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Christopher Dunn
Ithen aMuseum
manifesto-like catalogue essay for the 1967 New Objectivity exhibit at
of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Hlio Oiticica (19371980),
sought to account for the current state of the avant-garde in Brazil: O
fenmeno da vanguarda no Brasil no mais hoje questo de um grupo
provindo de uma elite isolada, mas uma questo cultural ampla, de grande
alada, tendendo s solues coletivas (2007: 229). Oiticica had been a cen-
tral figure in neo-concretism, a liminal experience of the Brazilian con-
structivist avant-garde in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like other avant-
garde movements, neo-concretism was generally not perceived as a broad
cultural issue, but rather, a specific intervention for a rarified audience of
artists and critics.
By 1968, a confluence of interventions in several artistic fields emerged
under the banner of Tropiclia, a term coined by Oiticica for an installation
cica achieved this effect with remarkable force in Grande ncleo (1960), part
of his spatial relief series. Oiticica saw this line of work as both an extension
of and break with Mondrians experiments with color and space in a two-
dimensional space. This liberation of color and form into space revealed a
key element in his subsequent work: the sensorial experience of erstwhile
viewers turned participants. Clark found her own way of addressing this
issue with her Bichos, a series of sculptures made of metal planes articulated
by hinges to be manipulated by the spectator-turned-participant. With the
Bichos emphasis was on tactile experience, or what Merleau-Ponty called
the haptic gaze, a form of seeing through touch (Herkenhoff 328). Later
in the decade, Clark further explored sensorial experience with the series
Objetos relacionais, which included proposals involving masks, gloves, and
goggles that seek to induce visual and tactile experiences in which the par-
ticipant gains heightened awareness of his/her own body, its relationship to
other bodies and objects, and its role in the constitution of self.
The neo-concretist group disbanded in 1961. The movements principal
theorist, Ferreira Gullar, abandoned the avant-garde project altogether and
joined the CPC (Centros Populares de Cultura), which advocated direct
communication with the masses based on discursive clarity and social pro-
test. He would later expand his critique by questioning the very relevance of
vanguardist practice in Brazil (1969: 35). The artists and theorists of the CPC
were also committed to participation in artistic practice, which entailed
agit-prop events, political consciousness-raising, and direct communication
with the public-at-large.
During this period a tension between overtly political art and the con-
structivist tradition was exacerbated. Whatever tensions had existed be-
tween the paulista concretists and the carioca neo-concretists were mini-
mal in relation to the deeper rifts between artists of diverse fields who were
devoted primarily to formal experimentation and those who believed that
the primary function of art was to communicate with the povo and raise-
consciousness. This debate took on greater urgency with the ascension of
military rule in 1964 and the hardening of the regime during the second half
of the decade. Oiticica was troubled by Gullars renunciation of the avant-
garde (Asbury 35), but it provided impetus to radicalize some key concepts
of neo-concretism while developing connections to popular culture.
the museum. Although not planned, the event is now remembered as a key
moment in contemporary Brazilian art that generated a kind of institutional
critique of the museum as a space and of the art work as an object of pas-
sive contemplation.
During this time, he forged friendships and creative alliances with peo-
ple identified as marginal, most notably the famous urban bandit Cara de
Cavalo, who was murdered by a death squad in 1964. Oiticica would later
create a homage to his friend, Caixa Blide 18Homenagem a Cara de Ca-
valo (1966). For Oiticica, marginality was a social reality, but also an ethical
position in a context of violence and exclusion. In the program of conser-
vative modernization promoted by the military regime, poverty was itself
criminalized as large segments of the population were excluded from the
formal economy. At the same time, middle-class Brazilians were dropping
out of society to join the clandestine urban and rural armed movements
against the regime. Cultural production from this period is fi lled with art
works, films, and songs that focus on issues of violence, criminality, and
marginality in Brazilian society. The rapid expansion of Brazilian cities in
the post-war era had contributed to the rise of urban poverty and violence,
further exacerbated by authoritarian removal policies implemented by lo-
cal authorities. In the mid-1960s, the state government of Rio initiated a
wide-scale demolition of urban favelas to make room for middle class de-
velopments. For Oiticica, marginality was an ethical stance in relation to
state violence against favelados, as well as a strategic position-taking in the
artistic field. Writing to Lygia Clark in 1968, he stated: hoje sou marginal ao
marginal, no marginal aspirando pequena burguesia, o que acontece com
a maioria, mas marginal mesmo: margem de tudo, o que me d surpreen-
dente liberdade de ao . . . (Figueiredo 44).
