hélio oiticica and neville d'almeida, block experiments in cosmococa, program in progress

8/15/2019 Hélio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida, Block experiments in cosmococa, program in progress

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Hélio Oiticicaand Neville D’Almeida

Block-Experimentsin Cosmococa —program in progress

Sabeth Buchmannand Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz

One Work


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Sabeth Buchmannand Max Jore Hinderer Cruz


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One Work Series EditorMark Lewis

Aterall BooksEditorial DirectorsCharles Esche and

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Other titles in theOne Work series:

Bas Jan Ader: In Searcho the Miraculousby Jan Verwoert

Hollis Frampton:(nostalgia)by Rachel Moore

Ilya Kabakov: Te ManWho Flew into Space

rom his Apartmentby Boris Groys

ichard Prince:Untitled (couple)

by Michael Newman

Joan Jonas: I Want toLive in the Country(And Other omances) by Susan Moran

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Yvonne ainer:he Mind is a Muscle by Catherine Wood

Fischli and Weiss:he Way hings Go by Jeremy Millar

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Alighiero e Boetti: Mappa by Luca Cerizza

Chris Marker: La Jetée by Janet Harbord

Hanne Darboven: CulturalHistory —by Dan Adler

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One Work is a unique series o books published by Aferall, basedat Central Saint Martins Collee o Art and Desin in London.Each book presents a sinle work o art considered in detail bya sinle author. Te ocus o the series is on contemporary artand its aim is to provoke debate about sinificant moments inart’s recent development.

Over the course o more than one hundred books, important workswill be presented in a meticulous and enerous manner by writerswho believe passionately in the orignality and sinificance o theworks about which they have chosen to write. Each book containsa comprehensive and detailed ormal description o the work,

ollowed by a critical mappin o the aesthetic and cultural contextin which it was made and has one on to shape. Te changnpresentation and reception o the work throuhout its existenceis also discussed, and each writer stakes a claim on the influence‘their’ work has on the makin and understandin o otherworks o art.

Te books insist that a sinle contemporary work o art (in all

o its different maniestations), throuh a unique and radicalaesthetic articulation or invention, can affect our understandino art in eneral. More than that, these books suest that a sinlework o art can literally transorm, however modestly, the waywe look at and understand the world. In this sense the One Work series, while by no means exhaustive, will eventually becomea veritable library o works o art that have made a difference.


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First published in by Aferall Books

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© Aferall, Central Saint MartinsCollee o Art and Desin,University o the Arts London,the artists and the authors.

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ranslation Gerrit Jackson

Imaes o work by Hélio Oiticica© César and Claudio OiticicaCourtesy Projeto Hélio Oiticica

Imaes o Bloco-Experiências in Cosmococa —progama in progress (Block-Experimentsin Cosmococa — program in progress ), © César and Claudio Oiticica and Neville D’AlmeidaCourtesy Projeto Hélio Oiticica

An Aferall BookDistributed by Te MI Press


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Sabeth Buchmannand Max Jore Hinderer Cruz


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Te authors would like to thank Projeto Hélio Oiticica and NevilleD’Almeida, as well as Michael Asbury, Ricardo Basbaum, HelmutBatista and Capacete Entretenimentos, Paula Braa, Ivan Cardoso,Beatriz Sciliano Carneiro, Fred Coelho, Diedrich Diederichsen,Ariane Fiueiredo, Santiao García Navarro, Arto Lindsay, SérioBruno Martins, Jore Menna Barreto, César Oiticica Filho andVinicius Nascimento, Luis Camillo Osorio, Laercio Redondo,Suely Rolnik, Adriana Schneider Alcure, Sinai Sanzerla, MarcSieel and Juan A. Suarez. Special thanks to Rainer Bellenbaumand Falke Pisano. Te editors would also like to thank Césarand Claudio Oiticica or their enerosity and support durin theproduction o this book and Ariane Fiueiredo at Projeto Hélio

Oiticica or her support in providin material rom the archive. Sabeth Buchmann is an art historian and critic who lives in Berlinand Vienna. She is Proessor o the History o Modern and Post-modern Art at the Academy o Fine Arts, Vienna. Her publicationsinclude Denken gegen das Denken. Produktion — echnologie— Subjektivität bei Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer und Hélio Oiticica (), Art Afer Conceptual Art (ed. with Alexander Alberro,

) and Film Avantgarde Biopolitik (ed. with Helmut Draxlerand Stephan Geene, ). She is co-editor o PoLYpeN — a bookseries on art criticism, aesthetics and political theory (b_books,Berlin) — and a reular contributor to international art maazines,cataloues and antholoies.

Max Jore Hinderer Cruz is a writer, translator and culturaltheorist based in Berlin. He is currently workin on a doctoral

thesis on Hélio Oiticica’s unpublished writins and tape andfilm recordins. Recent projects include ‘Te Potosí Principle /Principio Potosí’, an exhibition that took place in at the MuseoNacional Centro de Arte Reina Soía in Madrid, the Haus derKulturen der Welt in Berlin and the Museo Nacional de Arte andMuseo Nacional de Etnoraía y Folklore in La Paz (curated withAlice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, also co-editors o theaccompanyin cataloue). His writin has been published in edited

volumes includin Art and the Critique o Ideology Ater (ed. with Eva Birkenstock, Jens Kastner and Ruth Sondereer, ).


