Tactile Dematerialization, Sensory Politics: Hlio Oiticica's Parangols Author(s): Anna Dezeuze Source: Art Journal, Vol.

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H61ioOiticica. ParangolBP16 Cape 12, Da adversidadevivemos, 1967, worn by Nildo of Mangueira. Courtesy of Projeto Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: Claudio Oiticica.

Dematerialization, Sensory Politics: H lio Oiticica's Parangols

Like the word parangole, a slang term from Rio de Janeiro that refers to a range of events or states including idleness, a sudden agitation, an unexpected situation, or a dance party, the more than thirty objects so titled by Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica have an indeterminate status. Produced mainly between 1964 and 1968, these flags, tents, and capes made out of jute and plastic bags, painted or printed fabrics, and sometimes including painted or stenciled texts, are meant to be used by the viewer. A Parangole cape on a hanger is not a Parangole: its complex textures can only be revealed through the gestures Anna Dezeuze and movements of the person who wears it. As the artist explained in a 1965 text, the spectator of these works becomes a participant ' or "participator" (participador). Hitherto little-known outside Brazil, Oiticica's work rose to international prominence when it was featured in the 1997 Documenta X, joining a selection of works which, as one critic explained, "featured a critical political sensibility at the expense of aesthetics."'2 Indeed, the director of Documenta, Catherine David, who also cocurated the first touring retrospective of Oiticica's work in 1992, has stressed the transgressive aims of his practice in texts focusing on the artist's conceptual, rather than formal, innovations.3 In contrast, Brazilian critic S6nia Salzstein warned in i994 against readings privileging the social and political dimension of Oiticica's work because they tend to "surreptitiously overwhelm his work with a

Tactile

"Noteson the Parangol"' I. HelioOiticica, exh. cat. (Riode Janeiro: (1965),in H'lioOiticica, Centrode Arte H61lio Oiticica,1997),93. 2. Neal Benezra, "TheMisadventures of Beauty," in Regarding A View of the LateTwentieth Beauty: exh. cat. (Washington: Hirschhorn Century, Museum andSculpture Smithsonian Garden, Institution, 1999), 17. 3. See, for example,Catherine David,"Helio Brazil in TheExperimental Oiticica: Experiment," Exercise exh. cat. (LosAngeles: of Freedom, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), 169-201. 4. S6niaSaltzstein, "Helio Oiticica: Autonomy of Subjectivity," andthe Limits Third Text 28/29 (Autumn/Winter 1994):120. Art 5. See for example, TonyGodfrey, Conceptual Phaidon, Conceptualism: (London: 1998);Global Points 1950-1980, exh. cat. (New of Origin, York: of Art, 1999);andPeter Queens Museum Art(London: Osborne,ed., Conceptual Phaidon, 6. H61io "Position andProgram" Oiticica, (1966) and"General Schemefor the New Objectivity" A Critical Art: ed. (1967),in Conceptual Anthology, Alexander Alberro andBlake Stimson (Cambridge, andLondon: MIT Mass., Press,1999),6, 42. 7. See Mari CarmenRamirez, "Tactics for Thriving in Latin on Adversity: America, Conceptualism in Global 53-7 1; Conceptualism, 1960-1980," Alexander "AMedia Art:Conceptualism Alberro, in Latin America inthe 1960s," in Rewriting NewmanandJonBird Art,ed. Michael Conceptual Reaktion Books,2000), 140-51;and (London: PeterOsborne,"Survey," in Conceptual 38-39. Art,

sociological argument," making one "lose sight of its aesthetic thought."4 Oiticica's texts have played an important role in reinforcing the perception of his works as "conceptual" practices, as promoted by Documenta X as well Art:An as in recent surveys, exhibitions, and anthologies.5 In the 2002 Conceptual in texts included Stimson Alberro and Blake Alexander for Anthology, example, and discussed his as "anti-art parexcellence" which Oiticica defined the Parangole aspirations "to create new experimental conditions where the artist takes on the In general, his works and role of 'proposer,' 'impressario,' or even 'educator.'"'6 of the specificity of in discussions reference of have become points writings more LatinAmerican Conceptual art, which is described as political in intent than its European and North American counterparts.7 seems to lie in their reference to The main political aspect of the Parangoles the favelas, the slums or shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro. Encouraged by Oiticica himself, critics have emphasized the crucial role played by the artist's involvement, from 1964, in the samba school of the Mangueira favela. Learning to dance and making friends in Mangueira, the the samba, participating in the carnaval, young man from a middle-class family discovered a whole new dimension of experience that effected a radical turn in his work. Indeed, many of the Parangoles were made for and sometimes in collaboration with his Mangueira friends: some texts included in the Parangole capes, for example, are known to have been suggested by specific individuals. Moreover, Oiticica chose to display the Parangolks publicly for the first time by inviting dancers from Mangueira to wear them at the opening of the 1965 exhibition Opinfdo 65 at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio. The irruption of the poor into the bourgeois atmosphere of the museum caused such a scandal that the director had them evicted. As censorship worsened in Brazil during the later i96os, Oiticica's association with Mangueira would

2002).