Although he rehearsed some of the ideas for what he called penetrveis
in the ncleo series of the early 1960s, Tropiclia was Oiticicas first true am-
biente, an installation designed for multisensorial experience. Tropiclia
featured stereotypical references to Brazilshanty-like structures, plants,
live parrots but the work also questioned familiar notions of Brazilian-
ness. The smaller of the two penetrables, for example, is inscribed with the
words Pureza um mito, a pointed reference to cultural hybridity in the
context of modernization. The larger penetrable is a maze-like structure that
leads the participant through a dark passage to a functioning television set.
The historiography of Tropiclia has tended to focus on popular mu-
sic, the only field in which an actual movement coalesced, often leading
to the erroneous perception that the tropicalist phenomena in other fields
were mere appendages of the music. Coelho makes a point of distinguish-
ing between Tropiclia, which involved avant-garde visual artists, writers,
and filmmakers, and tropicalismo musical, which reconfigured the field
Gal Costa, 1972. Photo by Maurcio Cirne for tima Hora. Courtesy of the Arquivo
Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.
237
238 Luso-Brazilian Review 50:1
of popular music and operated in the terrain of mass culture (24). While
this distinction allows us to better appreciate the long trajectory of several
distinct art forms in relation to internal debates proper to their respective
fields, particularly in relation to the avant-garde tradition, it also obscures
the vital intersections, however partial, qualified, or messy, between them.
Tropiclia may be regarded as a fractured and fleeting totality, encompass-
ing several projects, rife with tensions, but still meaningful as moment of
exchange across artistic fields.
The tropicalist moment reveals a productive tension between the tradi-
tion of constructivism with both concretist and neo-concretist manifes-
tations, and an emergent visual aesthetic informed by US American and
British Pop art. Whereas the constructivism of Oiticica and Clark sought
to overcome the image and privilege sensorial, participative experiences,
Brazilian neo-figurativism reveled in worn-out or banal images of everyday
life, often with reference to the role of mass media, especially newspapers
and TV. This tendency within Tropiclia can be seen in the paintings of
Rubens Gerchman, the carnivalesque theater of Teatro Oficina, and several
compositions by Caetano Veloso that embraced an aesthetics of kitsch or
mau gosto. Oiticica recognized the critical value of lampooning prevailing
notions of good taste through the use of cafona cultural references. He
warned, however, that it had also paved the way for conservative expressions
of saudosismo and velhaguardismo, which he associated with reactionary
and paternalist nationalism that coincided with the cultural program of the
military regime (Oiticica Filho 11718). Oiticica was also wary of pop-kitsch
tropicalism as a spectacular explosion of images for mass consumption. In
an essay about his installation Tropiclia, he asserted the aesthetic and ethi-
cal integrity of experience in the face of imagistic trends within the larger
complex of works: h elementos a que no podero ser consumidos por
essa voracidade burguesa: o elemental vivencial direto . . . (2007 241).
Writing to Guy Brett in 1968, Oiticica discussed ideas for a new project
designed to engender a new community that would come coalesce around
creative affinities. Elaborating further, he explained: Not a community to
make works of art, but something as the experience in real life all sorts
of experiences that could grow out in a new sense of life and societykind
of constructing an environment for life itself based on the premise that cre-
ative energy is inherent in everyone (Hlio Oiticica: 135). These ideas would
directly inform his next major work, den, a large environment first exhib-
ited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in early 1969. den would only
be mounted in Brazil in 1978 after Oiticicas long residency in New York. In
an essay composed in English for the exhibition catalogue, he characterized
den as an experimental campus, a kind of taba, where all human experi-
Dunn 239
ments will be allowed . . . (1992: 12). Whereas Tropiclia worked with an ob-
viously Brazilian image in an effort to advance a critique of contemporary
Brazilian society, den was more universal in its aims, having been inspired
by his reading of influential texts of the international counterculture, in-
cluding Herbert Marcuses Eros and Civilization, Edgard Morins California
Journal, and Marshal McLuhans Understanding Media. In London, he had
also initiated a dialogue with experimental artists and alternative commu-
nities, most significantly the Exploding Galaxy collective founded by David
Medalla (Jacques 118; Asbury 3536).