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cover:Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,Bloco-Experiências in Cosmococa— progama in progress (Block-Experiments in Cosmococa — programin progress ) CC1 Trashiscapes , 1973,

installation including slideprojections, sound and objects,detail — slide CC1/13

previous page:Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC2 Onobject , 1973,installation including slideprojections, sound and objects,detail — slide CC2/21


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Contents

1. Beinnins and ‘Be een ins’2. Jardim de Guerra , Mangue Bangue , Cosmococa :

CC, CC3 , CC5 3. Jardim Botânico, Whitechapel, Babylon:

Te Supra-sensorial Genealoy o the Cosmococas and Teir Extended Media Apparatus

4. Entanled Genres, Entanled Media:ropicália , CC2 , CC4 , CC6

5. Te Cosmococas Trouh a Different Media Teory:CC rashiscapes

5.1. Te Cut Trouh the Eye5.2. Participation Is (Not Just) a Matter o emperature5.3. Erasin by Repeatin5.4. Where ime Forks

6. Postcript: Lookin Back at the ‘Be een ins’

Endnotes


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Block-Experiments in Cosmococa — proram in proress |

I seek to bestow a sense of light upon pigmentary colour, initself material and opaque […] White is the ideal colour-light,the synthesis-light of all colours. It is the most static, assuch, favours silent, dense, metaphysical duration […]In a work of art, however, time takes on a special meaning,different from the meanings it possesses in other fields ofknowledge; it is more closely linked to philosophy and tothe laws of perception; but it is its symbolic meaning, in thesense of man’s internal, existential relationship with theworld, that characterises time in the artwork. Before it,man no longer mediates in static contemplation, but findshis own vital time as he becomes involved, in a univocal

relationship, with the time of the work. Here, he becomeseven closer to the pure vitality to which Mondrian aspired.Man experiences the polarities of his own cosmic destiny.He is not merely metaphysical but cosmic, the beginningand the end.

— Hélio Oiticica, ‘Color, Time, and Structure’ ()1

1. Beinnins and ‘Be een ins’

Today the five slide show installations by Hélio Oiticica andNeville D’Almeida commonly referred to as Bloco-Experiências inCosmococa — programa in progress (Block-Experiments in Cosmococa— program in progress, ; fig.—), Cosmococa — program in progress or simply Cosmococas can be easily regarded as the mostcelebrated Brazilian contribution to twentieth-century avant-garde experiments on the threshold of art and cinema. But thishas not always been the case. In , the same year that four of

the installations were shown for the first time together in thecity of São Paulo, D’Almeida wondered in an interview: ‘What’sthis? Thirty years of waiting! It’s taken so long, incredible as itmay seem […] The world had to evolve for this work to appear.’ 2 As D’Almeida rightly observes, the Cosmococas remained unseenfor several decades. It took until for one of them to be


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| Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida

installed in an art space, and until for the first-everexhibition of the five Cosmococas as a complete series ofinstallations in Rio de Janeiro, the city where Hélio Oiticicadied in at the age of of a sudden stroke, and whereD’Almeida continues to live and work.3

Originally, Neville D’Almeida invented the term ‘Cosmococa’to name a new film project of his. Yet, as Hélio Oiticica put it,‘more than a film it became — program in progress ’:4 not onesingle film, but an entire series of collaborations that D’Almeidaand Oiticica created in New York City. Oiticica was living therebetween and ,5 and D’Almeida visited at least twice

in , in March and in August. Each participative installationwas conceived independently and each includes a non-narrativesequence of about thirty slides with soundtrack. The slides wereto be projected on a loop in individually designed environmentswith hammocks, seats and mattresses, or even, on one occasion,a swimming pool, with ‘instructions for performance’ tobe carried out by participants. Each of these arrangementsconstitutes one ‘block’ of Cosmococa . The main visual reference

the slide sequences have in common is the abundantly displayedcocaine powder on book and LP covers and other surfaces,arranged as a graphic element, superposing the images belowby making use of the powder as pigment.

Oiticica meticulously documented each environment’scomponents in his notebooks (fig.), then transcribed,edited and partially translated these inventories from

Brazilian Portuguese to English. Each block was labelled ‘CC’,an abbreviation for Cosmococa , followed by a number thatindicates the chronological order of its creation within thegroup and a specific title: CC1 Trashiscapes (fig.—), CC2Onobject (fig.—), CC3 Maileryn (fig.—), CC4 Nocagions (fig.—) and CC5 Hendrix-War (fig.—) being the five


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collaborations of D’Almeida and Oiticica. Between August and March , Oiticica extended the ‘program in progress’and formalised ideas for another four blocks within othercollaborations, none of which has yet been installed for publicview, and only one of which is regarded as actually completed:CC6 Coke Head’s Soup, a collaboration with his friend ThomasValentin.6 Block CC7 was conceived as a proposal to curator andwriter Guy Brett in London, but went unfinished and unnamed.CC8 Mr. D or D of Dado was first planned as a collaboration withthe poet Silviano Santiago, but later referred to as a piece byOiticica alone, and CC9 Cocaoculta Renô Gone was proposed to theartist and photographer Carlos Vergara in Rio de Janeiro; neither

were finished.

In a project paper dated March , there are nine descriptionsof such block-experiments listed as Cosmococas (CC1—CC9 ).This paper, ‘Bloco-Experiências in Cosmococa — progama inprogress’ (‘Block-Experiments in Cosmococa — program inprogress’), was meant to be included in Oiticica’s ultimatelyunrealised publication project Newyorkaises (—), later

referred to as Conglomerado .7 A document of sixteen typewrittenpages in Portuguese, with a slightly shortened English transla-tion and eight extra sheets with instructions for CC1—CC5 , itis effectively the most important source of information on howto imagine Block-Experiments in Cosmococa — program in progress in and . Since , the main document in its Englishtranslation has been published in at least three catalogues andfurther translated into French, Dutch, Catalan and Spanish.8

In addition to his own notes, a rare description of Cosmococa bya contemporary can be found in the collection of writings aboutOiticica’s work by his close friend the poet Waly Salomão, anicon of the Brazilian counterculture. An account of the years theyspent together and separately in Rio de Janeiro, London and New


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York, these texts are characterised by the author’s intimacy withhis subject and their poetic and complicit system of references.9 ‘In his lifetime, [Oiticica] didn’t show COSMOCOCA to more thana few select people,’ Salomão writes.