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Helio Oiticica. ParangoldPI I Cape 7, Sexo e violIncia ..., 1966. Photographs: Alessandra Santarelli.

thathad taken be linked to a politicalresistanceto the dictatorship increasingly over the countryin 1964. was also singled out at the time in Oiticica'sdiscoveryof Mangueira Brazilian criticMarioPedrosa's1966article,"Arteambiental,artep6s-moderna, Helio Oiticica."8 In this importanttheorization,Pedrosa describedthe new a move in art as awayfrom "theher"post-modern" phase twentieth-century metic individualsubjectivism" of modern art, individual hermetico) (o subjetivismo and plasticos), dealing exclusivelywith "purelyplasticvalues"(valores propriamente towardthe increasingprominenceof social and politicalconcerns.Accordingto turn corresponded Pedrosa, Oiticica's"post-modern" preciselyto the moment when the artistabandonedthe "ivorytower"(torre and discovered demarfim) his conceptionof the an "initiation" thatwould forevertransform Mangueira, role of artand artists.9 from the context in While it seems impossibleto dissociatethe Parangoles which they were firstproduced,the exactnatureof their politicaldimensionis difficultto describe.Moreover, Oiticica'sclaim,in his writings, thatthe Parangoles can be worn by any viewer seems to be contradicted not only by his dedications of some of these worksto specificindividualsbut also by the photographs,taken in his lifetime,in which the capesareusuallyworn by his Mangueira friends. In this article,I will seek to disentanglethe Parangoles from the complex web that links the objectswith Oiticica'stexts, their originalcontext and reception,and Todo so, the photographsthathavebeen repeatedly exhibitedand published. I will use as a startingpoint an experimentI conductedwith photographer Alessandra in Londonin December2002 and March2003. Without Santarelli I askedSantarelli to takephoshowing her existing photographsof the Parangoles, on my 7. Cape Drawing tographsof myselfwearingOiticica's1966Parangole PII well as the of the as personalexperience wearing Parangole photographsthatwere other outdoorsin a in a the the two sessions-one studio, producedduring formalexperipark-I will explorethe natureof the relationbetween the artist's the ratherreductive mentationand his politicalobjectives.Insteadof rehearsing stanceand Salzstein's opposition noted earlierbetween David's"anti-aesthetic" not only thatOiticica's praisefor his "aesthetic thought,"I hope to demonstrate succeedin uniting both of these apparently Parangoles conflictingaspects,but that
the very articulation of this polarity constitutes their strength and their significance within the history of I960s art.

Intimate Spectatorship stumbleson the Any attemptto documentthe experienceof wearinga Parangolk problemthata single photographis insufficientto capturethe temporalprocess of discoverywhich it requires.Liftingthe cape,turningmy head, moving my body,I can relish the contrasting bright colors, touch the rough green fabricand the soft cotton cloth, and compareits two sides.I can pull out the long piece of gauze from a pocketin the cape and readthe words on it, hold it up in front of mask,or use it as a kind of shroudto coverparts my face like a semitransparent of my body. The temporaldimensionof the viewing experiencefiguredamong Oiticica's earliestartisticconcernsand was intrinsically linked to his explorationof the

8. Mario Pedrosa, "Arte ambiental, arte p6sdo Monhd,June moderna, H61ioOiticica," Correio 26, 1966, repr. in MdrioPedrosa,TextosEscolhidos ill: Acad6micose Modernos,ed. Otilia Arantes (Sdo Paulo: Editora da Universidade de Sdo Paulo, 1998), 355-60. 9. Ibid., 356, 355, and 356.