While Tropiclia is structured as space to walk though, den was a multi-
sensorial environment conceived as space in which individuals would come
together, hang out, and potentially form communities, however ephemeral.
Participants were invited to take off their shoes, traipse through the sand,
rest in little nests of straw, seek refuge in enclosed spaces, and linger in the
environment for extended periods of time. Photos from the Whitechapel
exhibit show Londoners, some with kids in tow, lounging in nests and frol-
icking through the penetrables. den included an homage to the tropicalists
in the form of the tenda Caetano-Gil in which participants could relax
and listen to their music: nessa tenda preta uma idia de mundo aspira seu
comeo: o mundo que se cria no nosso lazer, em torno dele, no como fuga
mas como pice dos desejos humanos (Hlio Oiticica: 136). Oiticicas use
of the tent in this context is suggestive in the way that it refers to an am-
bulant lifestyle of the counterculture and also in the way that it references
leisure as a creative liberating practice. Waly Salomo described den as a
paraso imanente created on earth, suggesting that people must assume
the responsibility of creating their own spaces for pleasure and creativity
(2003b: 72). One can infer a reference to the hippie movement as the den
project coincided with and drew inspiration from a whole range of life expe-
riences and dispositions associated with the counterculture in transnational
context. Oiticica conceived den as a estrutura germanativa that would
develop into a utopian communitarian project, the Barraco, which was
never realized (Jacques 119).
Following the den project, Oiticica returned to Brazil, where he re-
mained for most of 1970, before leaving for New York. In an interview about
his experience in the UK, Oiticica spoke at some length about the value and
meaning of participation: Para mim, a participao do espectador e in-
troduo de elementos sensoriais foram importantes para a introduo de
uma nova forma de comportamento (. . .) , e no a criar uma nova forma de
arte (Oiticica Filho 90). Participation was, for Oiticica, no longer a formal
or structural dimension of his work, but rather a permanent disposition ori-
ented toward everyday life.
240 Luso-Brazilian Review 50:1
duce meaning, much in the way that the works of Hlio Oiticica depended
on the active participation of spectators.
In the first in a series of written communiqus to his friends called He-
liotapes, Oiticica read Me segura in relation to his own work, calling it uma
construo numa estrutura, a curious description of a text that seems so
utterly devoid of any narrative or poetic structure. This is possible because
Oiticica read Me segura in light of vanguardist projects to fuse art and life.
In his words, Me segura created conditions for these kinds of experiences:
criar condies assumir uma posio existencial, assumir uma posio
diferencial na relao com o dia a dia. (Salomo 2003a 200). In his analy-
sis, Oiticica likened Me segura to Brancusis overcoming of the pedestal in
sculpture. Oiticica cites in particular one of the last sections of Me segura,
Um minuto de comercial in which Salomo proclaims the end of the
text several times, yet keeps adding narrative, dialogue, and aphorisms. In
Oiticicas reading, the end functions structurally as the pedestal (or the
frame in painting) that is overcome or absorbed by the text itself, which
is repeatedly revised through a process of amendment. Oiticica interprets
these successive textual fragments como se fosse a biblioteca do dia a dia,
no, uma euxistnciateca do real, no, porque a coisa uma criao em si
mesma (Salomo 2003a 203). He invents and discards a neologism euxis-
tnciateca, which is highly suggestive, but ultimately unsatisfactory because
it suggests a catalog of personal experiences that is exterior to the work.
In Oiticicas reading, Salomos text functioned as a strategy to create
conditions for perpetual experimentation and critical reflection that was
analogous to some of his own work. The final product, whether an object
or published text, is ultimately less important than the quotidian process of
creation and elaboration. Seen in this light, Me segura is rather more like a
proposal akin to one of Oiticicas open environments rather than fiction,
poetry, or memoir. His readership was, of course, quite small, but by the
time of publication in 1972, Waly Salomo had begun to reach a much wider
audience working in the realm of popular music, which was, as elsewhere,
the focal point for the youth counterculture in Brazil.
Gal Fa-tal
Between 1969 and 1972, while Veloso and Gil were in exile, Gal Costa
emerged as the most visible and alluring icon of the Brazilian countercul-
ture. This period of her career is characterized by emphatic expressions of
artistic identity independent of the tropicalist group and new collaborations
with visual artists, poets, and musicians associated with cultura marginal.