When I visited Hélio in New York in October , he toldme with one of the signals from his rich non-verbal repertoirethat I ought to stick around a little before going home, hewaited until the other people had left his loft, he swore meto absolute secrecy and only after I had made my vow didhe begin the clandestine ritual of the presentation. Hélio didnot exaggerate when he said about the inordinately secret

COSMOCOCA, hidden by seven seals: ‘I feel as though sittingon a powder keg wrapped in sticks of dynamite.’ […] Andhe was right: COSMOCOCA is pure nitro-glycerine. It is aholistic environment, it is cosmos.10

Even if we know that the Cosmococas may have been installedin different types of spaces in the s, like Oiticica’s NewYork loft, no photographic documentation can be found in

printed publications or in the archive of his estate. In fact wehave no evidence of how the presentations looked before .In all likelihood the standards of contemporary exhibitionspaces — the air-conditioned white cube we commonly encounterin museums and galleries — stand in pronounced contrast tothe rather spontaneous set up Salomão witnessed in .11

What we do have are several hundred pages of notes in notebooks

and on loose papers that might help us understand how theCosmococas were originally conceived — some handwritten,some typewritten, fastidiously inventoried by Oiticica himself.The first notes that explicitly speak of ‘Cosmococa’ are fromJune . The earliest instructions, concerning the look of theinstallations and how to structure the combinations of slides,


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audio-tracks and participatory performances, are dated March. A year had passed since the first slide photographs forCC1 were taken, and more than half a year since those for CC2 through CC5 were made, all of which are dated August ;at that time Oiticica had already begun planning four additionalworks, identified as CC6—CC9 , to be made with variouscollaborators. The last reference we can find in the ProjetoHélio Oiticica archive is in a document with a list of worksby Oiticica titled ‘FILMOGRAPHY (?)’, mentioning four itemsin chronological order: Agripina é Roma Manhattan (),Neyrótika (), Cosmococa () and Helena Inventa ÂngelaMaria (). Typewritten in Portuguese and English, only

two months before his death in March , his passage onCosmococas reads:

— COSMOCOCA — a program in progress — New York made of BLOCK EXPERIMENTS with the designation of

CC: from CC1 to CC5 made with NEVILLE D’ALMEIDAstarting March , , inaugurating the designationconcept of quasi-cinema: CC6 with THOMAS VALENTIN:

CC8 by himself; these BLOCKS are made of assembledslides-sound-tracks-INSTRUCTIONS: these INSTRUCTIONSare specific in each case, requiring the construction ofenvironments and the planning of events.12

It seems that by this time Oiticica had dropped the proposalsfor CC7 and CC9 . In general, though, it is interesting to notethat even years after making them, he addressed the principle

of the Cosmococas as an open programme that could lenditself to indefinite future elaboration, pursuing individualconcepts in interventions, such as performances, or evenletters and recorded conversations. As Oiticica points out, theseinterventions are to be understood as experimental ‘let-outs’or ‘chance operations’. He writes:


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COSMOCOCA as program bears in its origins an openexperimental character: shifts and changes are part of itsinventive structure and also (mainly!) the chance situationswhich occur as decisive steps for its different let-outs —the program as such is an open-program in progress andit is impossible to determine the whole of its possiblescope or what it will add up to — also because some of itsaspects (most!) press upon proposing possible experimentalsituations to other people whether collectively duringPERFORMANCES or by invitation, etc.: the main point inconsidering an EXPERIMENTAL activity is in not limitingsuch an activity to its originators but of creating multiple

let-outs for collective and individual participation as anexperimental exercise of liberty (MARIO PEDROSA).13

These practices of intervention, experiments or concepts,however, are often recorded only in fragmentary form, as newideas to be applied to the existing Cosmococas . In relation tothe name Block-Experiments in Cosmococa — program in progress ,the so-called ‘blocks’, or ‘shifts’, are the basic structures we

can identify as units that form the Cosmococas . But they donot appear as identities in a strictly successive order — ratheras intensities or simultaneities. Oiticica writes:

the idea of the BLOCOS, which HAROLDO DE CAMPOSalready uses as a generative structure in his book GALÁXIAS[—], it is the foundation […] BLOCOS: they relinquishthe defined sequence […] to the contrary, they even benefit

from their random sequence and their shifts: BLOCOS andGALÁXIAS are simultaneity, not a conclusive succession from one to the other.14

Oiticica describes the manner in which de Campos uses nestedrepetitions of linguistic units large and small — a procedure we


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may compare to the repeated and symbolic rearrangement ofthe lines of cocaine displayed in the slide shows — to createa continuum of forever new and ultimately inexhaustiblemeanings, as a ‘structure of chance operations ’. Referring tothe famous Mallarméan casting of the dice, time and againbeginning afresh, he writes: ‘MALLARMÉ is in reality thegrandfather of everything that is structurally generated asa chance operation .’15 The reference to Stéphane Mallarmé’s‘Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard’ (‘A Throw ofthe Dice will Never Abolish Chance’, ) again can be readas pointing towards the conglomerate publication formatNewyorkaises , in which Oiticica had planned to include the

Block-Experiments in Cosmococa . A virtually endless chain ofintersections orbiting in various formats, this unfinishedpublication ultimately adds a holistic dimension to the multiple‘chance situations’ and ‘let-outs’ of Cosmococa . We may note, in other words, that Block-Experiments in Cosmococa as an open programme in progress is not only unlimited intime, it also does not have a beginning, or only a relative one:

a ‘begeen ing’, as Oiticica puts it, quoting the typographicallylengthened vowel from de Campos’s experimental cycle of poemsGaláxias : ‘begeen ing, as the impossibility of being somethingprimordial: — begeen s here; the multiplicity of the begeen ing,begeen ing again, etc.’.16

With regard to the Cosmococas , this method also implies theabsence of an ‘original’. That means that all the Cosmococas

— the one Oiticica realised by himself (CC8) and hiscollaborations with D’Almeida (CC1—CC5 ) and Thomas Valentin(CC6 ), as well as those that did not evolve beyond the draft stage(CC7 and CC9 ) — are based on the same concept of originlessnessand infinite expansion. This also concerns the referentialcontent of the individual Cosmococas , suggested by their titles,


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which point to other artists (such as Yoko Ono in CC2 ), as wellas icons of mass culture (Marilyn Monroe in CC3 ) or rock music(CC5 Hendrix-War refers to Jimi Hendrix’s posthumous recordWar Heroes of , whereas CC6 Coke Head’s Soup alludes to theRolling Stones’ album Goat’s Head Soup).17

The open programme in progress underlying the Block-Experiments in Cosmococa is not only a factor in why some ofthem have remained incomplete, but it is also mirrored inthe transformation of the materials used in the ones completed.The first five authored with D’Almeida, for example, showphotographs, books and LP covers adorned with cocaine drawings.

