“Creleisure,” Oiticica termed the principle of his sensual installation “Eden” at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, in 1969. Jimi Hendrix became a guiding light to Oiticica at least as consequential as Marcel Duchamp. Like other aspects of his quicksilver character, his politics were ambiguous: leftist in general but what might be termed pop-aristocratic in effect. Needling of the junta by Oiticica and other artists-“Be an outlaw, be a hero,” he printed in black on a red banner with the image of a fallen youth-ended, in 1968, with a crackdown that drove many, including him, into exile. A military coup in Brazil in 1964 had ushered in a period of governmental oppression, which initially spared artistic activities. When, in 1965, Rio’s Museum of Modern Art barred entry to Parangolé-clad folk brought by Oiticica to dance at the opening of a show that he was in, the group disported outside in what became a legendary ad-hoc pageant. With concerted study, he became an expert samba dancer. The improvisatory folk culture there inspired his “Parangolés”: garments for festive wear, mainly capes, that he stitched together from swaths and scraps of colorful fabric. He took to frequenting Rio’s favelas, the direly impoverished hillside shantytowns that overlook the prosperous city. Those led to his “Penetrables”-booths that could be entered-and “Bólides,” finely built wooden boxes with drawers or flaps that viewers could open to find various raw materials, mostly earthen. The split proved enduring.) In hundreds of small paintings-too few, in the show, to sate my appetite for them-the young Oiticica rang startling changes, mixing homage and rivalry, on the styles of Mondrian, Malevich, and Klee.īy 1960, with like-minded compatriots including Lygia Pape (her own grand retrospective currently at the Met Breuer signals a corrective attention to Latin- American art), Oiticica had developed sculptural expansions of painting, with standing and suspended panels. (This put them on a course alien to artists in the United States, where Abstract Expressionism-soon to be followed by Pop art and minimalism-sought to eclipse European modernism. Back in Rio, he wrote plays, studied painting, and, in 1955, joined a group of artists who were strongly influenced by European geometric abstraction. He devoured modern philosophy, favoring Nietzsche. Oiticica spent two years in Washington, D.C., starting in 1947, while his father worked at the National Museum of Natural History. His father was a polymath engineer, mathematician, scientist, and experimental photographer whose own father, a philologist, published an anarchist newspaper. Oiticica was born in Rio in 1937 to an upper-middle-class and deeply cultured family. I mention this because a tin ear for Portuguese makes me typical in an art world that, with exceptions, has long been inattentive to Latin America. My pronunciation can still come out a little different every time, along a scale from the “Oy-ti- seek-a” recommended in the Times to the “Whoa-ta- cee-kah” that a self-confident Midwestern friend of mine swears by. Works that he made in New York and, at the time, showed only privately exalt sex, drugs, and rock and roll-delirium aplenty, yet managed with acute aesthetic intelligence. So do the multifarious love nests (mattresses, straw, chopped-up foam rubber, water) of a more austere faux beach, “Eden” (1969). The sand, huts, potted plants, caged parrots, and inscribed poetry of his sprawling “Tropicália” (1968) await your barefoot delectation, should you choose to park your shoes in the rack provided. Along the way, he turned from superb abstract painting to innovative work in sculpture, film, writing, political action, and participatory installation, much of which remains as fresh as this morning. Oiticica died in 1980, of a stroke, at the age of forty-two, after early success in Rio de Janeiro, a brush with fame in London, obscurity during seven years in New York, and a return to Rio that, at one opening, occasioned a riot. I’m getting braver at saying the name of a sorely under-known Brazilian artist whose retrospective at the Whitney Museum, “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium,” comes as an overdue revelation. Courtesy Claudio Oiticica / Projeto Hélio Oiticica Oiticica’s “Bólides” on display in his garden in Rio de Janeiro, in the mid-sixties.
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