Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame

Hélio Oiticica

Hélio Oiticica

Folding the Frame

Irene V. Small

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Irene V. Small is assistant professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, where she is also an affiliated faculty member in the Program in Latin American Studies and the Program in Media and Modernity.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in China

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-26016-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-26033-4 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226260334.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Small, Irene, author.

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

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-26016-7 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-26033-4 (e-book) 1. Oiticica, Hélio, 1937–1980 — Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

N6659.O35S63 2016

709.2—dc23

2015012861

This publication is made possible in part by the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Princeton University, and the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program.

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Kha-ai

Contents

Note on the Text

Introduction

1 The Folded and the Flat

2 The Cell and the Plan

3 Ready-Constructible Color

4 What a Body Can Do

Coda

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Note on the Text

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

Introduction

What does it mean to fold a frame? A frame is a limit, a boundary, an edge. It establishes a distinction between an inside world and an outside world, and in so doing, focuses attention on the world that is framed. To fold a frame is to produce and simultaneously dispel distinctions between inside and outside worlds. It is to treat the liminality of the frame as a generative structure—a structure with which to fold.

But who folds a frame? And what kind of worlds result?

Consider a photograph of a group of children inspecting a hanging work by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica titled NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 (NC1 Small Nucleus 1) (1960) (fig. intro. 1). Taken in 1966 for a feature in the monthly magazine A Cigarra, it shows the work installed as part of the artist’s first solo exhibition, at Galeria G4 in Rio de Janeiro. The work is marginally a painting, its rich orange and peach surfaces recalling a series of monochrome planes. Yet here two dimensions have been pushed into three, converting lateral extension into labyrinthine sculptural form. Departing from the wall, the entire configuration is suspended in space like giant folded origami. The artist has placed a mirror beneath this entity. And although partially obscured by the photograph’s angle, this reflected surface allows its viewers to see the intricate structure of the work, its hollows and crevices, secret pockets of air, deep inner space. This visual information is fundamentally different from the experience of the sculpture as a material thing perceived in time. The solid entity solicits a mobile viewer who experiences the sculpture elliptically, surface by surface, fold by fold, pausing hands upon knees, as the children do to peer into its interstices from beneath, or leaning close on tiptoe as an adult might to glimpse its divisions from above.

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

The mirror, by contrast, transforms the density of this phenomenological experience into a two-dimensional image, as if to diagram its structure. In it one sees the logic of the sculpture’s nested folds: that the configuration is not a single entity, but two sets of paired units that fold away from each other in space; that it is organized around a central square implied by its innermost folds; and that this square in turn is concretized in the units of the latticed grid from which it hangs. Yet the mirror also indicates that this structure exceeds a simple logic of symmetries and squares. One paired unit pivots away from its counterpart but also inverts it, as if to absorb the mirror’s capacity to reflect and reverse. At first diagramming the sculpture’s structure, the mirror’s repetitions and inversions quickly multiply into a dizzying vertigo that propels the viewer back to the three-dimensional object. This material entity, it is now clear, is not independent from the mirror, but has incorporated mirroring into the structure of its folds.

Surely the children pictured in the photograph do not attend to all of these details. Still, their fascination is driven by the perceptual interplay between the physical folds of the object and its immaterial reflection. Shifting their gaze between the sculpture and its image, the children approach the doubling and differencing of the work as a puzzle of optical and tactile cues. A blond boy reaches upwards to touch the sculpture. He recognizes that the space nested within it extends into the literal space in which he stands. The work has opened up into his environment. In so doing, it solicits not simply a viewer, but a participant who activates the work in his own time.

A girl in pigtails, meanwhile, perches on her heels and leans forward in anticipation. Her hands are poised just above the mirror, as if to reach into its virtual space, her image doubled in reflection along its far edge. Enveloping real space into virtual space, the mirror gives the little girl a picture of herself within the work. She sees herself seeing. But she also sees a space in which to act, and stretches her hands forward as if to grasp the work’s folds. For her the mirror’s diagram of structure has become experiential. Folding external space into the internal content of the work, the mirror allows the little girl to construct a phenomenal world of her own. Such a world belongs neither to the virtual space of the mirror nor to the physical space in which she exists. Instead, it belongs to the epistemological thickness of perception. This thickness creates the potential that interior worlds might transform the experience of exterior space.