But that principle undergoes modification in the four subsequentCosmococas , which were evidently less and less about the physicalproperties of cocaine as a raw pigment and more about itsqualities and effects according to time and light, that is,processing its wider scope of properties as a medium. Accordingto Beatriz Scigliano Carneiro, CC6 Coke Head’s Soup shows‘images of the translucent reflection of cocaine spread over therecord sleeve, creating what Hélio Oiticica named “cocamist”

due to its misty appearance’.18 CC8 Mr. D or D of Dado illustratesthat Oiticica’s interests in the later Cosmococas he conceivedtended toward an emphasis on phenomenological aspects,19 as it forgoes the use of cocaine in favour of a ‘manipulation oflight and reflections in a mirror’.20 Finally, in CC9 CocaocultaRenô Gone Oiticica speaks of ‘cocaoculta’ (an invented compoundthat literally means ‘concealed cocaine’),21 announcing the total invisibility or transparency of the used cocaine. This shift

illustrates the idea of the construction of sensory perceptionsimplicit to the Cosmococas — an aspect that is already at theroot of the works he made in the s in Brazil, and that isin these later works reinforced by the semantic conjunctionwith cocaine.


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The phonetic-semantic pun ‘cocaoculta’ also implies a directreference to Décio Pignatari’s poem ‘beba coca cola’ (; fig.),a famous work of Brazilian poesia concreta ; it concludes with thewords: ‘caco / cola / cloaca’ (‘shard / glue / cesspool’).22 Pignatariis considered one of the founding fathers of concrete poetry inBrazil, and with seminal texts such as ‘Marco Cero De Andrade’() he was responsible, together with the de Campos brothers,for the revival of Antropofagia. Sweeping the country in thes, Antropofagia would profoundly influence Brazil’s avant-garde art and culture, including what is known as the Tropicáliamovement, or Tropicalismo, emerging around .23

The layering of transparent and opaque materials and use ofmultiple references characteristic of the Cosmococas is anotherreason why we should speak not of ‘originals’ but of ‘block-experiments’. Accordingly, Paula Braga sees the Cosmococas asthe ‘fortunate encounter between two artistic investigations’; inother words, the interaction of two heterogeneous, process-boundmodes of aesthetics or knowledge. She writes: ‘D’Almeida hadalready experimented with fragmented and non-representative

narratives in films such as Mangue Bangue (; fig.).’ Onthe other hand, ‘Oiticica was carrying forward his programmeof reinventing art through the expansion of constructivist ideas.’And so, Braga concludes, ‘when the fragmentation of cineticismproposed by the former encountered the latter’s research onaltered states of consciousness (the “suprasensorial”) andbehavioural deconditioning, a new art cosmos exploded in worksso radical that thirty years would pass before they were first

shown in public’.24

This book looks back on this ‘fortunate encounter’ betweenOiticica and D’Almeida in New York from a distance of almostexactly four decades. It focuses on the historical context of theprocess-bound layering of materials and references, and on the


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‘media fabric’ to which the Cosmococas respond. This aspectalso includes the multifaceted meanings and uses of cocaine,which art-historical reception has tended to disregard. Bragais, together with Scigliano Carneiro, one of the few authorswho have sought to define its meaning without passing moral judgment. As Braga suggests, the cocaine powder featuredin the Cosmococas could be understood as making possible adifferent perception of ‘time’.25 Taking this idea further,we will seek to show that, vice versa, time is in these worksintrinsically embedded in the dimension of matter — meaningnot only physical objects and substances, but also physical andmental processes, such as states of activity or passivity of energy

or delirium. As Haroldo de Campos once put it, what Oiticicaultimately sought was ‘to organise delirium’.26

. Jardim de Guerra , Mangue Bangue , Cosmococa :CC1, CC3 , CC5 Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida first met in ,when Oiticica attended a private presentation of D’Almeida’sfirst film, Jardim de Guerra (Garden of War , ), at Rio’s

Líder Cinematográfica editing studios. The film, scripted incollaboration with performance artist Jorge Mautner, includedseveral long takes of posters found on walls in urban spaces.As D’Almeida said in an interview, the fascination with thoseposters stemmed out of the time he had lived in the US duringthe mid-s, and represented for him nothing less than‘the democratisation of art’: ‘you take a painting that hangson the wall, one which only you have access to, and you reproduce

it in an edition of ten thousand, of one hundred thousand,for the whole world, so anyone in the world can hang it on theirwall’.27 In , D’Almeida used a mix of agitprop and popcultural posters to establish the historical time of his film— ‘posters of Che Guevara, of Twiggy, of Trotsky, of Mao Tse-Tung,of Jimi Hendrix. When the picture was over, Hélio said: “I loved


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the posters; you made such great use of the posters […] Thatwas the first time I ever saw a film-maker using posters aslanguage.”’28 Tragically, Jardim de Guerra was confiscated andcensored by the military government almost instantly afterits release, and lost. Looking back, Oiticica would refer to theinnovative character of D’Almeida’s cinematographic project,linking it to Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One (also known, inan alternative edit, as Sympathy for the Devil, ), John Cage’smusical experiments and Marshall McLuhan’s media theory,all foundational references for the Cosmococas .29

Oiticica’s enthusiasm for Jardim de Guerra comes as no surprise.