Her first two solo albums, both released in 1969, highlighted her penchant
for juxtaposing soft bossa stylizations with psychedelic rock, R&B and blues,
Dunn 243
inspired by female singers from the US, especially Janis Joplin. In 1969, she
began working with Jards Macal, a young singer-songwriter from Rio who
had worked with Maria Bethnia during her famous series of performances
at the Teatro Opinio in 1965. In 1970 when they initiated a two-week run
at Sucata, a famous nightclub in the Lagoa neighborhood in Rio, they in-
vited Hlio Oititica to serve as artistic director. Having just returned from
his exhibit at Whitechapel, this project allowed for him to experiment with
environmental art outside of a gallery space and within the context of a
popular music event.
Eschewing notions of conventional cenography, Oiticia created instead
an ambientao for Gals performances at the Bar Sucata in June 1970
(Figueiredo 201). Entering the venue, the audience passed through, as if in a
ritual of deconditioning, a dense forest of plastic fi laments into a space orga-
nized into compartments by gauze-like screens hanging from the ceiling to
the floor. The musicians, the rock band Os Bubbles (later renamed A Bolha)
with the percussionist Nan Vasconcellos, were instructed to wear every
day clothes which further reinforced the idea of environment instead of
a show. Once inside, audience members would accommodate themselves
on cushions and pillows that created an environment that was reminiscent
of den. On the first night of a two-week run at the Sucata, much of the
environment was ripped down by the audience, which suggested that the
audience disliked the visual sense of distance and alienation from their idol,
but also enacted the principle of spectator participation.
Despite his aversion to readily consumed images, Oiticica created the
album cover for Gal Costas LP Fatal. The cover featured a black and white
photo of the singer cropped to show only the right half. A photo collage,
arranged as long wavy hair flowing down from her head and face features
well-known cultural figures from Brazil and abroad (Caetano Veloso, Gil-
berto Gil, Jards Macal, Waly Salomo, James Dean), images of experimen-
tal art (Lygia Clarks Mscara Sensorial, Lygia Papes Ovo. his own Blide
Bacia 1), along with festival scenes from the UK. He chose photos that sug-
gested uma referncia potica, virtual, nada de coisas ligadas a Gal, mas
imagens sem limite (Figueiredo 173). The overall effect of the cover art was
to situate Gal Costa in relation to Oiticicas circle of experimental artists. He
wrote enthusiastically to Lygia Clark about the project, noting that it helped
him to earn money and acquire experience in another artistic realm, while
offering a platform for inserting his own visual synthesis of the cultural mo-
ment, its relation to Gal, and its vital link to experimental culture in Brazil
(Figueiredo 137).
Following the Sucata shows, Oiticica departed for New York, but Gal
continued to work with artists from his circle of friends as she prepared for
Gal Fa-tal, a series of performances in October 1971 at the Teresa Raquel
Waly Salomo, 1972. Photo by Joo Rodolfo for Correio da Manh. Courtesy of the Ar-
quivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.
244
Dunn 245
Theater in Copacabana. The show was under the general direction of Waly
Salomo and the artistic direction by Luciano Figueiredo. Within months,
it was released as a double LP Gal Fa-tal: A todo vapor produced by Roberto
Menescal, who was best known as a bossa nova composer. Salomo and
Figueiredo created a set design that combined visual elements, avant-garde
aesthetics, and subtle political critique. The stage, painted purple was embla-
zoned with the suggestive neologism violeto, a word invented by Waly Sa-
lomo. Its semantic charge is ambiguous, simultaneously evoking the color
violet, or violeta, and the context of political repression, aptly described as
violento. The purple hue of the stage suggested the first meaning, but this
was undermined by the absence of the correct final vowel, while the second
meaning was compromised by the absence of the n. The letters FA
TAL appeared on the green and yellow backdrop. Salomo separated the
word fatal into two phonemes, drawing attention to the rhyme tal/Gal
(a certain Gal), while retaining the complete word with all of its various
meanings in Portuguese (deadly, fateful, inevitable). The use of ambiguous,
but highly allusive word-objects, the fragmentation of words, and the stra-
tegic deployment of graphic space revealed a debt to concrete poetry, while
the total environment of the venue suggested the influence of Oiticica.