A hint of this, too, is visible in the picture. Ambient light bouncing off the mirror has thrown up a faint projection onto the wall, transforming the mirror and the girl together into a luminescent lozenge of shadow and light. Contingent and indexical, it registers the temporary event of the work’s viewing within the encompassing space. Yet, captured and recorded by the photograph, this moment is now concretized alongside the work and its viewers. Parallel to the flat surface of the photograph, this fleeting detail returns me to my own conditions of beholding and suggests that I too am folding their frame. The pictured children enact the emergent possibilities of participation inaugurated by the spatial folds of Oiticica’s NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1. But it is my distinct perspective—temporally and spatially removed from this scene—that desires to render such possibilities historically legible today. To fold a frame is therefore a conceptual and archival operation as well as a phenomenological one. It conjoins past and present through the act of interpretation. It insists that the performativity of this reception proceeds from the work’s formal intervention—this is the locus of its critical claim.

*

Hélio Oiticica was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937 and began working in geometric abstraction in the mid- to late 1950s. Moving from a painterly to participatory practice over the course of the 1960s, then incorporating experimental writing and expanded cinema in the 1970s, Oiticica’s work charts a unique engagement with several of the most important tendencies of advanced art of this period. These include a rejection of discrete objects in favor of experiential, environmental, and informational works; a concern with aesthetic, social, and psychic emancipation; a critique of art’s institutional protocols; and a shift in emphasis from authorial creation to the viewer’s reception, interpretation, and use. In the years following Oiticica’s premature death in 1980, his reputation as an uncompromising, even unclassifiable, artist grew. An important volume of his writings was published in 1986 in Brazil, where his work resonated with recent processes of democratization and renewed attention to the country’s legacies of radical art and critical thought.¹ Soon after, he was absorbed within an international art circuit animated by discourses of globalization and difference.² There he provided a compelling articulation of avant-garde practice instigated outside of Europe and the United States. Such decentering impulses established Oiticica in contradistinction to the putative rationalism and insularity of contemporaneous Western modes as a standard-bearer of both politicized and sensorial Latin American art.³ As participatory and collaborative practices gained international prominence in the 1990s, his work appeared to both anticipate and challenge the utopian tendencies of relational aesthetics and the turn to the social.⁴ And as analytic rubrics of transnational migration complicated notions of locality and identity at the turn of the twenty-first century, Oiticica’s sojourns in New York and London evinced the complex mechanisms of affiliation, translation, and legibility in artistic practice and historiography alike.⁵ By the time that an accidental fire in Rio damaged or destroyed a majority of his mature works in 2009, Oiticica was considered a pivotal actor in the history of modern and contemporary art.

One of a small number of major works that escaped the fire unharmed, NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 will doubtless occupy a privileged place in Oiticica’s future reception. Yet how will such a piece be read? Is it a painted object that registers the traces of the artist’s brush and, as such, a historical artifact to be preserved as evidence of Oiticica’s hand? Or is the very notion of authorial inscription displaced by the work’s participatory dimension—a latent aspect that came to define the trajectory of Oiticica’s work at large? If the mirror is a primary catalyst for participation, what of the fact that it appears in some period photographs as a single pane of glass and as divided into four, horizontal and vertical axes demarcated by a slender groove, in others? Does this difference indicate a definitive change in thinking by Oiticica? A move to reiterate the orthogonal grid repeated in the latticed structure from which it hangs? Or might it suggest a lack of finality to the work as a whole—a demonstration of what he would later call his program-in-progress, that is, the organic and permanently evolving character of his thought process and oeuvre?⁶

