a drug which first enabled creative liberation, but which gradually seeps into the visual narrative as a slow spiralling out of control.
Oiticica Filho also captures the artist towards the end of his life, a time when he returned to Brazil, and allowed the maresias (sea breeze), running, and drinking juice to meet his needs. Not once do we see him indulge in food on screen, and perhaps that reinforces our reservations to pour a glass when we find an operating orange juice machine in one of the artist’s Penetrables.
Oiticica’s Penetrables are works which sit between sculptures and installations, inviting the viewer inside as a participant, enabling access and direct encounter with artworks. Tropicália (1966-1967), the Penetrable for which the artist is best known, is an exit-less construction which challenged the stereotype of Brazil as a ‘tropical paradise’.
Whilst first displayed in Rio de Janeiro, Oiticica was first inspired to make a labyrinthine structure for Hyde Park, implying the intended audience for this critical work. It travelled to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Tate, where a version remains in the permanent collection; curator Michael Wellen suggests it still poses a ‘problem’ for curators, perhaps due to the inclusion of live parrots.
It is absent from this exhibition, in favour of something a little more low-maintenance, and directly relatable. Filter Project is a maze filled with contrasts, both black-out blinds and permeable net curtains, PVC and coloured glass, filtering and adapting the participant’s view out onto Bexhill’s beach. Similar to Turner Contemporary’s recent exhibition with contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes, the curators here seek to create a conversation between Oiticica’s practice, and the local environment. Recreated too is the buzz of neon, the use of audio in the space, and the contrast between commercial ads contemporary to Oiticica’s experience, and Sky News reels contemporary to ours.
The connection is implicit, in his (still superior) critique of Brazilian minds ‘vulnerable’ to mass media. References to Brazil’s long history of populist politics, which predates the likes of Bolsonaro, challenge how new or unique the the media circus and ‘post-truth’ climate of Western Europe really is. Indeed, the Penetrables were produced in the political context of the country’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, a situation from which Oiticica ‘exiled himself’, and the artist’s contempt for convention – whether artistic or political - was always fuelled by a desire for an abstract freedom.
The bright colours recall those of Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, in her arts and leisure centres designed for working-class districts of São Paulo. But remarkably, Filter Project doesn’t feel out of context on display at the De La Warr Pavilion. Its location ensures it is another place where privileged city dwellers may travel to ‘do’ art, but it’s also an interesting curatorial choice for autumn, as it encourages return with the changing weather, to see how perspectives from the inside out might change.
Oiticica’s works remain as relevant as ever today, in highlighting our continued discomfort and coded behaviours in museums. Spectatorship pervades the experience of the Parangolés (1964) – binary-blurring textile sculptures or capes, more personal structures for participation – as detached from their context. Oiticica may have conceived the Parangolés as layers, though ones which transform and reveal the body, but most will no doubt remove these wearable political banners unchanged.
Central to both the Penetrables and Parangolés is music; reflected in the documentary with interspersed scenes of samba and football in the favelas, highlighting the rhythm and movement common to both – and implicitly, the importance of Black cultures, and bodies, often appropriated by white Brazilians on the global stage.
Sérgio B. Martins, a critic, art historian and professor living in Brazil, refers to the ‘residual Primitivism’ of his practice, something typically ascribed to Western European art, evident in his fetishisation of the favela. Simultaneously, the Parangolés were most fully, or authentically, embraced by participants in America, shrugged off by socioeconomic elites in Brazil’s cities. These complexities aren’t mentioned here to focus on the Pavilion’s own public programme, which includes making recreations for local communities back in Brazil.
It concludes – or pauses - in COSMOCOCA, Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s program in progress and effort at expanded, ‘quasi-cinema’. The curation leans into the anti-imperial politics behind the works; the transformation of cocaine, as a substance extracted from Latin America, and appropriated in Western society, and the artists’ academic engagement with the likes of Sigmund Freud. But it is as much an indulgence in the music and popular culture which informed Oiticica’s practice - appropriated images of Marilyn Monroe and Yoko Ono are soundtracked by the music of Jimi Hendrix, an icon for the artist, who ‘changed the relationship between public and performer’.
Hendrix’s position between worlds – both respected and shunned, when he ‘created’ Woodstock – is explored in great depth in the documentary, indulging in his sexual performance. ‘People felt they were raped in some sense,’ remarks the artist, over images of shocked, and mesmerised, faces of white women. COSMOCOCA was not publicly displayed until 1992, due to the illegality of the drug. Now, fifty years since it was first conceived, the various installations in the series will be simultaneously shown across global institutions, as part of a ‘world tour’ which will return to its infamous swimming pool in LA, and to Hunter College, New York, where the series - like so much of Oiticica’s works - was realised.
COSMOCOCA perfectly captures the tensions in his relationship with ‘the West’. Increasingly, his works referenced rock music; The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, rather than samba. Frederico Coelho highlights how he maintained a comfortable distance from New York’s contemporary art community, a theme touched on only lightly in the curation: ‘The East always looked upon [Western] European ‘white madness’ with indifference or incomprehension,’ Oiticica writes in his manifesto.
Yet again, Oiticica Filho’s documentary adds layers to our understanding; we hear the artist complain of ‘banal’ and performative Happenings in New York, decentring experiential art from its Western focus. Oiticica suggests the city was less free for artists, with smaller buildings, and less transformative cultural spaces than Brazil (no mention of Lina Bo Bardi, again.) He also challenged existing/conventional models as static, and resisted the tendency in the 1970s to display his works as ‘sculptures’, maintaining the movement and changes in their use.
It was a Guggenheim Scholarship that enabled Oiticica to travel to New York and study film, becoming both a part of conventional institutions, and him to appropriate transnational artistic networks, for own purposes. Oiticica was already engaged with the work of Andy Warhol – predating the city icon’s works in his representations of Brazil’s drag communities.
The film subtly reflects this, acknowledging Warhol as a contemporary, without paying him much attention. Indeed, Oiticica was more acutely aware of the double standards facing migrants to the city. ‘Duchamp didn’t exhibit in New York,’ he asserts, whilst non-white artists seeking visas wouldn’t be accepted if making work for their countries, only for display in the US; an extractive relationship with art and artists from the ‘Global South’.
Waiting would have us think of Oiticica as a renegade, living exclusively in the moment, but no doubt, this was a man conscious of legacy. ‘In Brazil, nothing is permanent,’ he remarks, at the same time acknowledging his use of photography for cataloguing, as a means to ‘reconstruct my past’. Academic Irene V. Small suggests him as a ‘self-archivist’; indeed, his invention and constant creation may have been the product of historical insecurity – or an understanding of how non-Western art histories are often excluded from the canon.
By the 1970s, Oiticica was confident that his work was wholly original, ‘a watershed’, to academic Sérgio B. Martins. ‘I feel like I’m sitting on dynamite,’ the artist said, another nod to an ego. In 2009, many of his works were destroyed by fire, and he died young, in the process of creation; the documentary closes with the constant creation of detailed architectural models, perhaps his greatest source of pride.
Still, he was already well-known, and beyond risk of posthumous obscurity. The disaster took place in the same year as a major exhibition in Houston, Texas, and the beginnings of the artist’s online archive. The same cannot be said of the historical legacy of the Brazilian avant-garde more widely, and networks of artists practising in Neo-Concretism, and later Western minimalism and constructivism, in which Oiticica positioned himself too. Glimpses in the documentary of the influential women, and wives of his, contemporaries, and his early abstract works, don’t satisfy.
Waiting is wonderful, but Oiticica Filho’s film is an exhibition all of itself. In a bid to better get to know his uncle, the filmmaker stays close to his subject, creating a similarly non-conventional artwork. The artist’s constant movement is reflected in dynamic filming - the camera shaking during samba dancing scenes - and, without talking head interviews, the artist’s complexities are laid out in their own words. Oiticica was disinterested in editing, something he considered to be an ‘old technique’, but his estate has represented his history perfectly. For an artist who started his study in film, it is fitting that he has at least two documentaries (the first, by Ivan Cardoso), and a screening room at the Embassy of Brazil in London to his name.
Brazil’s art history is as large and diverse as its geography; even within the movements mentioned, many artists were not connected, which makes it all the more disappointing that Western knowledge and representation remains limited to so few. But Waiting’s legacy will be to prompt more critical thinking about the celebrated diversity of the country, authenticity, and how we experience and access art – and yes, to drink in life like orange juice, bits and all.
Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun is on view at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 January 2024.
Hélio Oiticica (2012) screened at the De La Warr Pavilion, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker César Oiticica Filho and Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion, on 23 September 2023, and is available to view online.
In 1970, the artist Hélio Oiticica wrote ‘The Possibilities of Creleisure’, an essay-manifesto calling for the combination of creativity, leisure, and belief (creer, in the languages of his native Brazil). Oiticica’s advocation of ‘leisure-pleasure-making’ in part reflected his personal hedonism – his tastes for sex, drugs, and samba dancing – and a not-too-radical anti-capitalism. But it has also provoked others to rethink the boundaries of the conventional museum space.
Fifteen years after Oiticica’s last UK exhibition, the De La Warr Pavilion re-interprets his practice in light of our contemporary moment. Drawing on archive materials from Rio de Janeiro, New York, and London – letters, poems, and writings which attest to his prolific output, and total practice – Waiting focuses on the ten years of the artist’s departure and return to Brazil, not forgetting a brief residency in Sussex. Still, Oiticica is most often remembered for his immersive, experiential artworks, created long before they were so quotidian or capitalised upon in mainstream institutions.
Installed on clunking Sony TVs, early Super 8 films embody the artist’s fascination with both the capital city and countercultures. There are shots of cash streaming through offices, of Oiticica standing outside his own flat in New York City, witnessing the place nicknamed ‘Babylon’ for its corrupting influence (while another film draws a classical connection between Rome and Manhattan). The technology of their presentation glows with nostalgia, but other works are wholly new and re-created, in order to be re-interpreted.
Hélio Oiticica (2012), a striking found-footage documentary by the artist’s nephew, filmmaker César Oiticica Filho, visually captures the artist’s relationship with the city. We hear him describe the street as ‘a way to be less old’, to ground him from his ‘dangerous inclination to close myself in with ideas’. His ego is suggested in the opening scenes of scuttling insects, and aerial shots of humans moving through his models like mice in a lab experiment, speaking to his repeated self-perception of being above others.