The clash between its cinematic modes of appropriation andlogic of distribution, on the one hand, and the subcultural codingof public space through posters and politically charged streetart, on the other, seems to perfectly match his own interest inthe appropriation of public space.30 The same year he saw Jardimde Guerra he had organised Apocalipopótese (; fig.), an eventwith mobile installations, live music and the participationof dancers from the Mangueira favela and the public. As we

know from a recollection of the events by his close friend RogérioDuarte, John Cage — who was visiting Rio at the time and wasintroduced to Oiticica by dancer Esther Stocker and novelistJosé Agrippino de Paula — was particularly interested in theParangolé performances of several of Oiticica’s friends, such asLygia Pape, Torquato Neto, Antonio Manuel and Duarte himself.31 The first presentation of the Parangolé capes had been bannedfrom the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ)

during the ‘Opinão ’’ exhibition, and was spontaneouslytransferred by Oiticica into the park surrounding the museum.With Apocalipopótese, Oiticica claimed the modernist parksurrounding the museum as another ‘garden of war’ for thes countercultural movements.


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The night of their first encounter in , Oiticica andD’Almeida agreed on merging the ideas of Oiticica’s spatialexperiments — based on the liberation of sensorial experienceand spectator participation — with the structural innovationsin the language of avant-garde cinema by D’Almeida. Thisresulted in a film called Mangue Bangue,32 planned whileOiticica was travelling to Paris, London, Los Angeles andNew York from to , and moving to New York in ,with D’Almeida filming Mangue Bangue on his own that yearin Rio. The cast includes Oiticica’s friend Rose Matos — famousfor her samba dancing skills and for being the daughter of theinfluential Oto do Pó (‘Powder Oto’), an informal authority in

Mangueria — and actor Paulo Villaça, who had impersonatedthe legendary ‘red-light bandit’ in Rogério Sganzerla’s O Bandidoda Luz Vermelha in , and who would reappear in two ofD’Almeida’s most successful films, A Dama do Lotaçao (Ladyon the Bus , ) and Rio Babilônia ().

Mangue Bangue, filmed entirely in Mangue, the red-lightdistrict in the centre of Rio de Janeiro, consists of several long

takes that emphasise the spectator’s durational experience,for example by showing a group of people ‘hanging out’,smoking pot and not talking, eventually laughing or gettingintimate with each other.33 Oititica refers to these takes as‘non-narration’ or ‘limit-situations’, which ‘provided the inertia’for their collaborative work on the slides for Block-Experimentsin Cosmococa . In fact, it was not until Mangue Bangue waspresented in a guest-only screening at New York’s Museum

of Modern Art in March that Oiticica and D’Almeidawould finally return to the idea of a collaborative film project.Moreover, Oiticica constantly highlights the importance ofD’Almeida’s previous work for the invention of Cosmococa inhis project paper, insisting that the slide presentation — the‘FRAME-MOMENTS: INSTAMOMENTS’ of Cosmococa — must be


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understood as a direct corollary to Mangue Bangue. According toOiticica, ‘NEVILLE’s concern is to grasp environments sensorialplasticity’, and his camera work acts as ‘a sensorial glove fortouching-probing-circulating’.34

A few minutes of Super footage D’Almeida and Oiticica recordedin New York in March document Cosmococa ’s affinity toMangue Bangue. The silent, fragmentary footage of a repetitiveaction forecasts the mm slides of CC1 Trashiscapes : thescattering of cocaine powder over the surfaces of the LP coverof Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention’s Weasels RippedMy Flesh (; fig.); over a poster showing Luis Fernando

Guimarães, intimate friend of Oiticica, wearing a Parangolé cape (Parangolé Capa , M’Way Ke, ; fig. and ); and overthe cover of The New York Times Magazine from March (fig.), featuring Luis Buñuel with a razor blade drawing aline through his eye, recalling the infamous scene from hisfilm Un Chien andalou (). Then the rearrangement of thecocaine powder as a graphic element on these surfaces or itsreflection on a pocket mirror; the erasure of the designs made

with the powder by ‘cutting’ as well as blurring or snorting thelines; and repeated rounds of new arrangements, rearrangementsand the fun D’Almeida and Oiticica are obviously having whilemaking the work.

But this Super footage only documents the production sessionsof CC1’s slide sequence. This slide sequence, rather than thedocumentary film material, was to be used in the projections.

As Oiticica writes, the formal ‘limit-situations’ of MangueBangue in Cosmococa ‘explode into SLIDES’.35 The Cosmococas then become something other than cinema:

really a kind of quasi-cinema: a structural innovation withinNEVILLE’S work and an unexpected field for my longing to


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INVENT in the light of my dissatisfaction with ‘cinemalanguage’; not to be contented by the relationship (mainlythe visual one) of spectator-spectacle (nurtured by cinema-disintegrated by teevee) and the wide-spread indifferenceof such notions: the prevalent blindfaith acceptance ofthat relationship’s immutability the spectator’s hypnosisand submission to the screen’s visual and absolute super-definition always seemed to me too prolonged the pictureschanged but somehow remained the same: why? 36

We may understand the ‘explosions into slides’ as thecondensation — or fragmentation — of time introduced by

the use of slide projections. Thus the ‘instamoments’ or ‘frame-moments’ Oiticica refers to represent a condensed experienceof time, as opposed to the linear experience of time in thenarrative structures of mainstream cinema. The aim was partlyto undermine the authoritative order of cinema (the -minutenorm) by introducing divergent forms of temporality. ButOiticica and D’Almeida’s deconstruction of cinema language alsoaims at the spatial or physical intervention into the ‘spectator’s

hypnosis’ and experience of submission — bodily throughperformance experiments or other forms of participation,and structurally by multiplying the projections and scatteringthem all over the place.