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formal qualities of color. In i96o, he noted that "when ... color is no longer

"October5, 1960," in H6lio 10.HelioOiticica, 33. Oiticica, "ATransigio da cor do quadro I I. HelioOiticica, parao espa?oe o sentidode constructividade" labirinto: textosde H6lio ao grande (I962), inAspiro Oiticica Figueiredo, (1954-1969), ed. Luciano (Riode Janeiro: Pape,andWalySalomdo Lygia Rocco, 1986),53. writtenby 12.The Neoconcretemanifesto, Amilcar Ferreira Gullar, de cosignedby artists Clark, Castro,Lygia Pape,Reynaldo Jardim, Lygia andFranz andpubTheonSpanudis, Weissmann, of theJornal do lishedinthe Sunday supplement and March 22, 1959,hasbeen reproduced Brasil, invarious For into English translated anthologies. no see Arteconstrutiva the Portuguese original, ed. Aracy Amaral Leirner, Brasil: Cole?oAdolpho DoreaBooksandArt, 1998),270-75. (SdoPaulo: betweenMinimal13.Foraccountsof the relation see Rosalind ismandphenomenology, Krauss, inModern Mass., Sculpture (Cambridge, Passages MIT andLondon: Press,1977)andAlex Potts, TheSculptural Modernist, Figurative, Imagination: andNew Haven: YaleUniverMinimalist (London between sityPress,2000). Fora comparison andNeoconcretism, see Paulo Minimalism a Parallels: Toward Herkenhoff, "Divergent and Comparative Studyof Neo-concretism in Geometric Abstraction: Latin Minimalism," Artfrom the Patricia de Cisneros American Phelps exh. cat. (Cambridge, Mass.: Collection, Fogg Art Museums, Harvard Art Museum, University 2001): 104-31; andAnnaDezeuze,"The'Do-itand Artwork': Spectator Participation yourself of the Art Object,New the Dematerialisation 1958-1967"(Ph.D. YorkandRiode Janeiro, of London, Courtauld thesis,University Institute of Art,2003), chap.4. 14.Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ph6nom6nologie de la perception Gallimard, (Paris: 1945), 154. in Fer,"Judd's 15.Briony Specific Objects," Yale Art(New HavenandLondon: OnAbstract Press,1997), 130-5I. University Part2" "Noteson Sculpture, 16.RobertMorris, A Critical ed. Art: Anthology, (1966),inMinimal Battcock E.P.Dutton, Gregory (New York: accountof the differ1968),23 I. Fora detailed see JamesMeyer, ences betweenJuddandMorris, inthe Sixties ArtandPolemics Minimalism: (New YaleUniversity HavenandLondon: Press,2001). a poesiaabriga"Oiticica: 17.Frederico Morals, de Noticias, October5, 1967 [H61lio da,"Didrio Riode Janeiro, Archives, Oiticica ProjetoH61lio Oiticica]. "'Apurezandoexiste,'" Morais, 18.Frederico October6, 1967[H6lioOiticica de Noticias, Didrio Riode Janeiro, Archives, ProjetoH61io Oiticica]. 19.Potts,4.

subjected to the rectangle [of the canvas] or the forms represented on this recit takes on a temporal tangle, it tends to become 'embodied' [se'corporificar']; thus becomes the 'body of work the and dimension, creates its own structure, dacor]." color' [o corpo '~ In fact, the trajectory of Oiticica's works, from his and Nucleito the later Parangoles, Reliefs 1959-60 hanging, brightly painted Spatial can be read as an incessant search to convey this material, corporeal, and sensual "body of color." Inviting viewers to move around or inside the work in order to observe its structure and formal qualities, Oiticica sought to transform the of the work. " In order to achieve this, spectator into a "discoverer" (descobridor) Oiticica set up an intimate relation between the work and the viewer. Suspended works are hung low enough for one to peer into the nooks of their folded planes or the numerous corners of their mazelike structures (in (as in the Spatial Reliefs) started in 1963, or BoxFireballs), Caixas(BoxBolides, the Nuclei),while in his B6lides one is invited to open the hinged doors or drawers of painted boxes of varying sizes to discover related hues of yellow, red, pink, and orange, and alternating smooth and granular surfaces, as well as pigment and fabrics. In the late i9gos Oiticica belonged to the Neoconcrete group in Rio de Janeiro, whose 1959 manifesto referred to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writings as an alternative to the kind of Pavlovian, mechanicist model of perception explored by the Concrete artists in Sdo Paulo.'2 Desiring to distinguish themselves from these Concrete artists, the Neoconcretists sought to emphasize the temporal, bodily encounter of the viewer with the artwork. Although created are direct extensions after the official end of the movement, Oiticica's BoxBolides of his painted Neoconcrete objects and are exemplary of Neoconcretism as a whole. In their use of simple geometric volumes and their focus on the relation between viewer and work, Neoconcrete works can be compared to works by certain American Minimalists. Indeed, one of the most striking points of comparison between Neoconcretism and Minimalism is both movements' affinity and Donald Judd's boxlike with phenomenology. 13 Both Oiticica's BoxBolides between the dramatize works, for example, subject and object" that "dialogue lies at the heart of the phenomenological experience, according to MerleauPonty.'4By setting up relations between inside and outside, between volume and void, and between the object and the space in which it has been directly placed, the box format in these works highlights some of the characteristics of percepits mobilization of of Perception: tion described in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology several senses rather than a disembodied gaze, its relation to movement, and its privileging of the "primordial experience" of encountering objects in the world directly, with a sense of wonder that precedes scientific distinctions among time, space, form, structure, and color. Within this similar exploration of phenomenological perception, however, and Donald Judd's works set up very different relations Oiticica's BoxBolides between the work and the viewer: Oiticica's 1964 BoxBolide 9 invites us to play with the sliding panels and open the drawer filled with pigment, while we tend to peer into and gaze through Judd's I965 steel and Plexiglas box. Indeed, if the number of fingerprints found on Judd's works in museums across the world testify to the viewers' irrepressible desire to touch them, this invitation is frustrated by the industrial dimension of both materials and production: their perfect