It also subtly reinforces the notion of the Western city as a place of indulgence. Above all, the artist prized information and learning, and was aware of how its abundance (‘dripping into people’s laps’ or ‘at arm’s reach’) in New York made people ambivalent and ignorant of it. At the same time, he bought into the centralisation of the city, staying close to Manhattan, and calling out Queens, the Bronx, as ‘outside of civilisation’. Nor does it shy from his appetite for cocaine, a drug which first enabled creative liberation, but which gradually seeps into the visual narrative as a slow spiralling out of control.
Oiticica Filho also captures the artist towards the end of his life, a time when he returned to Brazil, and allowed the maresias (sea breeze), running, and drinking juice to meet his needs. Not once do we see him indulge in food on screen, and perhaps that reinforces our reservations to pour a glass when we find an operating orange juice machine in one of the artist’s Penetrables.
Oiticica’s Penetrables are works which sit between sculptures and installations, inviting the viewer inside as a participant, enabling access and direct encounter with artworks. Tropicália (1966-1967), the Penetrable for which the artist is best known, is an exit-less construction which challenged the stereotype of Brazil as a ‘tropical paradise’.
Whilst first displayed in Rio de Janeiro, Oiticica was first inspired to make a labyrinthine structure for Hyde Park, implying the intended audience for this critical work. It travelled to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Tate, where a version remains in the permanent collection; curator Michael Wellen suggests it still poses a ‘problem’ for curators, perhaps due to the inclusion of live parrots.
It is absent from this exhibition, in favour of something a little more low-maintenance, and directly relatable. Filter Project is a maze filled with contrasts, both black-out blinds and permeable net curtains, PVC and coloured glass, filtering and adapting the participant’s view out onto Bexhill’s beach. Similar to Turner Contemporary’s recent exhibition with contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes, the curators here seek to create a conversation between Oiticica’s practice, and the local environment. Recreated too is the buzz of neon, the use of audio in the space, and the contrast between commercial ads contemporary to Oiticica’s experience, and Sky News reels contemporary to ours.
The connection is implicit, in his (still superior) critique of Brazilian minds ‘vulnerable’ to mass media. References to Brazil’s long history of populist politics, which predates the likes of Bolsonaro, challenge how new or unique the the media circus and ‘post-truth’ climate of Western Europe really is. Indeed, the Penetrables were produced in the political context of the country’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, a situation from which Oiticica ‘exiled himself’, and the artist’s contempt for convention – whether artistic or political - was always fuelled by a desire for an abstract freedom.
The bright colours recall those of Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, in her arts and leisure centres designed for working-class districts of São Paulo. But remarkably, Filter Project doesn’t feel out of context on display at the De La Warr Pavilion. Its location ensures it is another place where privileged city dwellers may travel to ‘do’ art, but it’s also an interesting curatorial choice for autumn, as it encourages return with the changing weather, to see how perspectives from the inside out might change.
Oiticica’s works remain as relevant as ever today, in highlighting our continued discomfort and coded behaviours in museums. Spectatorship pervades the experience of the Parangolés (1964) – binary-blurring textile sculptures or capes, more personal structures for participation – as detached from their context. Oiticica may have conceived the Parangolés as layers, though ones which transform and reveal the body, but most will no doubt remove these wearable political banners unchanged.
Central to both the Penetrables and Parangolés is music; reflected in the documentary with interspersed scenes of samba and football in the favelas, highlighting the rhythm and movement common to both – and implicitly, the importance of Black cultures, and bodies, often appropriated by white Brazilians on the global stage.
Sérgio B. Martins, a critic, art historian and professor living in Brazil, refers to the ‘residual Primitivism’ of his practice, something typically ascribed to Western European art, evident in his fetishisation of the favela. Simultaneously, the Parangolés were most fully, or authentically, embraced by participants in America, shrugged off by socioeconomic elites in Brazil’s cities. These complexities aren’t mentioned here to focus on the Pavilion’s own public programme, which includes making recreations for local communities back in Brazil.
It concludes – or pauses - in COSMOCOCA, Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s program in progress and effort at expanded, ‘quasi-cinema’. The curation leans into the anti-imperial politics behind the works; the transformation of cocaine, as a substance extracted from Latin America, and appropriated in Western society, and the artists’ academic engagement with the likes of Sigmund Freud. But it is as much an indulgence in the music and popular culture which informed Oiticica’s practice - appropriated images of Marilyn Monroe and Yoko Ono are soundtracked by the music of Jimi Hendrix, an icon for the artist, who ‘changed the relationship between public and performer’.
Hendrix’s position between worlds – both respected and shunned, when he ‘created’ Woodstock – is explored in great depth in the documentary, indulging in his sexual performance. ‘People felt they were raped in some sense,’ remarks the artist, over images of shocked, and mesmerised, faces of white women. COSMOCOCA was not publicly displayed until 1992, due to the illegality of the drug. Now, fifty years since it was first conceived, the various installations in the series will be simultaneously shown across global institutions, as part of a ‘world tour’ which will return to its infamous swimming pool in LA, and to Hunter College, New York, where the series - like so much of Oiticica’s works - was realised.
COSMOCOCA perfectly captures the tensions in his relationship with ‘the West’. Increasingly, his works referenced rock music; The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, rather than samba. Frederico Coelho highlights how he maintained a comfortable distance from New York’s contemporary art community, a theme touched on only lightly in the curation: ‘The East always looked upon [Western] European ‘white madness’ with indifference or incomprehension,’ Oiticica writes in his manifesto.
Yet again, Oiticica Filho’s documentary adds layers to our understanding; we hear the artist complain of ‘banal’ and performative Happenings in New York, decentring experiential art from its Western focus. Oiticica suggests the city was less free for artists, with smaller buildings, and less transformative cultural spaces than Brazil (no mention of Lina Bo Bardi, again.) He also challenged existing/conventional models as static, and resisted the tendency in the 1970s to display his works as ‘sculptures’, maintaining the movement and changes in their use.
It was a Guggenheim Scholarship that enabled Oiticica to travel to New York and study film, becoming both a part of conventional institutions, and him to appropriate transnational artistic networks, for own purposes. Oiticica was already engaged with the work of Andy Warhol – predating the city icon’s works in his representations of Brazil’s drag communities.
The film subtly reflects this, acknowledging Warhol as a contemporary, without paying him much attention. Indeed, Oiticica was more acutely aware of the double standards facing migrants to the city. ‘Duchamp didn’t exhibit in New York,’ he asserts, whilst non-white artists seeking visas wouldn’t be accepted if making work for their countries, only for display in the US; an extractive relationship with art and artists from the ‘Global South’.
Waiting would have us think of Oiticica as a renegade, living exclusively in the moment, but no doubt, this was a man conscious of legacy. ‘In Brazil, nothing is permanent,’ he remarks, at the same time acknowledging his use of photography for cataloguing, as a means to ‘reconstruct my past’. Academic Irene V. Small suggests him as a ‘self-archivist’; indeed, his invention and constant creation may have been the product of historical insecurity – or an understanding of how non-Western art histories are often excluded from the canon.
By the 1970s, Oiticica was confident that his work was wholly original, ‘a watershed’, to academic Sérgio B. Martins. ‘I feel like I’m sitting on dynamite,’ the artist said, another nod to an ego. In 2009, many of his works were destroyed by fire, and he died young, in the process of creation; the documentary closes with the constant creation of detailed architectural models, perhaps his greatest source of pride.
Still, he was already well-known, and beyond risk of posthumous obscurity. The disaster took place in the same year as a major exhibition in Houston, Texas, and the beginnings of the artist’s online archive. The same cannot be said of the historical legacy of the Brazilian avant-garde more widely, and networks of artists practising in Neo-Concretism, and later Western minimalism and constructivism, in which Oiticica positioned himself too. Glimpses in the documentary of the influential women, and wives of his, contemporaries, and his early abstract works, don’t satisfy.
Waiting is wonderful, but Oiticica Filho’s film is an exhibition all of itself. In a bid to better get to know his uncle, the filmmaker stays close to his subject, creating a similarly non-conventional artwork. The artist’s constant movement is reflected in dynamic filming - the camera shaking during samba dancing scenes - and, without talking head interviews, the artist’s complexities are laid out in their own words. Oiticica was disinterested in editing, something he considered to be an ‘old technique’, but his estate has represented his history perfectly. For an artist who started his study in film, it is fitting that he has at least two documentaries (the first, by Ivan Cardoso), and a screening room at the Embassy of Brazil in London to his name.
Brazil’s art history is as large and diverse as its geography; even within the movements mentioned, many artists were not connected, which makes it all the more disappointing that Western knowledge and representation remains limited to so few. But Waiting’s legacy will be to prompt more critical thinking about the celebrated diversity of the country, authenticity, and how we experience and access art – and yes, to drink in life like orange juice, bits and all.
Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun is on view at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 January 2024.
Hélio Oiticica (2012) screened at the De La Warr Pavilion, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker César Oiticica Filho and Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion, on 23 September 2023, and is available to view online.
In 1970, the artist Hélio Oiticica wrote ‘The Possibilities of Creleisure’, an essay-manifesto calling for the combination of creativity, leisure, and belief (creer, in the languages of his native Brazil). Oiticica’s advocation of ‘leisure-pleasure-making’ in part reflected his personal hedonism – his tastes for sex, drugs, and samba dancing – and a not-too-radical anti-capitalism. But it has also provoked others to rethink the boundaries of the conventional museum space.
Fifteen years after Oiticica’s last UK exhibition, the De La Warr Pavilion re-interprets his practice in light of our contemporary moment. Drawing on archive materials from Rio de Janeiro, New York, and London – letters, poems, and writings which attest to his prolific output, and total practice – Waiting focuses on the ten years of the artist’s departure and return to Brazil, not forgetting a brief residency in Sussex. Still, Oiticica is most often remembered for his immersive, experiential artworks, created long before they were so quotidian or capitalised upon in mainstream institutions.
Installed on clunking Sony TVs, early Super 8 films embody the artist’s fascination with both the capital city and countercultures. There are shots of cash streaming through offices, of Oiticica standing outside his own flat in New York City, witnessing the place nicknamed ‘Babylon’ for its corrupting influence (while another film draws a classical connection between Rome and Manhattan). The technology of their presentation glows with nostalgia, but other works are wholly new and re-created, in order to be re-interpreted.
Hélio Oiticica (2012), a striking found-footage documentary by the artist’s nephew, filmmaker César Oiticica Filho, visually captures the artist’s relationship with the city. We hear him describe the street as ‘a way to be less old’, to ground him from his ‘dangerous inclination to close myself in with ideas’. His ego is suggested in the opening scenes of scuttling insects, and aerial shots of humans moving through his models like mice in a lab experiment, speaking to his repeated self-perception of being above others.