In the 1960s the notion that the identity of a work of art was wholly determined by its author was repeatedly undermined—on the one hand, by the proliferation of open works whose structural indeterminacy required interpretation for their completion, and on the other by the death of the author, the recognition that a work does not register individual authorial expression so much as constitute, as Roland Barthes wrote, a multi-dimensional space in which existing texts blend and clash.⁷ Haroldo de Campos and Umberto Eco (who independently coined the term open work in 1955 and 1958 respectively), as well as Barthes, whose essay The Death of the Author appeared in 1967, all noted modernist precedents to these phenomena, most notably in the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé.⁸ But it was the wholesale reconfiguration of the work of art in the postwar period that best embodies the confluence of these twin phenomena: as iterative event actuated at a remove from the artist (as in Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings), realized via an instructional scenario (as in the Fluxus score), or vivified by a participant by way of material props (as in Lygia Clark’s sensorial objects).⁹

Yet plotting Oiticica’s location along these critical vectors is a complex task. A consummate writer and thinker, he contributed the single most insightful commentary to his own work as well as to that of many of his contemporaries. He noted the importance of this discursive role in a 1961 interview:

I think it is of utmost importance that artists leave their own testimony of their experience. The tendency is for artists to be ever more conscious about what they do. It is much easier to penetrate the artist’s thinking when he leaves a verbal testimony of his creative process. I always feel compelled to make annotations about all the essential points of my work.¹⁰

Not surprisingly, the precise taxonomies Oiticica developed in order to classify and systemize his works continue to exert a determining role in narrating his conceptual trajectory. A voluminous archive of typed diary entries, carbon-copied letters, marked newspaper clippings, exhaustive inventories, and meticulous notes—sometimes dated even to the hour—offers a formidable interpretive armature to those who enter its labyrinth. Following the digitalization of a large portion of these documents in 1999, this archive has itself become a central object of inquiry.¹¹ This depository, combined with Oiticica’s magnetic personality, dramatically truncated life, and passionate rhetoric extolling life-experiences, anti-art, and a return to the world, has led to an enduring mythos regarding the mutual elucidation of his biography, work, and texts. Indeed, some of the earliest and most compelling accounts of Oiticica’s work come from those who could still recall the particular form of living—as art historian Aracy Amaral once put it—that he embraced.¹²

Yet if Oiticica’s categories and conceptual frameworks were the coeval inventions of an experimental practice—inaugurated and made intelligible with each new work—the intervening years have rendered this lexicon increasingly, even excessively, transparent.¹³ Where there was once exploration and emergence, there is now tautology and coincidence, with Oiticica’s neologisms simply projected back upon the work. Thus, despite the fact that the work’s participatory nature thoroughly disrupted the hermeticism of artistic expression, its reception has largely consolidated and circumscribed the traditional notion of the author as such.

In the wake of the fire, this condensation has opened up to two extremes of quasi-fetishistic retrieval: first, of the auratic authenticity of the material object and, second, of the ideational authenticity of the text.¹⁴ As auction prices for undamaged works soared, some critics opined that the fire had liberated Oiticica’s ideas from their material cage.¹⁵ According to this view, Oiticica’s works are primarily prompts for experience better conveyed by propositions and writings than physical remains. Yet by positioning the written document as the privileged anchor of artistic intent, this idealist position curiously overlaps with its market version, since propositions and projects are easily editioned and sold when remade. While Oiticica’s fastidious records of paint mixtures have allowed many damaged works to be conserved, his notes and documents had already facilitated posthumous production of several unrealized propositions before the fire forced the issue into sharp relief. A largely unreconstructed concept of the author thus stands at the locus of both the contraction and expansion of works put forward in Oiticica’s name, and this despite the fact that it is the participant—Barthes’s newly constituted reader—who is called forth by the works themselves.

In this book, I proceed from the assumption that the delimiting frames of modernist art history—authorship and the autonomous art object, but also the historical methods by which such categories come to mean—must be topologically reconfigured in order to account for the emergence of participation as a structural element within Oiticica’s work. I conceive of this reconfiguration as a fold that embeds such categories within a complex tissue of possibility and determining constraints. Thus, rather than offering a definitive account of Oiticica’s work as a series of authorial procedures, I adopt the generative position of the reader in order to excavate the critical potential of propositions that were intended to open up beyond their own bounds. In so doing, I aim to recover participation as an experimental and highly contingent phenomenon rather than an a priori end.

