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

Agrippina in Miniskirts

Also presented on a monitor, the "Quasi-cinema" Agripina e Roma-Manhattan (Agrippina is Rome-Manhattan, 1972) is credited as the joint work of Oiticica and D'Almeida. To risk a meditation on the pitfalls of appetite and greed, Oiticica, perhaps disillusioned in his chosen exile, turns to history for inspiration and solace. As a candidate for their project, the artists identify Agrippina, the widowed Roman aristocrat fierce with the blood of the Caesars, a warrior in the days before her fall and eventual exile, translated to the New York of now, promenading on the arm of a B-cast pimp. The restless camera roams the majestic architecture of Manhattan, pausing to ogle the bare legs of a young woman (Cristiny Nazareth) presumably the Agrippina of the title. (In one Oiticica shot published in the exhibition catalogue, she sports a banner as a sash with the title of the work in progress spelled out across her chest.) She wears a flirty red halter-top minidress more appropriate to the w&k of a roller-skating cocktail waitress, and strappy sandals that wrap provocatively well above her knees. The camera reveres the daggers of her Egyptoid eye shadow, cavernous nostrils and flickering tongue. Elsewhere, attired as a youthful hooker, she trolls impatiently on a narrow patch of street corner. Jack Smith's superstar Mario Montez appears, well turned out in a smart salsa outfit and heels, endlessly and without much enthusiasm casting dice on stacked sheets of rusted steel with the artist Antonio Dias. (10) By the time of these experiments, much had occurred in the world of avant-garde and expanded cinema in New York and internationally. The relative affordability of Super-8 and video equipment provided artists with more of the tools that had already transformed the notion of what constitutes a work of art.

Crisis of Process

"Helio Oiticica: Quasi-cinemas" was an exhibition of works left largely unfinished at the time of the artist's death, and its catalogue--however hobbled by its omission of an index--is a great service to those interested in his project. Unfortunately, the time lines constructed in the exhibition's education mezzanine seemed rote, and the accompanying videos were lacking in content and context, a brand of parangole-lite.

It is significant that Oiticica romanticized the idea of cocaine and its outlaw status. Except for a heady passage in a printed handout, the word "cocaine" appeared nowhere at the New Museum, a strategy puzzling to the visitor who may well have recognized the substance. Basualdo does remark on Oiticica's interest in the historic use of the coca leaf. He observes: "For an artist who never ceased identifying with the outlaw as a figure of resistance to the instrumentalization of artistic work (so increasingly evident after the postwar period), the discovery of a substance that signified at once the crisis of this instrumental process and its reversal into illegality and transgression must have appeared barely short of ideal." (11)