It also subtly reinforces the notion of the Western city as a place of indulgence. Above all, the artist prized information and learning, and was aware of how its abundance (‘dripping into people’s laps’ or ‘at arm’s reach’) in New York made people ambivalent and ignorant of it. At the same time, he bought into the centralisation of the city, staying close to Manhattan, and calling out Queens, the Bronx, as ‘outside of civilisation’. Nor does it shy from his appetite for cocaine, a drug which first enabled creative liberation, but which gradually seeps into the visual narrative as a slow spiralling out of control.
Oiticica Filho also captures the artist towards the end of his life, a time when he returned to Brazil, and allowed the maresias (sea breeze), running, and drinking juice to meet his needs. Not once do we see him indulge in food on screen, and perhaps that reinforces our reservations to pour a glass when we find an operating orange juice machine in one of the artist’s Penetrables.
Oiticica’s Penetrables are works which sit between sculptures and installations, inviting the viewer inside as a participant, enabling access and direct encounter with artworks. Tropicália (1966-1967), the Penetrable for which the artist is best known, is an exit-less construction which challenged the stereotype of Brazil as a ‘tropical paradise’.
Whilst first displayed in Rio de Janeiro, Oiticica was first inspired to make a labyrinthine structure for Hyde Park, implying the intended audience for this critical work. It travelled to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Tate, where a version remains in the permanent collection; curator Michael Wellen suggests it still poses a ‘problem’ for curators, perhaps due to the inclusion of live parrots.
It is absent from this exhibition, in favour of something a little more low-maintenance, and directly relatable. Filter Project is a maze filled with contrasts, both black-out blinds and permeable net curtains, PVC and coloured glass, filtering and adapting the participant’s view out onto Bexhill’s beach. Similar to Turner Contemporary’s recent exhibition with contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes, the curators here seek to create a conversation between Oiticica’s practice, and the local environment. Recreated too is the buzz of neon, the use of audio in the space, and the contrast between commercial ads contemporary to Oiticica’s experience, and Sky News reels contemporary to ours.
The connection is implicit, in his (still superior) critique of Brazilian minds ‘vulnerable’ to mass media. References to Brazil’s long history of populist politics, which predates the likes of Bolsonaro, challenge how new or unique the the media circus and ‘post-truth’ climate of Western Europe really is. Indeed, the Penetrables were produced in the political context of the country’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, a situation from which Oiticica ‘exiled himself’, and the artist’s contempt for convention – whether artistic or political - was always fuelled by a desire for an abstract freedom.
The bright colours recall those of Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, in her arts and leisure centres designed for working-class districts of São Paulo. But remarkably, Filter Project doesn’t feel out of context on display at the De La Warr Pavilion. Its location ensures it is another place where privileged city dwellers may travel to ‘do’ art, but it’s also an interesting curatorial choice for autumn, as it encourages return with the changing weather, to see how perspectives from the inside out might change.
Oiticica’s works remain as relevant as ever today, in highlighting our continued discomfort and coded behaviours in museums. Spectatorship pervades the experience of the Parangolés (1964) – binary-blurring textile sculptures or capes, more personal structures for participation – as detached from their context. Oiticica may have conceived the Parangolés as layers, though ones which transform and reveal the body, but most will no doubt remove these wearable political banners unchanged.
Central to both the Penetrables and Parangolés is music; reflected in the documentary with interspersed scenes of samba and football in the favelas, highlighting the rhythm and movement common to both – and implicitly, the importance of Black cultures, and bodies, often appropriated by white Brazilians on the global stage.
Sérgio B. Martins, a critic, art historian and professor living in Brazil, refers to the ‘residual Primitivism’ of his practice, something typically ascribed to Western European art, evident in his fetishisation of the favela. Simultaneously, the Parangolés were most fully, or authentically, embraced by participants in America, shrugged off by socioeconomic elites in Brazil’s cities. These complexities aren’t mentioned here to focus on the Pavilion’s own public programme, which includes making recreations for local communities back in Brazil.
It concludes – or pauses - in COSMOCOCA, Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s program in progress and effort at expanded, ‘quasi-cinema’. The curation leans into the anti-imperial politics behind the works; the transformation of cocaine, as a substance extracted from Latin America, and appropriated in Western society, and the artists’ academic engagement with the likes of Sigmund Freud. But it is as much an indulgence in the music and popular culture which informed Oiticica’s practice - appropriated images of Marilyn Monroe and Yoko Ono are soundtracked by the music of Jimi Hendrix, an icon for the artist, who ‘changed the relationship between public and performer’.
Hendrix’s position between worlds – both respected and shunned, when he ‘created’ Woodstock – is explored in great depth in the documentary, indulging in his sexual performance. ‘People felt they were raped in some sense,’ remarks the artist, over images of shocked, and mesmerised, faces of white women. COSMOCOCA was not publicly displayed until 1992, due to the illegality of the drug. Now, fifty years since it was first conceived, the various installations in the series will be simultaneously shown across global institutions, as part of a ‘world tour’ which will return to its infamous swimming pool in LA, and to Hunter College, New York, where the series - like so much of Oiticica’s works - was realised.
COSMOCOCA perfectly captures the tensions in his relationship with ‘the West’. Increasingly, his works referenced rock music; The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, rather than samba. Frederico Coelho highlights how he maintained a comfortable distance from New York’s contemporary art community, a theme touched on only lightly in the curation: ‘The East always looked upon [Western] European ‘white madness’ with indifference or incomprehension,’ Oiticica writes in his manifesto.
Yet again, Oiticica Filho’s documentary adds layers to our understanding; we hear the artist complain of ‘banal’ and performative Happenings in New York, decentring experiential art from its Western focus. Oiticica suggests the city was less free for artists, with smaller buildings, and less transformative cultural spaces than Brazil (no mention of Lina Bo Bardi, again.) He also challenged existing/conventional models as static, and resisted the tendency in the 1970s to display his works as ‘sculptures’, maintaining the movement and changes in their use.
It was a Guggenheim Scholarship that enabled Oiticica to travel to New York and study film, becoming both a part of conventional institutions, and him to appropriate transnational artistic networks, for own purposes. Oiticica was already engaged with the work of Andy Warhol – predating the city icon’s works in his representations of Brazil’s drag communities.
The film subtly reflects this, acknowledging Warhol as a contemporary, without paying him much attention. Indeed, Oiticica was more acutely aware of the double standards facing migrants to the city. ‘Duchamp didn’t exhibit in New York,’ he asserts, whilst non-white artists seeking visas wouldn’t be accepted if making work for their countries, only for display in the US; an extractive relationship with art and artists from the ‘Global South’.
Waiting would have us think of Oiticica as a renegade, living exclusively in the moment, but no doubt, this was a man conscious of legacy. ‘In Brazil, nothing is permanent,’ he remarks, at the same time acknowledging his use of photography for cataloguing, as a means to ‘reconstruct my past’. Academic Irene V. Small suggests him as a ‘self-archivist’; indeed, his invention and constant creation may have been the product of historical insecurity – or an understanding of how non-Western art histories are often excluded from the canon.
By the 1970s, Oiticica was confident that his work was wholly original, ‘a watershed’, to academic Sérgio B. Martins. ‘I feel like I’m sitting on dynamite,’ the artist said, another nod to an ego. In 2009, many of his works were destroyed by fire, and he died young, in the process of creation; the documentary closes with the constant creation of detailed architectural models, perhaps his greatest source of pride.
Still, he was already well-known, and beyond risk of posthumous obscurity. The disaster took place in the same year as a major exhibition in Houston, Texas, and the beginnings of the artist’s online archive. The same cannot be said of the historical legacy of the Brazilian avant-garde more widely, and networks of artists practising in Neo-Concretism, and later Western minimalism and constructivism, in which Oiticica positioned himself too. Glimpses in the documentary of the influential women, and wives of his, contemporaries, and his early abstract works, don’t satisfy.
Waiting is wonderful, but Oiticica Filho’s film is an exhibition all of itself. In a bid to better get to know his uncle, the filmmaker stays close to his subject, creating a similarly non-conventional artwork. The artist’s constant movement is reflected in dynamic filming - the camera shaking during samba dancing scenes - and, without talking head interviews, the artist’s complexities are laid out in their own words. Oiticica was disinterested in editing, something he considered to be an ‘old technique’, but his estate has represented his history perfectly. For an artist who started his study in film, it is fitting that he has at least two documentaries (the first, by Ivan Cardoso), and a screening room at the Embassy of Brazil in London to his name.
Brazil’s art history is as large and diverse as its geography; even within the movements mentioned, many artists were not connected, which makes it all the more disappointing that Western knowledge and representation remains limited to so few. But Waiting’s legacy will be to prompt more critical thinking about the celebrated diversity of the country, authenticity, and how we experience and access art – and yes, to drink in life like orange juice, bits and all.
Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun is on view at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 January 2024.
Hélio Oiticica (2012) screened at the De La Warr Pavilion, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker César Oiticica Filho and Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion, on 23 September 2023, and is available to view online.
In 1970, the artist Hélio Oiticica wrote ‘The Possibilities of Creleisure’, an essay-manifesto calling for the combination of creativity, leisure, and belief (creer, in the languages of his native Brazil). Oiticica’s advocation of ‘leisure-pleasure-making’ in part reflected his personal hedonism – his tastes for sex, drugs, and samba dancing – and a not-too-radical anti-capitalism. But it has also provoked others to rethink the boundaries of the conventional museum space.
Fifteen years after Oiticica’s last UK exhibition, the De La Warr Pavilion re-interprets his practice in light of our contemporary moment. Drawing on archive materials from Rio de Janeiro, New York, and London – letters, poems, and writings which attest to his prolific output, and total practice – Waiting focuses on the ten years of the artist’s departure and return to Brazil, not forgetting a brief residency in Sussex. Still, Oiticica is most often remembered for his immersive, experiential artworks, created long before they were so quotidian or capitalised upon in mainstream institutions.
Installed on clunking Sony TVs, early Super 8 films embody the artist’s fascination with both the capital city and countercultures. There are shots of cash streaming through offices, of Oiticica standing outside his own flat in New York City, witnessing the place nicknamed ‘Babylon’ for its corrupting influence (while another film draws a classical connection between Rome and Manhattan). The technology of their presentation glows with nostalgia, but other works are wholly new and re-created, in order to be re-interpreted.