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H1lio Oiticica with his

Box Bolide 9, 1964. Painted

sheen is in fact quite spoiled by a fingerprint. Thus, as Briony Fer has demonstrated, Minimalist objects such as Judd's are articulated through a double bind of anxiety and pleasure, unlike Neoconcrete works, which not only invite but often require a tactile engagement in the process of their discovery.is Although Judd's work was very different from Robert Morris's Minimalist objects, Morris's description of the relation between object and spectator in Minimalist sculpture in his 1966 "Notes on Sculpture" is particularly relevant here. Morris opposed what he called the "public" mode of viewing set up by large objects to the "intimate mode of viewing" required by small objects, which "is essentially closed, spaceless, compressed, and exclusive."'6This very "quality of intimacy" rejected by Morris was, in fact, one of the defining features of Neoconcrete works. According to the artist and critic Frederico Morais, writing in 1967, Oiticica's entire oeuvre could be seen as a search for a "sheltered poetry" Morais associated (poesia abrigada).17 this kind of poetry with what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called "intimate spaces": spaces that we possess, protect, and love. The wrote Morais, have the poetry Bolides, of small things which are "aconchegantes" -a Portuguese word that evokes physical proximity, shelter, warmth, and coziness.'8 According to Alex Potts, the Minimalist object's "inert thingness, its impinging on the viewer's space" was still capable, in the i96os, of "getting in the way of normative patterns of visual consumption."'9 Neoconcrete works such as Oiticica's force viewers to physically encounter their "thingness" not by "impinging" on the spectators' space but by inviting them to handle nonanthropomorphic, geometric objects, thereby encouraging an acute awareness of the spatiotemporal experience of viewing. Thus Oiticica's and other Neoconcretists' appeal to tactile participation was an effective means of exploring the bodily relation between viewer and object suggested, yet warded off, by Minimalism; and this,

wood, painted glass, and

pigment. 19'%6x 13'/ x

19/8 in. (50 x 34 x 50.5 cm). Courtesy of Projeto Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro.
Photograph: Claudio

Oiticica.
Donald Judd. Untitled, 1965. Steel and Plexiglas. 26 x 34 x 48 in. (66 x 86.4 x 121.9 cm). Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, NewYork. ? 2004 Judd Foundation. Licensed by VAGA, NewYork/DACS, London.

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I would argue, allowed their participatory works to resist somewhat better being assimilated as yet other kinds of art objects to be passively consumed. One of the problems that Neoconcretism did share with Minimalism, however, was phenomenology's appeal to a "generic" spectator, described by Hal Foster "as somehow before or outside history, language, sexuality, and power."20 Just as subsequent art practices in the United States were described by Foster as having expanded upon and critiqued Minimalism's phenomenological approach, so Oiticica's works in the i96os can be read both as extensions of the Neoconcrete project and attempts to overcome its shortcomings. Taking as a starting point the Neoconcrete exploration of a new type of intimate spectatorship allowed Oiticica to develop two crucial aspects of the Parangole to which I shall now turn: an exploration of identity as a self-reflexive, performative process, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the so-called dematerialization of the art object described by Lucy Lippardas one of the key features of Conceptual art.2'