In Waly Salomão’s text on the Cosmococas , we find a descriptionof his personal experience inside the installation setting ofCC1 Trashiscapes with its situative participation proposals.

He writes:

Among the instructions accompanying these environments,one [CC1] instructed the visitor to lie down, they providemattresses and nail files, so you stay there and look at Idon’t know how many slides, listening to the soundtrack


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and simply being there, fingernail after fingernail, and fileaway […] at the same time, you send life into dormancy,a quiet time for life […] There is an erotic relationship there,eroticism light, something like sensual inaction, dissipation,the pleasure of time without immediacy, a time of vacancy,a time of eternity, a time without intentions, a delightfultime, without urgent appointments, without obligations[…] in the suburb as well, the suburban girl leaning by thewindow and watching life as she does her nails […] The factthat you file your nails means that you enter a differentenjoyment of time, a way of taking pleasure in the sensationof time that is different from the time of protestant capital-

ism, time is money, for example. It’s different from that.Time is money, no. Time is pleasure. It’s the pleasure principle that rules, and the reality principle is suspended.37

As Oiticica’s notes suggest, his role was to arrange theinstallation, including composing a soundtrack and thechoice of photographic images, while D’Almeida took charge of‘painting’ everything with cocaine powder, and applying it as if

it were make-up — ‘mancoquilagens’. Additionally, the make-upsituations captured on the mm slides feature all kinds of itemsand ‘tools’ that point at the further ‘processing’ of the cocaine,such as a butterfly knife, penknife, razor blade, scissors, ahalf-smoked joint and a rolled five dollar bill, but also postcards,film cans, a telephone set or, as in the case of CC1 Trashiscapes ,newspaper advertisements with job offers.

The use of cocaine make-up can also be read as a form of exaggerated and trashy appropriation of the portraits and namesof celebrities and icons taken up in the Cosmococas : Luis Buñuel,Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, Yoko Ono, Martin Heidegger,John Cage, Frank Zappa and the Rolling Stones, among others.It seems reasonable to assume that Oiticica’s selection should be


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understood as homage to those figures in literature, film,philosophy and art who constituted his artistic and intellectualpantheon at that time. Clearly, this appropriation pays tributeto D’Almeida’s use of posters in Jardim de Guerra . Oiticicarecapitulates the formal division of labour at stake in theCosmococas :

my work/relationship with NEVILLE may be compared tothat of a film director and cameraman: the difference beingthat there are just two of us in the whole project: just two ofus INVENTING/EXTRAPOLATING/etc. just two of us in amulti-structural multi-valent EXPERIMENTATION which

is not cinema nor photography nor narrative.38

In the cocaine make-up used in CC3 Maileryn (fig. and ),39 the close-up portrait of Marilyn Monroe on the cover of NormanMailer’s biography Marilyn () is literally ‘made-up’ byhighlighting her eyebrows, outlining her eyes and painting herlips with cocaine powder. In contrast to the description above,though, in CC3 a narrative is suggested: while the make-up

alternates between accentuating Monroe’s sensuality andforming grotesque caricature-like masks, a pair of scissors cutsopen the transparent cellophane wrapping of the new book bitby bit. It first uncovers a rather matt surface that suddenlyreveals a naked photograph of the star; in a next step this nudityis made-up again with shiny white cocaine powder.

The slide sequence is projected simultaneously on four walls

and ceiling, and the accompanying soundtrack features a songby Yma Sumac — the Peruvian singer who became famous ins Hollywood and Broadway productions and was labelledas ‘Hollywood’s Incan Princess’ — singing a soprano melodyreminiscent of ‘Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen’(‘Hell’s Vengeance Boils in My Heart’), sung by the Queen of the


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Night in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flut e, ). PerOiticica’s notes, the tape was ‘made using NEVILLE’s suggestion(APRIL ’) for the incorporation of sound/music suggestiveof SOUTH AMERICAN ARCHETYPES such as quechua etc.’.40 Thefloor of the installation consists of ‘thick durable transparentvinyl over sand arranged DUNEWISE with a low-level smootharea sloping up to a somewhat higher-level which in turnundulates down then up even higher-level’.41 The space isfilled with yellow and orange balloons (fig.). The participantsare invited to lie down barefoot and roll around freely, whilethrowing balloons into the air and dragging themselves alongthe floor.

CC5 Hendrix-War — created ‘August th , from AMto :AM’ — consists of a series of slides, instructionsfor a soundtrack and instructions for public and privateperformances. The whole set should be copied ten times, and,as the instructions remark: ‘ SETS of to be designated CC5COPY_(A)(B)(C)(D)’.42 The ‘PHOTO-PROPS’ used for the cocainemake-up should include: ‘one — penknife: two — matches:

virgin/burning/spent; three — unfinished silver mylarPARANGOLÉ CAPE; four — record album: WAR HEROES —JIMI HENDRIX’. Referring to the title of the War Heroes LPand Hendrix’s involvement in the black liberation movement,some of the slides show Hendrix’s face wearing make-upreminiscent of war paint (fig.). Then the cocaine is rearrangedas an abstract graphic element, outlining a square that issuperposed on Hendrix’s mouth. In the middle of this square,

lit matches suggest fiery speech and recall the legendary Vodounceremony Hendrix staged in in Monterey: setting his guitaron fire and shocking the festival audience with the wall of noisethis produced as he performed unequivocal sexual gestures withtongue and hips.


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The ‘public performance’ of CC5 Hendrix-War , that wasoriginally programmed at Oiticica’s loft, designates an eventtaking place in a very specific space: the participants were tooccupy hammocks suspended from a ceiling structure, enclosedby four projection walls with four entrances, one in every corner(fig.). The idea was to suspend the bodies of the participants‘ABOVE THE GROUND: HAMMOCKS-HANGING-COCOONWISE’.A sketch is ‘to be included in the instructions’ that indicatesthe distribution of the hammocks and projections. In contrast,for ‘private performances’, Oiticica wrote in his instructionsthat four sets of slides, meant for four or more private rooms,should be shown in multiple projections on interior or exterior

walls of a house or apartment. The action begins immediatelyafter the residents wake up. Everyone is called upon to ensurethat the slide projections operate while ‘any Hendrix’ recordis played — they take the creative organisation of the situationinto their own hands.