Hélio Oiticica (2012), a striking found-footage documentary by the artist’s nephew, filmmaker César Oiticica Filho, visually captures the artist’s relationship with the city. We hear him describe the street as ‘a way to be less old’, to ground him from his ‘dangerous inclination to close myself in with ideas’. His ego is suggested in the opening scenes of scuttling insects, and aerial shots of humans moving through his models like mice in a lab experiment, speaking to his repeated self-perception of being above others.
It also subtly reinforces the notion of the Western city as a place of indulgence. Above all, the artist prized information and learning, and was aware of how its abundance (‘dripping into people’s laps’ or ‘at arm’s reach’) in New York made people ambivalent and ignorant of it. At the same time, he bought into the centralisation of the city, staying close to Manhattan, and calling out Queens, the Bronx, as ‘outside of civilisation’. Nor does it shy from his appetite for cocaine, a drug which first enabled creative liberation, but which gradually seeps into the visual narrative as a slow spiralling out of control.
Oiticica Filho also captures the artist towards the end of his life, a time when he returned to Brazil, and allowed the maresias (sea breeze), running, and drinking juice to meet his needs. Not once do we see him indulge in food on screen, and perhaps that reinforces our reservations to pour a glass when we find an operating orange juice machine in one of the artist’s Penetrables.
Oiticica’s Penetrables are works which sit between sculptures and installations, inviting the viewer inside as a participant, enabling access and direct encounter with artworks. Tropicália (1966-1967), the Penetrable for which the artist is best known, is an exit-less construction which challenged the stereotype of Brazil as a ‘tropical paradise’.
Whilst first displayed in Rio de Janeiro, Oiticica was first inspired to make a labyrinthine structure for Hyde Park, implying the intended audience for this critical work. It travelled to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Tate, where a version remains in the permanent collection; curator Michael Wellen suggests it still poses a ‘problem’ for curators, perhaps due to the inclusion of live parrots.
It is absent from this exhibition, in favour of something a little more low-maintenance, and directly relatable. Filter Project is a maze filled with contrasts, both black-out blinds and permeable net curtains, PVC and coloured glass, filtering and adapting the participant’s view out onto Bexhill’s beach. Similar to Turner Contemporary’s recent exhibition with contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes, the curators here seek to create a conversation between Oiticica’s practice, and the local environment. Recreated too is the buzz of neon, the use of audio in the space, and the contrast between commercial ads contemporary to Oiticica’s experience, and Sky News reels contemporary to ours.
The connection is implicit, in his (still superior) critique of Brazilian minds ‘vulnerable’ to mass media. References to Brazil’s long history of populist politics, which predates the likes of Bolsonaro, challenge how new or unique the the media circus and ‘post-truth’ climate of Western Europe really is. Indeed, the Penetrables were produced in the political context of the country’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, a situation from which Oiticica ‘exiled himself’, and the artist’s contempt for convention – whether artistic or political - was always fuelled by a desire for an abstract freedom.
The bright colours recall those of Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, in her arts and leisure centres designed for working-class districts of São Paulo. But remarkably, Filter Project doesn’t feel out of context on display at the De La Warr Pavilion. Its location ensures it is another place where privileged city dwellers may travel to ‘do’ art, but it’s also an interesting curatorial choice for autumn, as it encourages return with the changing weather, to see how perspectives from the inside out might change.
Oiticica’s works remain as relevant as ever today, in highlighting our continued discomfort and coded behaviours in museums. Spectatorship pervades the experience of the Parangolés (1964) – binary-blurring textile sculptures or capes, more personal structures for participation – as detached from their context. Oiticica may have conceived the Parangolés as layers, though ones which transform and reveal the body, but most will no doubt remove these wearable political banners unchanged.
Central to both the Penetrables and Parangolés is music; reflected in the documentary with interspersed scenes of samba and football in the favelas, highlighting the rhythm and movement common to both – and implicitly, the importance of Black cultures, and bodies, often appropriated by white Brazilians on the global stage.
Sérgio B. Martins, a critic, art historian and professor living in Brazil, refers to the ‘residual Primitivism’ of his practice, something typically ascribed to Western European art, evident in his fetishisation of the favela. Simultaneously, the Parangolés were most fully, or authentically, embraced by participants in America, shrugged off by socioeconomic elites in Brazil’s cities. These complexities aren’t mentioned here to focus on the Pavilion’s own public programme, which includes making recreations for local communities back in Brazil.
It concludes – or pauses - in COSMOCOCA, Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s program in progress and effort at expanded, ‘quasi-cinema’. The curation leans into the anti-imperial politics behind the works; the transformation of cocaine, as a substance extracted from Latin America, and appropriated in Western society, and the artists’ academic engagement with the likes of Sigmund Freud. But it is as much an indulgence in the music and popular culture which informed Oiticica’s practice - appropriated images of Marilyn Monroe and Yoko Ono are soundtracked by the music of Jimi Hendrix, an icon for the artist, who ‘changed the relationship between public and performer’.
Hendrix’s position between worlds – both respected and shunned, when he ‘created’ Woodstock – is explored in great depth in the documentary, indulging in his sexual performance. ‘People felt they were raped in some sense,’ remarks the artist, over images of shocked, and mesmerised, faces of white women. COSMOCOCA was not publicly displayed until 1992, due to the illegality of the drug. Now, fifty years since it was first conceived, the various installations in the series will be simultaneously shown across global institutions, as part of a ‘world tour’ which will return to its infamous swimming pool in LA, and to Hunter College, New York, where the series - like so much of Oiticica’s works - was realised.
COSMOCOCA perfectly captures the tensions in his relationship with ‘the West’. Increasingly, his works referenced rock music; The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, rather than samba. Frederico Coelho highlights how he maintained a comfortable distance from New York’s contemporary art community, a theme touched on only lightly in the curation: ‘The East always looked upon [Western] European ‘white madness’ with indifference or incomprehension,’ Oiticica writes in his manifesto.
Yet again, Oiticica Filho’s documentary adds layers to our understanding; we hear the artist complain of ‘banal’ and performative Happenings in New York, decentring experiential art from its Western focus. Oiticica suggests the city was less free for artists, with smaller buildings, and less transformative cultural spaces than Brazil (no mention of Lina Bo Bardi, again.) He also challenged existing/conventional models as static, and resisted the tendency in the 1970s to display his works as ‘sculptures’, maintaining the movement and changes in their use.
It was a Guggenheim Scholarship that enabled Oiticica to travel to New York and study film, becoming both a part of conventional institutions, and him to appropriate transnational artistic networks, for own purposes. Oiticica was already engaged with the work of Andy Warhol – predating the city icon’s works in his representations of Brazil’s drag communities.
The film subtly reflects this, acknowledging Warhol as a contemporary, without paying him much attention. Indeed, Oiticica was more acutely aware of the double standards facing migrants to the city. ‘Duchamp didn’t exhibit in New York,’ he asserts, whilst non-white artists seeking visas wouldn’t be accepted if making work for their countries, only for display in the US; an extractive relationship with art and artists from the ‘Global South’.
Waiting would have us think of Oiticica as a renegade, living exclusively in the moment, but no doubt, this was a man conscious of legacy. ‘In Brazil, nothing is permanent,’ he remarks, at the same time acknowledging his use of photography for cataloguing, as a means to ‘reconstruct my past’. Academic Irene V. Small suggests him as a ‘self-archivist’; indeed, his invention and constant creation may have been the product of historical insecurity – or an understanding of how non-Western art histories are often excluded from the canon.
By the 1970s, Oiticica was confident that his work was wholly original, ‘a watershed’, to academic Sérgio B. Martins. ‘I feel like I’m sitting on dynamite,’ the artist said, another nod to an ego. In 2009, many of his works were destroyed by fire, and he died young, in the process of creation; the documentary closes with the constant creation of detailed architectural models, perhaps his greatest source of pride.
Still, he was already well-known, and beyond risk of posthumous obscurity. The disaster took place in the same year as a major exhibition in Houston, Texas, and the beginnings of the artist’s online archive. The same cannot be said of the historical legacy of the Brazilian avant-garde more widely, and networks of artists practising in Neo-Concretism, and later Western minimalism and constructivism, in which Oiticica positioned himself too. Glimpses in the documentary of the influential women, and wives of his, contemporaries, and his early abstract works, don’t satisfy.
Waiting is wonderful, but Oiticica Filho’s film is an exhibition all of itself. In a bid to better get to know his uncle, the filmmaker stays close to his subject, creating a similarly non-conventional artwork. The artist’s constant movement is reflected in dynamic filming - the camera shaking during samba dancing scenes - and, without talking head interviews, the artist’s complexities are laid out in their own words. Oiticica was disinterested in editing, something he considered to be an ‘old technique’, but his estate has represented his history perfectly. For an artist who started his study in film, it is fitting that he has at least two documentaries (the first, by Ivan Cardoso), and a screening room at the Embassy of Brazil in London to his name.
Brazil’s art history is as large and diverse as its geography; even within the movements mentioned, many artists were not connected, which makes it all the more disappointing that Western knowledge and representation remains limited to so few. But Waiting’s legacy will be to prompt more critical thinking about the celebrated diversity of the country, authenticity, and how we experience and access art – and yes, to drink in life like orange juice, bits and all.
Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun is on view at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 January 2024.
Hélio Oiticica (2012) screened at the De La Warr Pavilion, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker César Oiticica Filho and Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion, on 23 September 2023, and is available to view online.
In 1970, the artist Hélio Oiticica wrote ‘The Possibilities of Creleisure’, an essay-manifesto calling for the combination of creativity, leisure, and belief (creer, in the languages of his native Brazil). Oiticica’s advocation of ‘leisure-pleasure-making’ in part reflected his personal hedonism – his tastes for sex, drugs, and samba dancing – and a not-too-radical anti-capitalism. But it has also provoked others to rethink the boundaries of the conventional museum space.
Fifteen years after Oiticica’s last UK exhibition, the De La Warr Pavilion re-interprets his practice in light of our contemporary moment. Drawing on archive materials from Rio de Janeiro, New York, and London – letters, poems, and writings which attest to his prolific output, and total practice – Waiting focuses on the ten years of the artist’s departure and return to Brazil, not forgetting a brief residency in Sussex. Still, Oiticica is most often remembered for his immersive, experiential artworks, created long before they were so quotidian or capitalised upon in mainstream institutions.