Despite the capacity—or perhaps desire—for Oiticica’s propositions to surpass the ontological limits of the work of art, the participatory paradigm I trace here does not constitute a rupture with art as such. In this regard, the book decisively departs from the predominant explanation of the radicality of Oiticica’s work and Brazilian participatory practice more broadly. By and large this history has been a triumphal affair. First narrated in the testimonies of its practitioners and then rehearsed in later accounts, the story is one of formal episodes that chart the progressive dismantling of the bounded, autonomous art object, culminating in the integration of art and life.¹⁶ Evolutionary, teleological, and punctuated by moments of glittering rupture, it belongs to a long rhetorical tradition of the avant-garde. Indeed, artists such as Oiticica and Clark self-consciously traced their lineage to prewar European figures such as Piet Mondrian, whose paintings were insistently sovereign entities and anticipatory fragments that imagined the end of art.¹⁷ Brazilian participatory art thus stands paradoxically as both the first truly Brazilian avant-garde movement and the ultimate realization of this earlier European avant-garde’s utopian aim.¹⁸ Yet, in casting such innovation as a sequence of formal solutions to problems posited along a singular trajectory of advanced art, this narrative has cultivated a critical paradox: it approaches works purely from within the frame of art itself. For all the emphasis on the ultimate dissolution of art into life, the foundational account of Brazilian participatory art relies on the precise ontological framework such practices aimed to collapse.

This lacuna has likewise shaped the political interpretation of Oiticica’s work. If art and life remain confined to mutually exclusive realms of autonomy and engagement, then any ingress of artistic practice within the social realm can easily be construed (and misconstrued) as liberating in and of itself.¹⁹ As Oiticica and others were enlisted to perform the signal difference of Latin America within the newly globalized art world of the 1990s, this apparent exodus from art distinguished their work from contemporaneous critiques advanced by European artists such as Marcel Broodthaers and Daniel Buren. In critic Craig Owens’s influential formulation, these artists responded to the death of author by "shift[ing] attention away from the work and its producer and onto its frame, by which he meant the entirety of art’s institutional apparatus.²⁰ By abandoning this frame in order to act in life, by contrast, Latin American artists launched what curator Mari Carmen Ramírez, following Simón Marchán Fiz, persuasively termed an ideological conceptualism aimed directly at the social body and the repressive state.²¹ Yet Buren recognized that frames follow artistic practices whether or not they are circumscribed by physical walls (or, for that matter, the nomenclature of art").²² In short, bypassing the frame often fails to acknowledge the persistence of its structuring force.

At several key junctures, Oiticica distanced his work from simplistic accounts of the marginal and resistant. He decried the folkloric interpretation of his engagement with the favelas (the informal settlements of Brazil’s urban poor) and theorized the subterranean as an alternative and permanently evolving critical state.²³ Likewise, although he differentiated the ethical from the more broadly social in works such as B33 Bólide Caixa 18 Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo (Homage to Cara de Cavalo) (1966), these terms are frequently telescoped within a single narrative in which all that is not art retains the semblance of the authentic, emancipatory, and real.²⁴ To the degree that this partition of experience reinscribes the very dynamics of social schizophrenia Oiticica’s practice sought to disrupt—poor, black, and marginalized subjects relegated to a permanent outside to which the work of art can merely gesture or point—the bifurcation of the political and the aesthetic does little to unleash the manifold intervention of participatory art.