The principle of ‘private performances’ applies in this instancenot so much to individual relations between work and viewer

as to intersubjective and physical encounters: we may take theemphasis placed on ‘otherness’ to be also an erotically chargedevocation of incalculable ‘other’ experiences. Moreover, thisform of improvisation is ultimately designed to foster theperformance of the individual, to be intensified by collectiveaction. This becomes particularly clear in regard to CC2 Onobject .CC2 is a monument to Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (), a collectionin book form of instructions for actions that rose to cult status

in avant-garde circles of the time. This reference illustratesthat the instructions accompanying all of the Cosmococas may be considered for private as well as public actions to beimplemented at an agreed-upon place and time, but also atan indeterminate point in time, in any arbitrary dwelling.


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Given that US president Richard Nixon declared a ‘war on drugs’in , the ‘private’ is in this context undoubtedly political.Since the prohibition of cocaine is symbolic of the history ofcolonialism as well as of (bio)political forms of control,43 itsexplicit performative use seems to be more than just a symptomof addiction or ‘drug culture’. It should rather be understood asa mode of transfer, expropriation and defamiliarisation withexisting rules at the intersection between private and publiclife, as well as between subcultural and artistic practices.

Different psychoactive substances had also appeared ascomponents in Oiticica’s earlier work, before the Cosmococas .

For example, in the form of hallucinogenic, ‘supra-sensorial’states in the Penetrável Cannabiana (), presented at theWhitechapel Gallery in London in as part of his Éden environment (fig.), and in the script for an unrealisedquasi-cinema titled Nitro-Benzol and Black Linoleum ().The instructions for the latter stipulated that the audiencebe served a steady supply of Coca-Cola during a screening of allsorts of footage; later the participants would be asked to ‘sniff’

nitrobenzene before being left to entertain themselves in the‘darkroom’ created by turning off the film projector’s light:

IDEA // AUDIENCE: none of the screens are lighted / nolights anywhere / complete darkness // NO TAKE / scenewith audience: during (ten) mins. any strong & quick poprecord plays — in the dark environment people do what theywant — including dance, if possible, for cushions and small

mattresses will be scattered around.44

As we will go on to discuss later, cocaine, used in the Cosmococas both as medium and reference, is by no means replaceable byother psychoactive or illicit substances. Specific media mayrepresent distinct instruments of mediation, but they are always


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and most of all embedded in subject-object relations andinscribed in broader societal structures. Despite the factthat Block-Experiments in Cosmococa is an open programme inprogress, it is fair to say that each of its parts (‘blocks’) integratesinterrelated artistic and ethical, social and political, physicaland mental, metabolic and pharmacological components thatdo point towards a process-based whole. We may speculate thatthis is the ‘cosmic’ implication towards which Oiticica andD’Almeida’s title points.

. Jardim Botânico, Whitechapel, Babylon:Te Supra-sensorial Genealoy o the Cosmococas and Teir Extended Media Apparatus After the short but influential Neoconcretist period (—),artists such as Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Oiticica — whomaintained a close working relationship with each otherafter those years — developed an artistic practice that showedparallels the ‘dematerialised art’ that had been identified inArgentinean and North American discourse in the mid- to lates.45 With their mixed-media works — or more precisely,

works of indeterminate media — these three artists generatedparticipative and intersubjective whole-body situations;reflecting the dissolution of the previously dominant pictorialor sculptural rules and methods. Instead, they favoured a sensual,affective or intellectual constitution of the audience or spectator.This approach is close to the theory of affects, which seesintuitions and feelings not as extrinsic to things, but as releasedby the encounter of the viewer with things. In this respect,

Brian Massumi has spoken of a ‘technique of relation’,describing the viewer’s body not as a localised entity but insteadas a ‘“tendency toward” something’ driven by desire, pleasure,displeasure, lack of interest, etc. — as having the ability toalter the direction of emotion through the positively ‘objectified’experience of affect.46 The potential of change implicit in this


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1. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida, Bloco-Experiências in Cosmococa — progama in progress (Block-Experiments in Cosmococa — program in progress ), CC1 Trashiscapes , 1973,installation including slide projections, sound and objects, detail — slide CC1/13


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2. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC1 Trashiscapes , 1973,installation including slide projections,sound and objects,detail — slide CC1/32

3. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC1 Trashiscapes , 1973,

installation including slide projections,sound and objects,detail — slide CC1/21


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4. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC1 Trashiscapes , 1973,



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5. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC1 Trashiscapes , 1973,installation view, ‘Exposição Momentos-

Frames, Cosmococa’, Galeria Fortes Vilaça,São Paulo, 2003Photograph: César Oiticica Filho


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6. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC2 Onobject , 1973,installation view, ‘Cosmococa — programa

in progress’, Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica,Rio de Janeiro, 2005Photograph: César Oiticica Filho


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7. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC2 Onobject , 1973,installation including slide projections,

sound and objects,details — slides CC2/07 (top) and CC2/20(bottom)


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8. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC3 Maileryn , 1973,



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9. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC3 Maileryn , 1973,installation view, ‘Exposição Momentos-



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10. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC4 Nocagions , 1973,installation including slide projections,sound and objects,detail — slide CC4/27

11. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC4 Nocagions , 1973,



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12. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC4 Nocagions , 1973,installation view, ‘Cosmococa — programa

in progress’, Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica,Rio de Janeiro, 2005Photograph: César Oiticica Filho


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13. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC5 Hendrix-War , 1973,installation view, ‘Exposição Momentos-



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14. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC5 Hendrix-War , 1973,installation including slide projections,

sound and objects,details — slides CC5/04 (top)and CC5/05 (bottom)


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15. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida,CC5 Hendrix-War , 1973,



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16. Page from notebook that Hélio Oiticicastarted on 27 October 1973


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conception leads to the idea of a fundamental transformationof social subjectivation resides — an idea that Oiticica pursuedwith growing enthusiasm after his encounter with theNeoconcretists and Mário Pedrosa’s and Ferreira Gullar’swritings from the s.