Identity as Performance
The failures of Neoconcretism were formulated most vocally by none other than the spokesman of the group itself, the poet and critic FerreiraGullar.In a radical change of position that precipitated the break-up of the group in 1962, Gullar rejected Neoconcretism when he aligned himself with the Communist Centros decultura populares (Popular Centers for Culture, or CPCs), in particular that of the National Student Union, which conceived all art as "bourgeois" and elitist and set out to promote Brazilian popular culture instead. In his book A Cultura posta written in 1963 and first published in 1965, Gullar emquestdo Culture), (Questioning developed a ruthless self-analysis of his own Neoconcrete poetry and an impassioned critique of all artworks that valued "formal and stylistic factors over issues of content" os decontefido).22 dosfatores e estilisticos sobre Gullar formais (supervalorizago called for artists to acknowledge that their apparent neutrality was in fact embedded in the ideological position of an oppressive bourgeoisie that praised and bought their works. Instead, artists should assume responsibility as citizens and communicate with "the people" in order to deal with the real problems plaguing Brazil. Deeply influenced by Gullar'sposition, Oiticica would increasingly emphasize the ethical responsibility of the artist, starting in his writings about the Parangoles and culminating with his 1967 manifesto on the "New Brazilian Objectivity,"in which he stressed the importance of the artist'sengagement with sociopolitical concerns, and explained that artists' "communications" should not be directed to "an elite reduced to 'experts,'" but orchestrated "against this elite."23 Oiticica's highly politicized discourse should not, however, obscure the At the time artist's other, more formal, preoccupations reflected in the Parangoles. when Oiticica signaled his distance from Neoconcretism by shifting away from man-made, painted objects to found materials and sprayed or predyed fabrics, one of the recurrent motifs of his writings was his desire to differentiate his works from the Duchampian readymade. His Parangoles, he pointed out, evoke tents, capes, or banners without being direct appropriations of existing objects. While the "poor" materials and the way they have been roughly stitched together Oiticica may evoke the precarious, rapidly built shelters of the Mangueira favela, explained that what appealed to him most in them was what he called their

20. HalFoster, "TheCruxof Minimalism" (1986),

in The Returnof the Real:TheAvant-Garde at the End of the Century(Cambridge, Mass., and

MIT London: Press,1996),43.

21. Lucy Lippard,Six Years:The Dematerialization of the Art Object, I966-1972 (London: Studio

Vista,1973).
22. FerreiraGullar,Cultura posta em questeo; e subdesenvolvimento: Vanguarda ensaios sobre arte

Jos6OlympoEditora, (Riode Janeiro: 2002), 154. 23. Oiticica, "General Schemefor the New 40, 42. Objectivity,"

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Most importantfor him were the structural relations "structural organicity."24 between the heterogeneouselements,in which the propertiesof each part contributeto the sensoryexperienceof the work as a whole.Thus, as Carlos Basualdo has demonstrated, Oiticicastartedfrom a formalconcern-how to forms thatwould be discoveredin ever-more"embodycolor"in structural complex participatory experiences-and found a logical solution to this problem
in the vocabulary of the local culture of the favelas.25 If the Parangoles span the repertories of erudite and popular cultures, they do not, however, iron out the tensions between the two.26 For just as the Mangueira dancers provoked a disruption by leaving the context of the carnaval to enter that of the museum in 1965, I, a white, European, middle-class art historian, can only feel uneasy about the distance that separates me from the culture of the favela when I put on a Parangole.27 lies in discovIf part of the experience of the Parangole the in one's dimension consists its other self, ering object by revealing these hidden elements to others through one's own movements. After all, the bright colors and shiny fabrics are the same as those worn by samba dancers in the act like and the short texts included in the Parangoles spectacular Rio carnaval, an as well as a reader. bubbles wearer into enunciator the speech transforming Oiticica described this double experience of the individual-at once private and collective, intimate and spectacular-as the ciclo"vestir-assistir" (wearing-watching which includes the experiences of wearing, watching, and cycle) of the Parangole,
looking while being looked at.28

24. Oiticica, "Fundamental Basesfor the Defini87. tion of the Porangol6" Oiticica, (1964),inH6lio 25. Cf.CarlosBasualdo, annotations "Quelques surle Parangold," in L'Art ou corps, suppl6mentaires exh. cat. (Marseilles: Mus6ed'artcontemporain, 1996). ' 26. Cf.CarlosZilio,"DaAntropofagia in 0 Nacional e o Popular, Tropicalia," Eligia MoraesLeiteet al. (SdoPaulo: Editores Chiappini Brasiliense, 1982),38. 27. Although Oiticica madeit clearthatthe couldbe worn by anyone,performing Parangolds for the cameracertainly established an implicit withthe existing comparison imagesof Oiticica's friends. Ina different Mangueira setting,andworn to Oiticica's circleof friends, by someoneforeign the close relation betweenthe Porangol6s and fromthe photograph's field Mangueira disappears of signifieds. Thefullimplications of thisshiftand the ambiguities of my personal a positionrequire close analysis thatexceedsthe scope of thisessay. 28. Oiticica, "Noteson the Parangol6," 93. 29. Harry da arte," Laus, "Oiticica: Marginal Jornal do Brasil, 20, 1966[H6lioOiticica Archives, July Riode Janeiro, ProjetoHelioOiticica]. 30. HelioOiticica, untitled text (1969),in H6lio 25. Oiticica,

