Helio Oiticica: myth of the outlaw: a traveling exhibition recently highlighted the 1970s installations and film projects of the late Brazilian artist, most of them never publicly shown during his lifetime - Critical Essay - Biography

Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Edward Leffingwell

Simply and without much mediation, the New Museum of Contemporary Art's presentation of the road show "Helio Oiticica: Quasi-cinemas" brought to center stage six examples of the legendary Brazilian Neo-Concretist's excursions into the world of projected still and moving images, which he called "Quasi-cinemas." (1) Three were participatory installations, one took the form of a sequence of slides accompanied by an audio track, and two others consisted of moving images. The least finished and most fragmentary among them were especially interesting as instances of some of Oiticica's particular concerns.

Pharmacologic Cinema

Curator Carlos Basualdo's main event in the specialized world of Oiticica's "Quasi-cinemas" was the presentation of three of the artist's pharmacologically driven environments that go beyond the practice of conventional cinema, the Block Experiments in Cosmococa (1973). Inspired by Oiticica's experience of a Jack Smith slide performance in the early 1970s in New York, they were developed in collaboration with the Brazilian filmmaker Neville D'Almeida. The Cosmococas assembled for this traveling curatorial entertainment were conceived as room-sized installations accompanied by dense montages of amplified sound and bracketed by massive projections of images. Photographed by Oiticica and styled by D'Almeida, they were never publicly exhibited in the artist's lifetime. Their presentation was facilitated by D'Almeida's directions and Oiticica's many detailed sketches and notebooks specifying props and instructions for private and public performances.

CC1 Trashiscapes, the first of these Cosmococas, is constructed of slides from a number of sources, including a photograph of Luis Bunuel from a cover of the New York Times Magazine, the record jacket of Frank Zappa's Weasels Ripped My Flesh, a poster of Oiticica's friend Luis Fernando Guimaraes, and D'Almeida himself. Leisure devices designed to engage the viewer included exercise mats, pillows and nail files. The second of the Cosmococas, CC3 Maileryn, consists of slides based on an iconic photo of Marilyn Monroe from the jacket of Norman Mailer's then-current monograph Marilyn, wrapped in cellophane. A scattering of balloons on a floor deep with sand and covered with vinyl invested the work with palpable lightness and buoyancy. The projections of CC5 Hendrix-War introduce adaptations of images from the fierce cover portrait of the album jimi hendrix: war heroes, while hammocks invite a guarded reverie. Installed cheek by jowl, the Cosmococas collectively produced a cacophony of sound, from Hendrix to Yma Sumac. (2) (Additional Cosmococas featuring Yoko Ono and John Cage as well as a parody of the Rolling Stones' album Goat's Head Soup exist in the form of notes and images in various states of completion.)

During the process of shooting slides for the Cosmococas, D'Almeida embellished the bodies and faces in the original printed images--the portraits of Monroe, Hendrix, Bunuel and others--with generous tracings of cocaine as a kind of makeup (manco-quilagens). Through this "cosmetic" application of a substance widely indulged in the worlds of art, music and fashion, Oiticica introduced cocaine as a pigment, a medium that progressively vanished, presumably when ingested, in a radical expression of the dematerialization of the object of art (then a widely shared art-world preoccupation). However sublimated by its social currency, the substance Oiticica had chosen as his transgressive medium remained beyond the law, and consequently the Cosmococas languished, virtually unknown, until the advent of an important catalogue and touring exhibition mounted in Europe in 1992. (3)

Golden Kids

The exhibition featured an additional projected-slide program of particular interest: the sensual, homoerotic Neyrotika (1973), which is credited to Oiticica alone. Neyrotika, which was made after CC1 Trashiscapes, was presented publicly the year of its making in the group exhibition "Expo-Projecao 73," organized by the curator and critic Aracy Amaral for exhibition in Belo Horizonte and Sao Paulo. (4) Subterranean and narcissistic in affect, the episodic nonnarrative Neyrotika consists of a series of 80 projected slides, principally of young men, accompanied in the manner of Jack Smith by a tinny, incidental soundtrack recorded from broadcasts of the New York radio station WBLS, which routinely scheduled hours for salsa and reggae and introduced its news segment with Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On." Oiticica's improvised track is occasionally inflected with his own voice as he reads fragments from the work of another of his culture heroes, the proto-punk, vagabond poet Arthur Rimbaud. A small radio, a Sony tape recorder, the familiar New Directions paperback of Rimbaud's Illuminations (with cover design by Ray Johnson) and a microphone appear in several shots in a nod to process. The track ranges from blues to mambo king Tito Puente, and includes a spot for the programs of the Apollo Theatre as well as public service announcements concerning the federal government's fair housing services and the rights of the handicapped. Oiticica's notes suggest that he photographed the radio, book and tape machine as the broadcasts were taped.