Installed on clunking Sony TVs, early Super 8 films embody the artist’s fascination with both the capital city and countercultures. There are shots of cash streaming through offices, of Oiticica standing outside his own flat in New York City, witnessing the place nicknamed ‘Babylon’ for its corrupting influence (while another film draws a classical connection between Rome and Manhattan). The technology of their presentation glows with nostalgia, but other works are wholly new and re-created, in order to be re-interpreted.
Hélio Oiticica (2012), a striking found-footage documentary by the artist’s nephew, filmmaker César Oiticica Filho, visually captures the artist’s relationship with the city. We hear him describe the street as ‘a way to be less old’, to ground him from his ‘dangerous inclination to close myself in with ideas’. His ego is suggested in the opening scenes of scuttling insects, and aerial shots of humans moving through his models like mice in a lab experiment, speaking to his repeated self-perception of being above others.
It also subtly reinforces the notion of the Western city as a place of indulgence. Above all, the artist prized information and learning, and was aware of how its abundance (‘dripping into people’s laps’ or ‘at arm’s reach’) in New York made people ambivalent and ignorant of it. At the same time, he bought into the centralisation of the city, staying close to Manhattan, and calling out Queens, the Bronx, as ‘outside of civilisation’. Nor does it shy from his appetite for cocaine, a drug which first enabled creative liberation, but which gradually seeps into the visual narrative as a slow spiralling out of control.
Oiticica Filho also captures the artist towards the end of his life, a time when he returned to Brazil, and allowed the maresias (sea breeze), running, and drinking juice to meet his needs. Not once do we see him indulge in food on screen, and perhaps that reinforces our reservations to pour a glass when we find an operating orange juice machine in one of the artist’s Penetrables.
Oiticica’s Penetrables are works which sit between sculptures and installations, inviting the viewer inside as a participant, enabling access and direct encounter with artworks. Tropicália (1966-1967), the Penetrable for which the artist is best known, is an exit-less construction which challenged the stereotype of Brazil as a ‘tropical paradise’.
Whilst first displayed in Rio de Janeiro, Oiticica was first inspired to make a labyrinthine structure for Hyde Park, implying the intended audience for this critical work. It travelled to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Tate, where a version remains in the permanent collection; curator Michael Wellen suggests it still poses a ‘problem’ for curators, perhaps due to the inclusion of live parrots.
It is absent from this exhibition, in favour of something a little more low-maintenance, and directly relatable. Filter Project is a maze filled with contrasts, both black-out blinds and permeable net curtains, PVC and coloured glass, filtering and adapting the participant’s view out onto Bexhill’s beach. Similar to Turner Contemporary’s recent exhibition with contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes, the curators here seek to create a conversation between Oiticica’s practice, and the local environment. Recreated too is the buzz of neon, the use of audio in the space, and the contrast between commercial ads contemporary to Oiticica’s experience, and Sky News reels contemporary to ours.
The connection is implicit, in his (still superior) critique of Brazilian minds ‘vulnerable’ to mass media. References to Brazil’s long history of populist politics, which predates the likes of Bolsonaro, challenge how new or unique the the media circus and ‘post-truth’ climate of Western Europe really is. Indeed, the Penetrables were produced in the political context of the country’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, a situation from which Oiticica ‘exiled himself’, and the artist’s contempt for convention – whether artistic or political - was always fuelled by a desire for an abstract freedom.
The bright colours recall those of Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, in her arts and leisure centres designed for working-class districts of São Paulo. But remarkably, Filter Project doesn’t feel out of context on display at the De La Warr Pavilion. Its location ensures it is another place where privileged city dwellers may travel to ‘do’ art, but it’s also an interesting curatorial choice for autumn, as it encourages return with the changing weather, to see how perspectives from the inside out might change.
Oiticica’s works remain as relevant as ever today, in highlighting our continued discomfort and coded behaviours in museums. Spectatorship pervades the experience of the Parangolés (1964) – binary-blurring textile sculptures or capes, more personal structures for participation – as detached from their context. Oiticica may have conceived the Parangolés as layers, though ones which transform and reveal the body, but most will no doubt remove these wearable political banners unchanged.
Central to both the Penetrables and Parangolés is music; reflected in the documentary with interspersed scenes of samba and football in the favelas, highlighting the rhythm and movement common to both – and implicitly, the importance of Black cultures, and bodies, often appropriated by white Brazilians on the global stage.
Sérgio B. Martins, a critic, art historian and professor living in Brazil, refers to the ‘residual Primitivism’ of his practice, something typically ascribed to Western European art, evident in his fetishisation of the favela. Simultaneously, the Parangolés were most fully, or authentically, embraced by participants in America, shrugged off by socioeconomic elites in Brazil’s cities. These complexities aren’t mentioned here to focus on the Pavilion’s own public programme, which includes making recreations for local communities back in Brazil.
It concludes – or pauses - in COSMOCOCA, Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s program in progress and effort at expanded, ‘quasi-cinema’. The curation leans into the anti-imperial politics behind the works; the transformation of cocaine, as a substance extracted from Latin America, and appropriated in Western society, and the artists’ academic engagement with the likes of Sigmund Freud. But it is as much an indulgence in the music and popular culture which informed Oiticica’s practice - appropriated images of Marilyn Monroe and Yoko Ono are soundtracked by the music of Jimi Hendrix, an icon for the artist, who ‘changed the relationship between public and performer’.
Hendrix’s position between worlds – both respected and shunned, when he ‘created’ Woodstock – is explored in great depth in the documentary, indulging in his sexual performance. ‘People felt they were raped in some sense,’ remarks the artist, over images of shocked, and mesmerised, faces of white women. COSMOCOCA was not publicly displayed until 1992, due to the illegality of the drug. Now, fifty years since it was first conceived, the various installations in the series will be simultaneously shown across global institutions, as part of a ‘world tour’ which will return to its infamous swimming pool in LA, and to Hunter College, New York, where the series - like so much of Oiticica’s works - was realised.
COSMOCOCA perfectly captures the tensions in his relationship with ‘the West’. Increasingly, his works referenced rock music; The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, rather than samba. Frederico Coelho highlights how he maintained a comfortable distance from New York’s contemporary art community, a theme touched on only lightly in the curation: ‘The East always looked upon [Western] European ‘white madness’ with indifference or incomprehension,’ Oiticica writes in his manifesto.
Yet again, Oiticica Filho’s documentary adds layers to our understanding; we hear the artist complain of ‘banal’ and performative Happenings in New York, decentring experiential art from its Western focus. Oiticica suggests the city was less free for artists, with smaller buildings, and less transformative cultural spaces than Brazil (no mention of Lina Bo Bardi, again.) He also challenged existing/conventional models as static, and resisted the tendency in the 1970s to display his works as ‘sculptures’, maintaining the movement and changes in their use.
It was a Guggenheim Scholarship that enabled Oiticica to travel to New York and study film, becoming both a part of conventional institutions, and him to appropriate transnational artistic networks, for own purposes. Oiticica was already engaged with the work of Andy Warhol – predating the city icon’s works in his representations of Brazil’s drag communities.
The film subtly reflects this, acknowledging Warhol as a contemporary, without paying him much attention. Indeed, Oiticica was more acutely aware of the double standards facing migrants to the city. ‘Duchamp didn’t exhibit in New York,’ he asserts, whilst non-white artists seeking visas wouldn’t be accepted if making work for their countries, only for display in the US; an extractive relationship with art and artists from the ‘Global South’.
Waiting would have us think of Oiticica as a renegade, living exclusively in the moment, but no doubt, this was a man conscious of legacy. ‘In Brazil, nothing is permanent,’ he remarks, at the same time acknowledging his use of photography for cataloguing, as a means to ‘reconstruct my past’. Academic Irene V. Small suggests him as a ‘self-archivist’; indeed, his invention and constant creation may have been the product of historical insecurity – or an understanding of how non-Western art histories are often excluded from the canon.
By the 1970s, Oiticica was confident that his work was wholly original, ‘a watershed’, to academic Sérgio B. Martins. ‘I feel like I’m sitting on dynamite,’ the artist said, another nod to an ego. In 2009, many of his works were destroyed by fire, and he died young, in the process of creation; the documentary closes with the constant creation of detailed architectural models, perhaps his greatest source of pride.
Still, he was already well-known, and beyond risk of posthumous obscurity. The disaster took place in the same year as a major exhibition in Houston, Texas, and the beginnings of the artist’s online archive. The same cannot be said of the historical legacy of the Brazilian avant-garde more widely, and networks of artists practising in Neo-Concretism, and later Western minimalism and constructivism, in which Oiticica positioned himself too. Glimpses in the documentary of the influential women, and wives of his, contemporaries, and his early abstract works, don’t satisfy.
Waiting is wonderful, but Oiticica Filho’s film is an exhibition all of itself. In a bid to better get to know his uncle, the filmmaker stays close to his subject, creating a similarly non-conventional artwork. The artist’s constant movement is reflected in dynamic filming - the camera shaking during samba dancing scenes - and, without talking head interviews, the artist’s complexities are laid out in their own words. Oiticica was disinterested in editing, something he considered to be an ‘old technique’, but his estate has represented his history perfectly. For an artist who started his study in film, it is fitting that he has at least two documentaries (the first, by Ivan Cardoso), and a screening room at the Embassy of Brazil in London to his name.
Brazil’s art history is as large and diverse as its geography; even within the movements mentioned, many artists were not connected, which makes it all the more disappointing that Western knowledge and representation remains limited to so few. But Waiting’s legacy will be to prompt more critical thinking about the celebrated diversity of the country, authenticity, and how we experience and access art – and yes, to drink in life like orange juice, bits and all.
Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun is on view at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 January 2024.
Hélio Oiticica (2012) screened at the De La Warr Pavilion, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker César Oiticica Filho and Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion, on 23 September 2023, and is available to view online.
In 1970, the artist Hélio Oiticica wrote ‘The Possibilities of Creleisure’, an essay-manifesto calling for the combination of creativity, leisure, and belief (creer, in the languages of his native Brazil). Oiticica’s advocation of ‘leisure-pleasure-making’ in part reflected his personal hedonism – his tastes for sex, drugs, and samba dancing – and a not-too-radical anti-capitalism. But it has also provoked others to rethink the boundaries of the conventional museum space.
Fifteen years after Oiticica’s last UK exhibition, the De La Warr Pavilion re-interprets his practice in light of our contemporary moment. Drawing on archive materials from Rio de Janeiro, New York, and London – letters, poems, and writings which attest to his prolific output, and total practice – Waiting focuses on the ten years of the artist’s departure and return to Brazil, not forgetting a brief residency in Sussex. Still, Oiticica is most often remembered for his immersive, experiential artworks, created long before they were so quotidian or capitalised upon in mainstream institutions.