In 1966, the Brazilian critic Harry Laus described Oiticica as the "the marginal man of art" because he lived at the margins of both the bourgeois culture to which he would never sphere that he had left behind and the favela fully belong.29 Oiticica's personal situation led him to maintain an ambivalent, seem to invite marginal position in relation to both cultures, and the Parangoles self-conscious to this them of ambivalence participants experience by making their appearances and their relations to the objects being worn. My own selfoutdoors and a woman walking in consciousness increased as I wore the Parangole the park came over and asked me what was stenciled in white capital letters on my banner. "Sex and violence, this is what I like," I replied. Seeing the appalled look on her face, I felt suddenly uncomfortably aware of the statement that I was making to others, as if I were carrying a political banner in a demonstration. That Oiticica meant this statement sincerely is supported by his anarchist to Cara 18 Homage celebration of certain forms of violence. His 1966 BoxBolide de Cavalo is an emotional work that includes photographs of and a poem to Carade Cavalo, a friend of Oiticica's and a criminal who was shot down by the police. For the oppressed, Oiticica explained in a 1969 text, crime is often "a desperate search for happiness," violence as a means for revolt may be justified, and figures like Cara de Cavalo should be celebrated as heroes or martyrs.30 Yet the Parangole is more than a political banner: it also functions as a kind of costume capable of encouraging playacting.Although Oticica's friend Nildo coined the wording for the 1967 Parangole that reads "Estou (I am possessed), for example, I would possuido" than I argue that he is no more "authentic" or "sincere" a wearer of the Parangole am. I could easily reassure the woman in the park that claiming I liked violence was, in my case, ironic; but, in retrospect, I realize that I had in fact enjoyed the opportunity of mischievously shocking a potential audience: the anxiety of

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H6lio Oiticica. ParangolB PI 7 Cape 13, Estou Possuido, 1967, worn by Nildo of Mangueira. Courtesy of Projeto Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: EduardoViveiros de Castro.

being misunderstood and the pleasure of taking on another persona seemed inextricably,and ambivalently, paired. Nildo may also have taken delight in playing at being "possessed" in order to make his friends laugh and possibly scare bourgeois passers-by."You can never presume what will be a person's 'acting' in social life: there is a difference of levels between his way of being in himself and the way he acts as a social man." This comment by Oiticica in his text about Cara de Cavalo was triggered by the contrast between his own perception of his friend and society's vilification of him as "public enemy number one."3' Favoring anarchism over Communist policies, Oiticica opened an alternative path to thinking about popular culture and Brazilian identity beyond binary polarities that would have served to "primitivize" his Mangueira friends. Instead of embracing popular culture like Gullar and the CPCs,Oiticica explored class differences, through the Parangoles, by shifting the key question from "Who am I?" to "Who am I in the of the other?" And this question, of course, poses the issue of power. On the gaze one hand, the texts in the Parangoles dancer give a voice to the unheard: a carnaval accusingly saying "We are hungry," for example, would no doubt disturb the feel-good spectacle expected by eager tourists. On the other hand, these texts also ask me, the wearer, to reflect on who decides what I am-who actually possesses or owns me.

Guerrilla Tactics, the "Suprasensorial," and the "Constructive Will"

Whereas in the studio photographs, the careful control of lighting and contrast between the black background and the bright colors emphasized the formal as an object, the outdoor session was less staged and qualities of the Parangole more spontaneous. Caught in a dynamic process, the undulating shapes of the cape were transformed into wings, and the long piece of gauze extended my body into a kind of tail, as I ran, jumped, and climbed trees-activities in which I do not usually indulge when taking a walk in a park. Instead of being burdensome and shroudlike, the Parangole seemed to mingle freely with the kites being flown on Hampstead Heath. According to Mario Pedrosa, "It was during [Oiticica's] initiation into samba that the artist shifted from a visual experience . . . to an experience based on touch, movement, and the sensual enjoyment of materials."32 In addition to the materials and the structure of favela architecture, Mangueira's most important revelation for Oiticica was the experience of dancing itself: according to the artist's account, dance freed him from what he called the "excessive intellectualization" that was threatening his work and encouraged him to explore the performative aspect of the objects by inviting people to wear them.33The aerial dimension of samba could only have struck Oiticica as he learned dance steps such as the parafuso, or "screw,"which, as Waly Salomao described it, consists in "jumping from the floor and spinning in the air like a screw."34Significantly, as Salomio remarked, the Brazilian expression entrar emparafuso means to "get into a state."This "state" of trancelike immersion or absorption, achieved through the body's movements, is what struck Oiticica most.35 as a "hangWhen the Brazilianpoet Haraldo de Campos described the Parangole aerial or the not for he glider only aptly emphasized ecstasy" (asa-delta para o Extase), to status the Parangole's ecstatic characteristics of this immersion, but also pointed