What kind of historical method, then, might give texture to the ambition of works like these? Works that dispensed with frames and moved out into space? That solicited viewers’ manipulation, acted as engines of sociability and zones of experience? That borrowed from the materiality of the world in order to reconceptualize it as a perceptual field? A philosophical exegesis offers an elegant solution but often suffers from the ahistoricity of its analytic lens.²⁵ An approach that foregrounds institutions falls prey to an inverse oversight, for it apprehends neither the poiesis nor the irreducible strangeness of the artistic endeavor. A social history premised on the centrality of the artist as historical actor poses obvious problems, as the very notion of a participatory practice demands that we recover a calculus of possibilities set in motion, not by intentions but by artworks themselves.²⁶ As Oiticica’s works are primarily nonmimetic and abstract, neither does a history mortgaged to iconographic representation or narrative content deliver a sufficient optic. Indeed, one enduring predicament of the contextualist approach is its tendency to render the work of art inertly illustrative of its presumptive historical background. Reproducing an essentially representational conceit at the level of interpretive method, such an approach consigns work and context to a rigid figure/ground relation that never takes part in a single topology of actions and effects. The question, then, is how to write a social history of art that proceeds from the radicality of abstract, participatory form as both the subject of analysis and as a method—even as it recognizes the mediation of narrative as a generating force.

In light of this challenge, this book attempts to meet Oiticica’s practice on its own terms, not by simulating its provocations but by developing a paradigm of methodological elaboration from procedures embedded within the work. It proposes that the double challenge of this work—to conceive the viewer as an active participant and to imagine an artistic practice as part-and-parcel of the world at large—can only be engaged by taking seriously the work’s capacity to act as an epistemological device, that is, as a material, embodied model of emergent knowledge. As a corollary, it argues that the social (that most elusive element of art historical accounts and individual artistic events alike) is not a preexisting horizon but the active construction of subjects in conjunction with the assemblage of physical artifacts, textual propositions, and transitory sensations that together we call the work of art.²⁷ To approach works in this manner is to ask them to be affective as well as theoretical, to perform historicity and metaphorical extension at the same time. Such demands exert real pressures on the work of art. But the reward is to reclaim it as an agent rather than a historical effect.

*

The formal operation that guides this study is the fold. Self-same and self-other, the fold performs a reflexivity that consistently differentiates and diverges from itself. As a figure of the relationship between form and method, the fold is therefore not a prescriptive schema. Rather, it is a dynamic modality that continually enacts the production of affinity and dissimilarity that motivates the critical process and embodied reception alike. Both the specific operation and its broader methodological justification take their cue from formulations advanced by members of the Neoconcrete group, which emerged in the late 1950s in Rio and was the primary aesthetic and discursive field from which Oiticica launched his mature work. Neoconcretism itself was short-lived, its status as a movement largely the efforts of its principal polemicist, Ferreira Gullar. Yet the artistic dialogues that proceeded from it were highly generative, then as now.

The mobilizing distinction that Neoconcretism drew from Concretism—the predominant form of geometric abstraction practiced in Brazil at the time—pivoted on the relationship between theory and practice. Specifically, the priority the Neoconcrete group placed on experiential, inductive research undertaken from within the affective realm as opposed to the illustrative application of a priori principles to works of art.²⁸ The Neoconcretists were not averse to theory: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Ernst Cassirer’s constructive philosophy, and Henri Bergson’s duration, for example, all played important roles for various members in elucidating the organic, expressive, and temporal character of the artwork and its encounter. Yet these artists understood theorization as an explanatory and contextualizing procedure undertaken after formal experimentation, research, and realization had occurred.²⁹ By contrast, the epistemological character of the work of art—its ability to inaugurate conditions of knowledge, to constitute, and therefore reconfigure, one’s perception of the world—was located first and foremost in its initial emergence as an independent entity. Neoconcretists aimed for this revelation to recur with each encounter with the work.³⁰ In seeking to recover the significance and texture of these conditions of emergence, I therefore resist using Oiticica’s writings as one-to-one encapsulations of his work in favor of treating them, when they appear, as experimental, partial, and dialogic texts. I likewise resist importing external theoretical formulations of the fold in favor of excavating the category as an operation driven by the aesthetic and historical particularities of artistic practice. Thus while there are moments of resonance and conceptual overlap with the rich philosophical discourse on the fold—as chiasmic reversibility of body and world in Merleau-Ponty, as structuring hiatus in Jacques Derrida, as engendering plurality in Luce Irigaray, as infinitely transforming monad in Gilles Deleuze’s writing on Gottfried Leibniz, and as process of subjectivization in his work on Michel Foucault—these models are not primary reference points for my analyses.³¹ Instead this study is an experiment in treating the work of art as what Hubert Damisch calls a theoretical object, an entity that provokes but also problematizes the relation between theory and history in and of itself.³²