In addition to the unconventional staging, the concert also marked a
departure from ways in which Gal Costa had been presented as an artist.
During the first part of Gal Fa-tal she performed solo in a stripped down voz
e violo presentation typically reserved for artists who had achieved some
competence with the instrument. With the guitar, Gal was a novice, lend-
ing the opening numbers a certain air of amateurish informality, as if she
were playing for a group of friends around a campfire or at the beach. Her
vocal style and repertoire moved seamlessly from bossa nova to hard rock
to traditional sambas and rural song forms from the Brazilian northeast.
Gals repertoire, developed in consultation with Salomo, was notable for its
eclecticism. It included none of the standards of bossa nova or her recent hits
from the Tropiclia period. Instead, it featured two songs from traditional
Bahian folklore, classic sambas from Geraldo Pereira (Falsa baiana) and
Ismael Silva (Antonico), and a baio (Assum preto) by Luiz Gonzaga,
who was then experiencing a late-career revival after some twenty years out
of the limelight. In addition to four songs by Caetano Veloso, the show also
featured new compositions by emergent artists such as Jards Macal, Luiz
Melodia, Duda Machado, and Waly Salomo.
Gal Fa-tal opened with a capella version of Fruta gogoia, an anony-
mously authored song from Bahian folklore, which established her identity
as a baiana, while suggesting a connection to pre-modern musical tradi-
tions from the northeast. Picking up an acoustic guitar, she next performed
246 Luso-Brazilian Review 50:1
a fragment of Charles Anjo 45, Jorge Bens homage to the redeemed outlaw
from the favela, leading into Caetano Velosos Como 2 e 2, a melancholic
assessment of the present state of affairs in authoritarian Brazil:
Sim!
Eu estou to cansado
Mas no pra dizer
Que eu no acredito mais em voc
Com minhas calas vermelhas
Meu casaco de general
Cheio de anis
Vou descendo
Por todas as ruas
E vou tomar aquele velho navio
The song captured the sense of fatigue and disillusion felt by urban middle
class youth who opposed the regime. It is an interesting companion to Chico
Buarques much more famous and certainly more exuberant samba, Ape-
sar de voc, which was recorded around the same time: apesar de voc,
amanh h de ser outro dia. Both songs frame questions of public discord
in personal termsa fallout between two lovers yet while Buarques song,
Dunn 247
For Salomo, the radical rejection of cultural traditions, family ties, and
literary recognition creates the conditions for total artistic freedom. Liter-
ary creation becomes an existential question of daily struggle and resistance
oriented toward process and not the result (Hollanda 76).
250 Luso-Brazilian Review 50:1
Oiticica was living in New York as the Navilouca project was in produc-
tion, but maintained a constant and extensive correspondence with the edi-
tors, especially Waly Salomo. He sent a manifesto Experimentar o experi-
mental, written in March 1972 in which he traced his own artistic trajectory
since 1959, from his neoconrete ncleos e blides through the participative
turn represented by the parangols e ambientes. Much of the text is dedicat-
ing to critiquing Brazilian visual arts, especially painting and sculpture, the
gallery system, and puerile rivalries between artists. It echoes some of the
ideas outlined in text written for the Nova Objetividade exhibit, yet makes
no mention of the avant-garde. If, in 1967, the idea of the avant-garde in Bra-
zil was for Oiticica uma questo cultural ampla, by the early 1970s the term
had largely dropped out of his writings. In the context of authoritarian rule
with so many artists in exile, the call to programmatic action, guided by a
vontade construtiva geral no longer retained the ethical and aesthetic va-
lences as it had in the late 1960s. The idea of avant-garde ceded to a more dif-
fuse, less rigid, but equally vital imperative: o experimental. The shift from
the avant-garde to the experimental was already implicit in Oiticicas work
since the end of neo-concretism and his embrace of anti-art conceived in
terms of open proposals and environments. With a nod to the interna-
tional counterculture, he quotes Yoko Ono: To create is not the job of the
artist. The job is to change the value of things. He concludes the manifesto
on a hopeful and insurgent note, calling attention to the potentially endless
possibilities of the experimental in Brazilian cultural life, even at a time of
severe political repression:
os fios soltos do experimental so energias que brotam para um nmero
aberto de possibilidades
no brasil h fios soltos num campo de possibilidades: porque no explor-
los
Notes
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252 Luso-Brazilian Review 50:1