31. Ibid. 32. Foidurante a inicicaodo ao sambaqueo artista do experiencia ... paraumaexperienvisual passou do fruigio sensual cia do tato,do movimento, dos 357. materiais... Pedrosa, 33. HelioOiticica, "A na minha experiencia, danca 12de novembro de 1965," inAspiro ao grande 73. labirinto, inH6lioOiticica, 34. WalySalomdo, "HOmmage," 241. 35. Paula hasdiscussed thisstate in relation Braga to the "Dionysian celebrated intoxication" by were influential Nietzsche,whose writings for Oiticica. Cf. Paula Oiticica andthe "Helio Braga, Nietzsche's Parangol6s: (Ad)dressing Ubermensch," Third Text17,no. 1:43-52. 36. Haraldo de Campos,"Hang-Glider of in H6lio 217. Ecstasy," Oiticica,

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H1lio Oiticica. Parangold PI I Cape 7, Sexo e violencia...,

1966. Photographs: Alessandra Santarelli.

37. Helio Oiticica, "Appearance of the Suprasensorial" (1967), in H6lio Oiticica, 128. 38. Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien, vol. I, Arts de faire (1980; Paris:Gallimard, 1990), 59ff. 39. Jerry Rubin, Do It! Scenariosof the Revolution (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970). Oiticica owned a copy of this book.

as a tool or vehicle to reach this state.36For Oiticica, writing in 1967, the aim was not to simply create "tactile works," but rather to produce "propositions" or "exercises." These exercises were meant to lead participants to experience what Oiticica called "suprasensation"-an expansion of the senses that facilitates the discovery of one's "internal creative center" and the "expressive spontaneity" samba, carnoval, usually repressed in everyday life. 7 For Oiticica, the Parangolks, and hallucinogenic drugs were all means to an end: to create a "suprasensory state, a space where people can feel liberated from the rules and (suprasensorial) of regulations a repressive regime and thus discover their capacity for revolt. The process of creating a space of dissent within everyday life is precisely what Michel de Certeau described when he celebrated "tactics" over "strategy" in his 1980 'Invention duquotidien.38 Strategy is a means of calculation and manipulation in order to gain power over another, where the distinction between one's own space and the other's is clear-cut. Where this distinction is impossible, tactics are the only ways to act within the "other's space." Oiticica shared this kind of "tactical"processes withYippie leader Jerry Rubin, whose 1970 Do It! Scenarios of theRevolution encouraged all young Americans to rebel against the status quo.39 themselves on guerrilleros rather than organized parties, both Oiticica Modeling

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40. Ramirez, 53. 41. Hi1io Oiticica, "BrazilDiarrheia"(1970), in

H6lio 19. Oiticica,

42. Cf. Oiticica, "General Scheme for the New Objectivity,"40.

and Rubin emphasized action over theoretical projections and elaborate systems, and the local rather than the universal as the starting point for a political program. Like Rubin's "scenarios of the revolution," works such as Oiticica's can be used in more than one context. Parangoles Mari Carmen Ramirez has described Oiticica's and other LatinAmerican artists' works in the 196os as "tactics for thriving on adversity,"thus highlighting the relation between de Certeau's definition of "tactical" actions and Oiticica's motto "on adversity we live" (daadversidade which he included in one vivemos), of his Parangoles and as the concluding sentence of his text on the "New Brazilian Objectivity."'4Oiticica repeatedly celebrated the transformation of precariousness into strength, a process nowhere more visible than in the architecture of the favelas, which embodies human creativity and invention arising from the most dire of circumstances. Brazilians, according to Oiticica, should face the fact that they live in a Third World country and "shoulder and swallow the positive values given by this condition."4' In this context artists should be driven by a "constructive will" as well as a sense of rebellion, simultaneously encouraging Brazilians to reject their underdeveloped condition and guiding them in the creation, out of chaos, of a new cultural and national identity.42