Let us return, then, to folding the frame. In NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1, Oiticica orchestrates a structure and corresponding experiential scenario in which interior and exterior are porous and mutually constitutive, resulting in a topology rather than a set of discrete parts. As I will elaborate, the radical structural possibilities of the fold were epitomized in postwar Brazilian art by the Möbius loop, a single-sided surface given iconic form in the Swiss artist Max Bill’s sculpture Tripartite Unity (1948–49), widely known to artists at the time (fig. intro.2). Bill’s sculpture, however, is an exceedingly traditional work. Not only is it isolated and immobilized on a pedestal, per the figural conventions of monumental sculpture, the recursivity of the Möbius strip’s topological surface consistently returns the form inwards. This produces the unity of the work’s title but also staves off the possibility that the work might open to anything beyond itself. In other words, folding produces sameness but not difference.

Fig. Intro. 2 Max Bill, Tripartite Unity, 1948–49. Stainless steel, 114 x 88.3 x 98.2 cm. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zurich. Image courtesy of Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo.

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

Difference has long been the province of the frame, as it holds the work of art distinct from its environment. The cutout frames and shaped canvases of artists associated with Arte Madí and Arte Concreto-Invención in Buenos Aires in the 1940s, as well as Clark’s Quebra da Moldura (Breaking the Frame) series of 1954, both pressured this function (fig. intro. 3).³³ The former sought to rid the painterly plane of illusionism by dispensing with its traditional formats. The latter absorbed the frame within the painting as a single but newly discontinuous pictorial unit. Both integrated external space within the painting. Yet because their planar surfaces remain attached to the wall, these works are ultimately experienced pictorially in the conventional sense.

NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1, by contrast, decisively articulates the fold as an operation enacted upon the frame—it is, after all, all frame and all fold at once. In so doing, it actualizes an epistemological model in which the mediating entity that presumes to establish the incommensurability of inside and outside terms—the frame—becomes the very agent by which inside and outside, sameness and difference, are relationally intertwined—the fold. NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 posits this model from within the phenomenological conditions of encounter: spatial structure, chromatic inflection, temporal duration, and mimetic recognition. But the theoretical operation it performs is extensive in its implications. I want to elaborate on some of the consequences for the historically interdependent constructs of autonomy, the subject, and modernity here.

The first term—autonomy—concerns the distinction between art and life so prized within modernist rhetoric as art’s raison d’être, and within an avant-garde formulation, as its necessary end. The autonomy of art has long depended on this division, and the convention of the frame gives it physical form. Modern art, we could say, enacts the double process of securing this frame and seeking its rupture. By folding the frame (as opposed to ignoring, blurring, transgressing, or otherwise seeking to circumvent it), the theoretical model given form by NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 recasts the ontological question that undergirds the art/life duality as an epistemological one. The autonomy of art, it follows, is no longer a function of the maintenance or breach of boundaries. Rather, it is reciprocally produced via a complex interplay of utterances that characterize art and non-art alike.

We have long recognized utterances within the history of art as material gestures, rhetorical gambits, and self-aware statements that establish a field of communication by way of negation, dialogue, and response. They make meaning out of historically specific circumstances, even when they are blind to the relations that they construct. But utterances cannot be understood simply—or exclusively—as works of art. They are also objects, propositions, and actions that inhabit the world at large. Folding the frame allows us to recognize that the significance of art as art is generated neither within a mythical realm of pure reflexivity nor its negation but by virtue of topological relations by which fields of communication are constantly made and remade. Further, it permits us to see that the very physical matter that constitutes utterances—the paper upon which words are printed, the particles of pigment that make up paint—manifest this topology in and of itself.