Installed on clunking Sony TVs, early Super 8 films embody the artist’s fascination with both the capital city and countercultures. There are shots of cash streaming through offices, of Oiticica standing outside his own flat in New York City, witnessing the place nicknamed ‘Babylon’ for its corrupting influence (while another film draws a classical connection between Rome and Manhattan). The technology of their presentation glows with nostalgia, but other works are wholly new and re-created, in order to be re-interpreted.
Hélio Oiticica (2012), a striking found-footage documentary by the artist’s nephew, filmmaker César Oiticica Filho, visually captures the artist’s relationship with the city. We hear him describe the street as ‘a way to be less old’, to ground him from his ‘dangerous inclination to close myself in with ideas’. His ego is suggested in the opening scenes of scuttling insects, and aerial shots of humans moving through his models like mice in a lab experiment, speaking to his repeated self-perception of being above others.
It also subtly reinforces the notion of the Western city as a place of indulgence. Above all, the artist prized information and learning, and was aware of how its abundance (‘dripping into people’s laps’ or ‘at arm’s reach’) in New York made people ambivalent and ignorant of it. At the same time, he bought into the centralisation of the city, staying close to Manhattan, and calling out Queens, the Bronx, as ‘outside of civilisation’. Nor does it shy from his appetite for cocaine, a drug which first enabled creative liberation, but which gradually seeps into the visual narrative as a slow spiralling out of control.
Oiticica Filho also captures the artist towards the end of his life, a time when he returned to Brazil, and allowed the maresias (sea breeze), running, and drinking juice to meet his needs. Not once do we see him indulge in food on screen, and perhaps that reinforces our reservations to pour a glass when we find an operating orange juice machine in one of the artist’s Penetrables.
Oiticica’s Penetrables are works which sit between sculptures and installations, inviting the viewer inside as a participant, enabling access and direct encounter with artworks. Tropicália (1966-1967), the Penetrable for which the artist is best known, is an exit-less construction which challenged the stereotype of Brazil as a ‘tropical paradise’.
Whilst first displayed in Rio de Janeiro, Oiticica was first inspired to make a labyrinthine structure for Hyde Park, implying the intended audience for this critical work. It travelled to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Tate, where a version remains in the permanent collection; curator Michael Wellen suggests it still poses a ‘problem’ for curators, perhaps due to the inclusion of live parrots.
It is absent from this exhibition, in favour of something a little more low-maintenance, and directly relatable. Filter Project is a maze filled with contrasts, both black-out blinds and permeable net curtains, PVC and coloured glass, filtering and adapting the participant’s view out onto Bexhill’s beach. Similar to Turner Contemporary’s recent exhibition with contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes, the curators here seek to create a conversation between Oiticica’s practice, and the local environment. Recreated too is the buzz of neon, the use of audio in the space, and the contrast between commercial ads contemporary to Oiticica’s experience, and Sky News reels contemporary to ours.
The connection is implicit, in his (still superior) critique of Brazilian minds ‘vulnerable’ to mass media. References to Brazil’s long history of populist politics, which predates the likes of Bolsonaro, challenge how new or unique the the media circus and ‘post-truth’ climate of Western Europe really is. Indeed, the Penetrables were produced in the political context of the country’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, a situation from which Oiticica ‘exiled himself’, and the artist’s contempt for convention – whether artistic or political - was always fuelled by a desire for an abstract freedom.
The bright colours recall those of Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, in her arts and leisure centres designed for working-class districts of São Paulo. But remarkably, Filter Project doesn’t feel out of context on display at the De La Warr Pavilion. Its location ensures it is another place where privileged city dwellers may travel to ‘do’ art, but it’s also an interesting curatorial choice for autumn, as it encourages return with the changing weather, to see how perspectives from the inside out might change.
Oiticica’s works remain as relevant as ever today, in highlighting our continued discomfort and coded behaviours in museums. Spectatorship pervades the experience of the Parangolés (1964) – binary-blurring textile sculptures or capes, more personal structures for participation – as detached from their context. Oiticica may have conceived the Parangolés as layers, though ones which transform and reveal the body, but most will no doubt remove these wearable political banners unchanged.
Central to both the Penetrables and Parangolés is music; reflected in the documentary with interspersed scenes of samba and football in the favelas, highlighting the rhythm and movement common to both – and implicitly, the importance of Black cultures, and bodies, often appropriated by white Brazilians on the global stage.
Sérgio B. Martins, a critic, art historian and professor living in Brazil, refers to the ‘residual Primitivism’ of his practice, something typically ascribed to Western European art, evident in his fetishisation of the favela. Simultaneously, the Parangolés were most fully, or authentically, embraced by participants in America, shrugged off by socioeconomic elites in Brazil’s cities. These complexities aren’t mentioned here to focus on the Pavilion’s own public programme, which includes making recreations for local communities back in Brazil.
It concludes – or pauses - in COSMOCOCA, Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s program in progress and effort at expanded, ‘quasi-cinema’. The curation leans into the anti-imperial politics behind the works; the transformation of cocaine, as a substance extracted from Latin America, and appropriated in Western society, and the artists’ academic engagement with the likes of Sigmund Freud. But it is as much an indulgence in the music and popular culture which informed Oiticica’s practice - appropriated images of Marilyn Monroe and Yoko Ono are soundtracked by the music of Jimi Hendrix, an icon for the artist, who ‘changed the relationship between public and performer’.
Hendrix’s position between worlds – both respected and shunned, when he ‘created’ Woodstock – is explored in great depth in the documentary, indulging in his sexual performance. ‘People felt they were raped in some sense,’ remarks the artist, over images of shocked, and mesmerised, faces of white women. COSMOCOCA was not publicly displayed until 1992, due to the illegality of the drug. Now, fifty years since it was first conceived, the various installations in the series will be simultaneously shown across global institutions, as part of a ‘world tour’ which will return to its infamous swimming pool in LA, and to Hunter College, New York, where the series - like so much of Oiticica’s works - was realised.
COSMOCOCA perfectly captures the tensions in his relationship with ‘the West’. Increasingly, his works referenced rock music; The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, rather than samba. Frederico Coelho highlights how he maintained a comfortable distance from New York’s contemporary art community, a theme touched on only lightly in the curation: ‘The East always looked upon [Western] European ‘white madness’ with indifference or incomprehension,’ Oiticica writes in his manifesto.
Yet again, Oiticica Filho’s documentary adds layers to our understanding; we hear the artist complain of ‘banal’ and performative Happenings in New York, decentring experiential art from its Western focus. Oiticica suggests the city was less free for artists, with smaller buildings, and less transformative cultural spaces than Brazil (no mention of Lina Bo Bardi, again.) He also challenged existing/conventional models as static, and resisted the tendency in the 1970s to display his works as ‘sculptures’, maintaining the movement and changes in their use.
It was a Guggenheim Scholarship that enabled Oiticica to travel to New York and study film, becoming both a part of conventional institutions, and him to appropriate transnational artistic networks, for own purposes. Oiticica was already engaged with the work of Andy Warhol – predating the city icon’s works in his representations of Brazil’s drag communities.
The film subtly reflects this, acknowledging Warhol as a contemporary, without paying him much attention. Indeed, Oiticica was more acutely aware of the double standards facing migrants to the city. ‘Duchamp didn’t exhibit in New York,’ he asserts, whilst non-white artists seeking visas wouldn’t be accepted if making work for their countries, only for display in the US; an extractive relationship with art and artists from the ‘Global South’.
Waiting would have us think of Oiticica as a renegade, living exclusively in the moment, but no doubt, this was a man conscious of legacy. ‘In Brazil, nothing is permanent,’ he remarks, at the same time acknowledging his use of photography for cataloguing, as a means to ‘reconstruct my past’. Academic Irene V. Small suggests him as a ‘self-archivist’; indeed, his invention and constant creation may have been the product of historical insecurity – or an understanding of how non-Western art histories are often excluded from the canon.
By the 1970s, Oiticica was confident that his work was wholly original, ‘a watershed’, to academic Sérgio B. Martins. ‘I feel like I’m sitting on dynamite,’ the artist said, another nod to an ego. In 2009, many of his works were destroyed by fire, and he died young, in the process of creation; the documentary closes with the constant creation of detailed architectural models, perhaps his greatest source of pride.
Still, he was already well-known, and beyond risk of posthumous obscurity. The disaster took place in the same year as a major exhibition in Houston, Texas, and the beginnings of the artist’s online archive. The same cannot be said of the historical legacy of the Brazilian avant-garde more widely, and networks of artists practising in Neo-Concretism, and later Western minimalism and constructivism, in which Oiticica positioned himself too. Glimpses in the documentary of the influential women, and wives of his, contemporaries, and his early abstract works, don’t satisfy.
Waiting is wonderful, but Oiticica Filho’s film is an exhibition all of itself. In a bid to better get to know his uncle, the filmmaker stays close to his subject, creating a similarly non-conventional artwork. The artist’s constant movement is reflected in dynamic filming - the camera shaking during samba dancing scenes - and, without talking head interviews, the artist’s complexities are laid out in their own words. Oiticica was disinterested in editing, something he considered to be an ‘old technique’, but his estate has represented his history perfectly. For an artist who started his study in film, it is fitting that he has at least two documentaries (the first, by Ivan Cardoso), and a screening room at the Embassy of Brazil in London to his name.
Brazil’s art history is as large and diverse as its geography; even within the movements mentioned, many artists were not connected, which makes it all the more disappointing that Western knowledge and representation remains limited to so few. But Waiting’s legacy will be to prompt more critical thinking about the celebrated diversity of the country, authenticity, and how we experience and access art – and yes, to drink in life like orange juice, bits and all.
Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun is on view at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 January 2024.
Hélio Oiticica (2012) screened at the De La Warr Pavilion, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker César Oiticica Filho and Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion, on 23 September 2023, and is available to view online.
In 1970, the artist Hélio Oiticica wrote ‘The Possibilities of Creleisure’, an essay-manifesto calling for the combination of creativity, leisure, and belief (creer, in the languages of his native Brazil). Oiticica’s advocation of ‘leisure-pleasure-making’ in part reflected his personal hedonism – his tastes for sex, drugs, and samba dancing – and a not-too-radical anti-capitalism. But it has also provoked others to rethink the boundaries of the conventional museum space.