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While the hovering shapes of Oiticica's Bilaterals or Spatial Reliefs, inspired the Kazimir forms of Malevich's and the hangpaintings by Suprematist floating reliefs of seem to Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko, embody the ing Neoconcrete references to the "constructive will" of early twentieth-century evoke flight as a more urgent kind of escape from the utopias, the aerial Parangoles of and the long period of oppression misery. Although I was far from the favelas in initial of dictatorship Brazil, this utopian aspiration came spark the Parangole's through in my own experience of the work as I defied, for a few seconds, the laws of gravity and "flew" over Parliament Hill, on Hampstead Heath in London. Thus, rather than being an illustration of a strict political program, Oiticica's guerrilla type of artwork operates as what Pedrosa called "the experimental exercise of freedom": as a means both of becoming aware of one's own freedom and of preparing, of practicing, for another kind of freer society.43

43. Pedrosa's often quoted expression o exercicio experimentaldo liberdadedoes not seem to appear in his published writings until 1970, but both Oiticica and another artist close to Pedrosa, LygiaClark, cite it much earlier. Oiticica quoted this expression in "Appearance of the Suprasensorial," 127. Clark quoted the related term "the spiritualexercise of freedom" in her 1965 "A prop6sito da magia do objeto," repr. in Lygia Clark,exh. cat. (Marseilles:Musee d'art contemporain, 1998), 153. 44. Potts, 210. 45. Michael Newman, "The MaterialTurn in the Art of Western Europe and North America in the 1960s," in BeyondPreconceptions: The Sixties Experiment,exh. cat. (New York: Independent Curators International,2000), 73.

In TheSculptural Alex Potts makes a convincing case for a return to Imagination, to art-historical approaches that "exclude as an alternative phenomenology any close consideration of the visual and perceptual dimensions" involved in viewing works of art.44As we saw, Oiticica's Neoconcrete works shared with the Minimalist sculpture discussed by Potts a focus on the phenomenological dimensions of the viewing experience. Yet, unlike Minimalism, which set up a kind of confrontation between the human body and the autonomous art object, Neoconcrete works acknowledged the possibility of an intimate phenomenological relation between the viewer and the artwork in a way more in tune, in fact, with Merleau-Ponty's writings. This Neoconcretist innovation provided a starting point for Oiticica's shift from autonomous objects to works such as the Parangoles, which can only exist when used, and act as extensions of the participant's body. It was thus through an interrogation of formal elements that Oiticica was able to contribute to the "rethinking of materiality,"which, as Michael Newman points out, is a more suitable term than "dematerialization" to describe Conceptual art's collective attack on "the fetishization of the handmade object."45 By making objects to be used, Oiticica was able to successfully free his works from this fetishization by recasting the materiality of his works as performances instead of commodified objects. Moreover, the "experimental exercise of freeis based on each viewer's unique and often ambivalent dom" of the Parangole experience, which no photograph can capture.Whether taken in the artist's lifetime or in the recent collaboration between Alessandra Santarelli and myself, can only ever serve as complephotographs of people wearing the Parangoles ments-not replacements-for the experience of the work itself. Once this is clarified, Oiticica's work emerges as a rare exception amongst the dematerializing conceptual practices whose "rethinking of materiality" did not prevent them from being refetishized, in a sense, by the commodification of documentary materials, the increased dependence on the artist's own body as a stamp of authenticity, or both. Hence, paradoxically, the tactility and sensuality involved in the experience of the Parangoles-which cannot be replaced by a photograph acting as a commodity object, and which are not mediated by the artist's body since they are to be worn by the viewer-are precisely what makes the works lose their materiality as fetishized art objects.

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Helio Oiticica. Parangol6 P17 Cape 13, Estou Possuido, 1967, worn by Nildo of Mangueira. Courtesy of Projeto Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: Claudio Oiticica.

can be conceived as conceptual tools The contingent and precarious Parangoles that mobilize sensual participation in order to achieve contrasting yet complementary goals. On the one hand, by radically challenging conventions of museum display that have traditionally discouraged any form of tactile participation, the Parangoles exist in a social space in which viewers become aware of identity as a shifting, ambivalent term constructed in a performative process involving selfpresentation and the gaze of others, and exploring issues of authenticity, playencourage a "suprasensory acting, and power. On the other hand, the Parangoles state of absorption, bordering on headiness, which can act as an effective trigger for contestation because it celebrates freedom and pleasure in the face of adversity, conformism, and repression. Beyond oppositions between guerrilla tactics and sensory pleasure, intimacy and political activism, Oiticica's Parangoles thus kind in which and the the for a of the aesthetic opened path postmodernism are like two sewn together anti-aesthetic, rather than being mutually exclusive, sides of the same whirling fabric.
AnnaDezeuzeis a research fellowat the AHRB Research Centrefor Studies of Surrealism andIts of Manchester. Legacies, University

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