This brings me to the second arena—that of the subject—that NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 reshapes. If utterances span discourses and material presences—statements and inert things—the classic opposition between subject and object can no longer be maintained. Not only philosophically, where the dichotomy is largely obsolete, but methodologically. In his influential formulation of the linguistic utterance, Mikhail Bakhtin argued that language acts are two-sided affairs in which meaning is shared by a speaker and an audience as part of an ongoing process of dialogism and institutionalized response.³⁴ Art histories attentive to the relational matrix of practice and reception have made productive use of this articulation, whether in analyzing an individual artist anticipating a public or an entire field such as Latin American art as it interfaces with the dominant canon.³⁵ Still, Bakhtin’s utterance privileges speaking and responding subjects and is less adept at theorizing the peculiar disruptions of objects themselves. The displacement of the human subject in the turn to speculative realisms represents one attempt to overcome such a problem.³⁶ But it is hardly adequate to the deeply phenomenological orientation and participatory activation of Oiticica’s work. By orchestrating perceptual and structural loops between object and image, abstraction and representation, the virtuality of space and the tangibility of things, NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 offers an alternate model of agency. It establishes the viewer and the work of art within a shared ecology of effects. This too is constitutive of an utterance as I want to understand it here. The much-vaunted organic quality of the Neoconcrete work is therefore not a projection of the subject’s animate qualities onto the object. It is the production of an amalgamate entity in which participation is a behavioral extension of a work’s structural possibilities, much as an organism’s movement is contingent upon its skeletal frame.³⁷ The subject is reconfigured in turn. It becomes less than, but also more than, its body and psychic effects.

Because this participatory paradigm belongs wholly to neither an ostensible object (the work) nor ostensible subject (the viewer on the one hand, the artist on the other), we need to rethink the proprietory role of the individual artist. This does not discount authorship or intention but rather embeds this agency within a wider circuit of actors, objects, and events.³⁸ Oiticica frequently used the term invention to describe both his own process and that which he hoped his works would catalyze for their viewers or participants.³⁹ Unlike related notions such as creation (with its traditional associations of individual skill and craft) or expression (which remains enmeshed within a Romantic notion of subjective interiority), invention calls up a constellation of occurrences that, while unique in their specific innovations, are widely generative in their effects. One invention engenders another invention, Oiticica noted in one of the last interviews before his death, not simply for the individual artist but for a family of inventors whose works function like a galaxy of points of light.⁴⁰ Oiticica’s formulation is akin to that of Bakhtin’s utterance in its dynamics of enunciation and response. But if we recast this concept by way of the folded frame of NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1—that is, as a blended behavioral and material assemblage—we can conceive of invention as a radical change that includes but also exceeds the limits of the individual subject as such.

My final observation by way of NC1 Pequeno Núcleo 1 concerns the topological field within which such inventions take place. In the same 1979 interview, Oiticica identified this field as modernism: Modern art is the commencement of the emergence of what I call the state of invention.⁴¹ Compiling the artistic references by which he situated his production—Mondrian, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, but also Gullar, Clark, Aluísio Carvão, Oswald de Andrade, Haroldo de Campos—reveals Oiticica’s understanding of modernism as a transnational field constituted by formal and conceptual innovation. Indeed, this is one working definition of the avant-garde.⁴² Yet this constellation is not a self-evident field. While modern art imagines itself as universal, it operates by a logic of proximity and promotion. Certain utterances consolidate their legibility by virtue of frequency, repetition, and the availability of networks in which to travel, while others are required to construct their own circuits and may not be received at all.⁴³ It is no coincidence that the Brazilian artists of Oiticica’s generation were familiar with the work of their European and American contemporaries, but not the other way around. The constellation model productively disrupts the fiction of unidirectional center-periphery flow. But it must be significantly pressured in order to account for the disequilibrium that structures the visibility of its points of light. From this perspective, although the ambitions of modernist invention are transhistorical, transnational, and comprehensive in scope, the enactment of invention can never be disengaged from the conditions of its locale.

Coterminous with—indeed, exceeding—the field of modern art, then, is the field of modernity. Its effects are unevenly distributed according to