Fifteen years after Oiticica’s last UK exhibition, the De La Warr Pavilion re-interprets his practice in light of our contemporary moment. Drawing on archive materials from Rio de Janeiro, New York, and London – letters, poems, and writings which attest to his prolific output, and total practice – Waiting focuses on the ten years of the artist’s departure and return to Brazil, not forgetting a brief residency in Sussex. Still, Oiticica is most often remembered for his immersive, experiential artworks, created long before they were so quotidian or capitalised upon in mainstream institutions.
Installed on clunking Sony TVs, early Super 8 films embody the artist’s fascination with both the capital city and countercultures. There are shots of cash streaming through offices, of Oiticica standing outside his own flat in New York City, witnessing the place nicknamed ‘Babylon’ for its corrupting influence (while another film draws a classical connection between Rome and Manhattan). The technology of their presentation glows with nostalgia, but other works are wholly new and re-created, in order to be re-interpreted.
Hélio Oiticica (2012), a striking found-footage documentary by the artist’s nephew, filmmaker César Oiticica Filho, visually captures the artist’s relationship with the city. We hear him describe the street as ‘a way to be less old’, to ground him from his ‘dangerous inclination to close myself in with ideas’. His ego is suggested in the opening scenes of scuttling insects, and aerial shots of humans moving through his models like mice in a lab experiment, speaking to his repeated self-perception of being above others.
It also subtly reinforces the notion of the Western city as a place of indulgence. Above all, the artist prized information and learning, and was aware of how its abundance (‘dripping into people’s laps’ or ‘at arm’s reach’) in New York made people ambivalent and ignorant of it. At the same time, he bought into the centralisation of the city, staying close to Manhattan, and calling out Queens, the Bronx, as ‘outside of civilisation’. Nor does it shy from his appetite for cocaine, a drug which first enabled creative liberation, but which gradually seeps into the visual narrative as a slow spiralling out of control.
Oiticica Filho also captures the artist towards the end of his life, a time when he returned to Brazil, and allowed the maresias (sea breeze), running, and drinking juice to meet his needs. Not once do we see him indulge in food on screen, and perhaps that reinforces our reservations to pour a glass when we find an operating orange juice machine in one of the artist’s Penetrables.
Oiticica’s Penetrables are works which sit between sculptures and installations, inviting the viewer inside as a participant, enabling access and direct encounter with artworks. Tropicália (1966-1967), the Penetrable for which the artist is best known, is an exit-less construction which challenged the stereotype of Brazil as a ‘tropical paradise’.
Whilst first displayed in Rio de Janeiro, Oiticica was first inspired to make a labyrinthine structure for Hyde Park, implying the intended audience for this critical work. It travelled to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Tate, where a version remains in the permanent collection; curator Michael Wellen suggests it still poses a ‘problem’ for curators, perhaps due to the inclusion of live parrots.
It is absent from this exhibition, in favour of something a little more low-maintenance, and directly relatable. Filter Project is a maze filled with contrasts, both black-out blinds and permeable net curtains, PVC and coloured glass, filtering and adapting the participant’s view out onto Bexhill’s beach. Similar to Turner Contemporary’s recent exhibition with contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes, the curators here seek to create a conversation between Oiticica’s practice, and the local environment. Recreated too is the buzz of neon, the use of audio in the space, and the contrast between commercial ads contemporary to Oiticica’s experience, and Sky News reels contemporary to ours.
The connection is implicit, in his (still superior) critique of Brazilian minds ‘vulnerable’ to mass media. References to Brazil’s long history of populist politics, which predates the likes of Bolsonaro, challenge how new or unique the the media circus and ‘post-truth’ climate of Western Europe really is. Indeed, the Penetrables were produced in the political context of the country’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, a situation from which Oiticica ‘exiled himself’, and the artist’s contempt for convention – whether artistic or political - was always fuelled by a desire for an abstract freedom.
The bright colours recall those of Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, in her arts and leisure centres designed for working-class districts of São Paulo. But remarkably, Filter Project doesn’t feel out of context on display at the De La Warr Pavilion. Its location ensures it is another place where privileged city dwellers may travel to ‘do’ art, but it’s also an interesting curatorial choice for autumn, as it encourages return with the changing weather, to see how perspectives from the inside out might change.
Oiticica’s works remain as relevant as ever today, in highlighting our continued discomfort and coded behaviours in museums. Spectatorship pervades the experience of the Parangolés (1964) – binary-blurring textile sculptures or capes, more personal structures for participation – as detached from their context. Oiticica may have conceived the Parangolés as layers, though ones which transform and reveal the body, but most will no doubt remove these wearable political banners unchanged.
Central to both the Penetrables and Parangolés is music; reflected in the documentary with interspersed scenes of samba and football in the favelas, highlighting the rhythm and movement common to both – and implicitly, the importance of Black cultures, and bodies, often appropriated by white Brazilians on the global stage.
Sérgio B. Martins, a critic, art historian and professor living in Brazil, refers to the ‘residual Primitivism’ of his practice, something typically ascribed to Western European art, evident in his fetishisation of the favela. Simultaneously, the Parangolés were most fully, or authentically, embraced by participants in America, shrugged off by socioeconomic elites in Brazil’s cities. These complexities aren’t mentioned here to focus on the Pavilion’s own public programme, which includes making recreations for local communities back in Brazil.
It concludes – or pauses - in COSMOCOCA, Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s program in progress and effort at expanded, ‘quasi-cinema’. The curation leans into the anti-imperial politics behind the works; the transformation of cocaine, as a substance extracted from Latin America, and appropriated in Western society, and the artists’ academic engagement with the likes of Sigmund Freud. But it is as much an indulgence in the music and popular culture which informed Oiticica’s practice - appropriated images of Marilyn Monroe and Yoko Ono are soundtracked by the music of Jimi Hendrix, an icon for the artist, who ‘changed the relationship between public and performer’.
Hendrix’s position between worlds – both respected and shunned, when he ‘created’ Woodstock – is explored in great depth in the documentary, indulging in his sexual performance. ‘People felt they were raped in some sense,’ remarks the artist, over images of shocked, and mesmerised, faces of white women. COSMOCOCA was not publicly displayed until 1992, due to the illegality of the drug. Now, fifty years since it was first conceived, the various installations in the series will be simultaneously shown across global institutions, as part of a ‘world tour’ which will return to its infamous swimming pool in LA, and to Hunter College, New York, where the series - like so much of Oiticica’s works - was realised.
COSMOCOCA perfectly captures the tensions in his relationship with ‘the West’. Increasingly, his works referenced rock music; The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, rather than samba. Frederico Coelho highlights how he maintained a comfortable distance from New York’s contemporary art community, a theme touched on only lightly in the curation: ‘The East always looked upon [Western] European ‘white madness’ with indifference or incomprehension,’ Oiticica writes in his manifesto.
Yet again, Oiticica Filho’s documentary adds layers to our understanding; we hear the artist complain of ‘banal’ and performative Happenings in New York, decentring experiential art from its Western focus. Oiticica suggests the city was less free for artists, with smaller buildings, and less transformative cultural spaces than Brazil (no mention of Lina Bo Bardi, again.) He also challenged existing/conventional models as static, and resisted the tendency in the 1970s to display his works as ‘sculptures’, maintaining the movement and changes in their use.
It was a Guggenheim Scholarship that enabled Oiticica to travel to New York and study film, becoming both a part of conventional institutions, and him to appropriate transnational artistic networks, for own purposes. Oiticica was already engaged with the work of Andy Warhol – predating the city icon’s works in his representations of Brazil’s drag communities.
The film subtly reflects this, acknowledging Warhol as a contemporary, without paying him much attention. Indeed, Oiticica was more acutely aware of the double standards facing migrants to the city. ‘Duchamp didn’t exhibit in New York,’ he asserts, whilst non-white artists seeking visas wouldn’t be accepted if making work for their countries, only for display in the US; an extractive relationship with art and artists from the ‘Global South’.
Waiting would have us think of Oiticica as a renegade, living exclusively in the moment, but no doubt, this was a man conscious of legacy. ‘In Brazil, nothing is permanent,’ he remarks, at the same time acknowledging his use of photography for cataloguing, as a means to ‘reconstruct my past’. Academic Irene V. Small suggests him as a ‘self-archivist’; indeed, his invention and constant creation may have been the product of historical insecurity – or an understanding of how non-Western art histories are often excluded from the canon.
By the 1970s, Oiticica was confident that his work was wholly original, ‘a watershed’, to academic Sérgio B. Martins. ‘I feel like I’m sitting on dynamite,’ the artist said, another nod to an ego. In 2009, many of his works were destroyed by fire, and he died young, in the process of creation; the documentary closes with the constant creation of detailed architectural models, perhaps his greatest source of pride.
Still, he was already well-known, and beyond risk of posthumous obscurity. The disaster took place in the same year as a major exhibition in Houston, Texas, and the beginnings of the artist’s online archive. The same cannot be said of the historical legacy of the Brazilian avant-garde more widely, and networks of artists practising in Neo-Concretism, and later Western minimalism and constructivism, in which Oiticica positioned himself too. Glimpses in the documentary of the influential women, and wives of his, contemporaries, and his early abstract works, don’t satisfy.
Waiting is wonderful, but Oiticica Filho’s film is an exhibition all of itself. In a bid to better get to know his uncle, the filmmaker stays close to his subject, creating a similarly non-conventional artwork. The artist’s constant movement is reflected in dynamic filming - the camera shaking during samba dancing scenes - and, without talking head interviews, the artist’s complexities are laid out in their own words. Oiticica was disinterested in editing, something he considered to be an ‘old technique’, but his estate has represented his history perfectly. For an artist who started his study in film, it is fitting that he has at least two documentaries (the first, by Ivan Cardoso), and a screening room at the Embassy of Brazil in London to his name.
Brazil’s art history is as large and diverse as its geography; even within the movements mentioned, many artists were not connected, which makes it all the more disappointing that Western knowledge and representation remains limited to so few. But Waiting’s legacy will be to prompt more critical thinking about the celebrated diversity of the country, authenticity, and how we experience and access art – and yes, to drink in life like orange juice, bits and all.
Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun is on view at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 January 2024.
Hélio Oiticica (2012) screened at the De La Warr Pavilion, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker César Oiticica Filho and Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion, on 23 September 2023, and is available to view online.
In 1970, the artist Hélio Oiticica wrote ‘The Possibilities of Creleisure’, an essay-manifesto calling for the combination of creativity, leisure, and belief (creer, in the languages of his native Brazil). Oiticica’s advocation of ‘leisure-pleasure-making’ in part reflected his personal hedonism – his tastes for sex, drugs, and samba dancing – and a not-too-radical anti-capitalism. But it has also provoked others to rethink the boundaries of the conventional museum space.
Fifteen years after Oiticica’s last UK exhibition, the De La Warr Pavilion re-interprets his practice in light of our contemporary moment. Drawing on archive materials from Rio de Janeiro, New York, and London – letters, poems, and writings which attest to his prolific output, and total practice – Waiting focuses on the ten years of the artist’s departure and return to Brazil, not forgetting a brief residency in Sussex. Still, Oiticica is most often remembered for his immersive, experiential artworks, created long before they were so quotidian or capitalised upon in mainstream institutions.
Installed on clunking Sony TVs, early Super 8 films embody the artist’s fascination with both the capital city and countercultures. There are shots of cash streaming through offices, of Oiticica standing outside his own flat in New York City, witnessing the place nicknamed ‘Babylon’ for its corrupting influence (while another film draws a classical connection between Rome and Manhattan). The technology of their presentation glows with nostalgia, but other works are wholly new and re-created, in order to be re-interpreted.
Hélio Oiticica (2012), a striking found-footage documentary by the artist’s nephew, filmmaker César Oiticica Filho, visually captures the artist’s relationship with the city. We hear him describe the street as ‘a way to be less old’, to ground him from his ‘dangerous inclination to close myself in with ideas’. His ego is suggested in the opening scenes of scuttling insects, and aerial shots of humans moving through his models like mice in a lab experiment, speaking to his repeated self-perception of being above others.
It also subtly reinforces the notion of the Western city as a place of indulgence. Above all, the artist prized information and learning, and was aware of how its abundance (‘dripping into people’s laps’ or ‘at arm’s reach’) in New York made people ambivalent and ignorant of it. At the same time, he bought into the centralisation of the city, staying close to Manhattan, and calling out Queens, the Bronx, as ‘outside of civilisation’. Nor does it shy from his appetite for cocaine, a drug which first enabled creative liberation, but which gradually seeps into the visual narrative as a slow spiralling out of control.
Oiticica Filho also captures the artist towards the end of his life, a time when he returned to Brazil, and allowed the maresias (sea breeze), running, and drinking juice to meet his needs. Not once do we see him indulge in food on screen, and perhaps that reinforces our reservations to pour a glass when we find an operating orange juice machine in one of the artist’s Penetrables.
Oiticica’s Penetrables are works which sit between sculptures and installations, inviting the viewer inside as a participant, enabling access and direct encounter with artworks. Tropicália (1966-1967), the Penetrable for which the artist is best known, is an exit-less construction which challenged the stereotype of Brazil as a ‘tropical paradise’.
Whilst first displayed in Rio de Janeiro, Oiticica was first inspired to make a labyrinthine structure for Hyde Park, implying the intended audience for this critical work. It travelled to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Tate, where a version remains in the permanent collection; curator Michael Wellen suggests it still poses a ‘problem’ for curators, perhaps due to the inclusion of live parrots.
It is absent from this exhibition, in favour of something a little more low-maintenance, and directly relatable. Filter Project is a maze filled with contrasts, both black-out blinds and permeable net curtains, PVC and coloured glass, filtering and adapting the participant’s view out onto Bexhill’s beach. Similar to Turner Contemporary’s recent exhibition with contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes, the curators here seek to create a conversation between Oiticica’s practice, and the local environment. Recreated too is the buzz of neon, the use of audio in the space, and the contrast between commercial ads contemporary to Oiticica’s experience, and Sky News reels contemporary to ours.
The connection is implicit, in his (still superior) critique of Brazilian minds ‘vulnerable’ to mass media. References to Brazil’s long history of populist politics, which predates the likes of Bolsonaro, challenge how new or unique the the media circus and ‘post-truth’ climate of Western Europe really is. Indeed, the Penetrables were produced in the political context of the country’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, a situation from which Oiticica ‘exiled himself’, and the artist’s contempt for convention – whether artistic or political - was always fuelled by a desire for an abstract freedom.
The bright colours recall those of Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, in her arts and leisure centres designed for working-class districts of São Paulo. But remarkably, Filter Project doesn’t feel out of context on display at the De La Warr Pavilion. Its location ensures it is another place where privileged city dwellers may travel to ‘do’ art, but it’s also an interesting curatorial choice for autumn, as it encourages return with the changing weather, to see how perspectives from the inside out might change.
Oiticica’s works remain as relevant as ever today, in highlighting our continued discomfort and coded behaviours in museums. Spectatorship pervades the experience of the Parangolés (1964) – binary-blurring textile sculptures or capes, more personal structures for participation – as detached from their context. Oiticica may have conceived the Parangolés as layers, though ones which transform and reveal the body, but most will no doubt remove these wearable political banners unchanged.
Central to both the Penetrables and Parangolés is music; reflected in the documentary with interspersed scenes of samba and football in the favelas, highlighting the rhythm and movement common to both – and implicitly, the importance of Black cultures, and bodies, often appropriated by white Brazilians on the global stage.
Sérgio B. Martins, a critic, art historian and professor living in Brazil, refers to the ‘residual Primitivism’ of his practice, something typically ascribed to Western European art, evident in his fetishisation of the favela. Simultaneously, the Parangolés were most fully, or authentically, embraced by participants in America, shrugged off by socioeconomic elites in Brazil’s cities. These complexities aren’t mentioned here to focus on the Pavilion’s own public programme, which includes making recreations for local communities back in Brazil.
It concludes – or pauses - in COSMOCOCA, Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s program in progress and effort at expanded, ‘quasi-cinema’. The curation leans into the anti-imperial politics behind the works; the transformation of cocaine, as a substance extracted from Latin America, and appropriated in Western society, and the artists’ academic engagement with the likes of Sigmund Freud. But it is as much an indulgence in the music and popular culture which informed Oiticica’s practice - appropriated images of Marilyn Monroe and Yoko Ono are soundtracked by the music of Jimi Hendrix, an icon for the artist, who ‘changed the relationship between public and performer’.
Hendrix’s position between worlds – both respected and shunned, when he ‘created’ Woodstock – is explored in great depth in the documentary, indulging in his sexual performance. ‘People felt they were raped in some sense,’ remarks the artist, over images of shocked, and mesmerised, faces of white women. COSMOCOCA was not publicly displayed until 1992, due to the illegality of the drug. Now, fifty years since it was first conceived, the various installations in the series will be simultaneously shown across global institutions, as part of a ‘world tour’ which will return to its infamous swimming pool in LA, and to Hunter College, New York, where the series - like so much of Oiticica’s works - was realised.
COSMOCOCA perfectly captures the tensions in his relationship with ‘the West’. Increasingly, his works referenced rock music; The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, rather than samba. Frederico Coelho highlights how he maintained a comfortable distance from New York’s contemporary art community, a theme touched on only lightly in the curation: ‘The East always looked upon [Western] European ‘white madness’ with indifference or incomprehension,’ Oiticica writes in his manifesto.
Yet again, Oiticica Filho’s documentary adds layers to our understanding; we hear the artist complain of ‘banal’ and performative Happenings in New York, decentring experiential art from its Western focus. Oiticica suggests the city was less free for artists, with smaller buildings, and less transformative cultural spaces than Brazil (no mention of Lina Bo Bardi, again.) He also challenged existing/conventional models as static, and resisted the tendency in the 1970s to display his works as ‘sculptures’, maintaining the movement and changes in their use.
It was a Guggenheim Scholarship that enabled Oiticica to travel to New York and study film, becoming both a part of conventional institutions, and him to appropriate transnational artistic networks, for own purposes. Oiticica was already engaged with the work of Andy Warhol – predating the city icon’s works in his representations of Brazil’s drag communities.
The film subtly reflects this, acknowledging Warhol as a contemporary, without paying him much attention. Indeed, Oiticica was more acutely aware of the double standards facing migrants to the city. ‘Duchamp didn’t exhibit in New York,’ he asserts, whilst non-white artists seeking visas wouldn’t be accepted if making work for their countries, only for display in the US; an extractive relationship with art and artists from the ‘Global South’.
Waiting would have us think of Oiticica as a renegade, living exclusively in the moment, but no doubt, this was a man conscious of legacy. ‘In Brazil, nothing is permanent,’ he remarks, at the same time acknowledging his use of photography for cataloguing, as a means to ‘reconstruct my past’. Academic Irene V. Small suggests him as a ‘self-archivist’; indeed, his invention and constant creation may have been the product of historical insecurity – or an understanding of how non-Western art histories are often excluded from the canon.
By the 1970s, Oiticica was confident that his work was wholly original, ‘a watershed’, to academic Sérgio B. Martins. ‘I feel like I’m sitting on dynamite,’ the artist said, another nod to an ego. In 2009, many of his works were destroyed by fire, and he died young, in the process of creation; the documentary closes with the constant creation of detailed architectural models, perhaps his greatest source of pride.
Still, he was already well-known, and beyond risk of posthumous obscurity. The disaster took place in the same year as a major exhibition in Houston, Texas, and the beginnings of the artist’s online archive. The same cannot be said of the historical legacy of the Brazilian avant-garde more widely, and networks of artists practising in Neo-Concretism, and later Western minimalism and constructivism, in which Oiticica positioned himself too. Glimpses in the documentary of the influential women, and wives of his, contemporaries, and his early abstract works, don’t satisfy.
Waiting is wonderful, but Oiticica Filho’s film is an exhibition all of itself. In a bid to better get to know his uncle, the filmmaker stays close to his subject, creating a similarly non-conventional artwork. The artist’s constant movement is reflected in dynamic filming - the camera shaking during samba dancing scenes - and, without talking head interviews, the artist’s complexities are laid out in their own words. Oiticica was disinterested in editing, something he considered to be an ‘old technique’, but his estate has represented his history perfectly. For an artist who started his study in film, it is fitting that he has at least two documentaries (the first, by Ivan Cardoso), and a screening room at the Embassy of Brazil in London to his name.
Brazil’s art history is as large and diverse as its geography; even within the movements mentioned, many artists were not connected, which makes it all the more disappointing that Western knowledge and representation remains limited to so few. But Waiting’s legacy will be to prompt more critical thinking about the celebrated diversity of the country, authenticity, and how we experience and access art – and yes, to drink in life like orange juice, bits and all.
Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun is on view at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea until 14 January 2024.
Hélio Oiticica (2012) screened at the De La Warr Pavilion, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker César Oiticica Filho and Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions at De La Warr Pavilion, on 23 September 2023, and is available to view online.