A similar departure from traditional ideas of art and itsauthorship in favour of radically participative processes canalso be observed in other avant-garde thinking of the time — achange that is of particular significance in light of the politicalsituation of Latin America then. Oiticica’s statements at thetime, centred on the ethical responsibility of the art producer,

seem to reflect this conjuncture.47 Looking back at , heprefers to speak of ‘extension’ instead of ‘dematerialisation’or ‘dissolution’. He notes:

The concept of New Objectivity does not seek, as manythink, to ‘dilute’ structures; but to give them a total meaning,overcoming the structuralism created by the propositionsof abstract art, making it grow on all sides, like a plant,

until it embraces an idea focused on the liberty of theindividual, furnishing him with propositions which are open for imaginative, interior exercise — this would be one ofthe ways, provided in this case by the artist, of de-alienatingthe individual, of making him objective in his socio-ethicalbehaviour. The very ‘making of the work’ would be violated,as would interior ‘elaboration’, since the real ‘making’would be the individual’s life-experience. I came, then,

to formulate the concept of the ‘supra-sensorial’.48

The means employed to this purpose, however, have nothingto do with an aesthetic of overpowering the viewer, whichcharacterises the Minimal art, Op art, Pop art and multimediaart popular at the time. The Cosmococas , in particular, address


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not the fleeting gaze of the thrill-seeker, but a long-terminhabitant who is open to contingent experience. For instance,Minimal art from the United States, which reached the apexof its international popularity around that time, confronts theviewer with his or her reified existence, through its geometric,abstract objects and its industrial aesthetic. Instead, theCosmococas , as did Oiticica’s Tropicália (; fig.)49 and Éden before, constitute sites for an intimate encounter or embrace.Compared to Minimal art, their physical qualities reveal thesame process of a metabolic shift from hard to soft materials thatthe Parangolés (—) and Bólides (—) already performvis-à-vis the plain wooden surfaces of Oiticica’s Neoconcretist

displays from around (for example, the Nuclei and thefirst Penetrável; fig. and respectively). From the first GlassBólides () on, a tendency towards materials such as powder,fabric, plastic, glass and liquids is dominant in Oiticica’s work.From he adds typography and appropriated media imagery.What both Minimalism and the Cosmococas share is an interestin how the viewer perceives: the challenge is patently to neitherlook passively nor ‘stare romantically’;50 this art clearly intends

to support neither sublimated commodity consumption noridentification with the values of high culture. Its ideal viewer isasked to engage, quite in keeping with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’sPhenomenology of Perception (), in a dialectic of touchingand being touched.

The difference that separates Oiticica’s later work from Minimalart and from Ferreira Gullar’s concept of a ‘purely sensorial

exaltation’ of the Neoconcrete ‘quasi-corpus’ is the following:51 the physical-perceptive relation to the object must be regardedas paradoxically both more literal and more metaphorical.The Cosmococas operate in a vastly cinematic fashion: whereasMinimal art, in the tradition of Enlightenment theatre, assumesthat a physical-affective transmission takes place between the


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objects on display and the subjects who look at them, Oiticica’sart involves the spectators in the visual narrative by meansof ‘tactile images’ and ‘supra-sensorial fields of perception’.52 At the same time, interpenetration between subject and object,rendered literal in the concept of the Penetrável, shifts themeaning of ‘objective’: whereas in Constructivism andConcretism this notion is linked to the category of the object,Oiticica links it to the subject, that is, to objective-subjectivemodes of perception. These are conceived as the starting pointfor a new notion of participation:

There are, however, two well-defined modes of participation:

one is that which involves ‘manipulation’ or ‘sensorial-corporal participation’; the other, that which involves a‘semantic’ participation. These two modes of participationseek, as it were, a fundamental, total, significant, non- fractioned participation, involving the two processes,that is, they are not reducible to the purely mechanical participation, but concentrate on new meanings, differing from pure transcendental contemplation.53

Such notions attest to an intellectually complex engagementwith the analysis of culture and society, and are closely connectedto the spirit of ‘artistic critique’54 and informed by vitalistphilosophy, Freudo-Marxism, phenomenology and media theory,as developed by authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche, HerbertMarcuse, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson and MarshallMcLuhan:

From the ‘playful’ propositions to those of the ‘act’, from the‘pure word’ semantic propositions to those of the ‘word inthe object’, in ‘narrative’ works and works of political orsocial protest, what is being sought is an objective mode of participation. This would be the internal search, inside and


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outside of the object, desired by the proposition of activespectator participation in the process: the individual towhom the work is addressed is invited to complete themeanings proposed by it — it is thus an open work. This process, as it has emerged in Brazil, is intimately connectedto that of the break-up of the picture, and the arrival at theobject, relief and anti-picture (narrative picture).55

Oiticica linked his concepts of a ‘new objectivity’ and ‘thesupra-sensorial’ to the negation of existing generic categories.Accordingly, he spoke of ‘non-painting’, ‘non-sculpture’, etc.He attempted to extend and ideally overcome given categories

for the sake of action/agency, language, chance, affect,intersubjective/sexual intensity and subjectivity. Combinedwith the period’s prevailing critique of a reductive understandingof the artwork, anti-formalist and anti-positivist conceptionsof the image were part of an emerging ‘climate of knowledge’.56 Within this climate, (media) visions about non-essentialist— and that is to say constructivist and at the same timecontingent — forms of subjectivation would emerge.

In light of this diversity of intellectual influences, it seemsfair to assume that Oiticica has as little in common with thetraditional image of the solitary genius in his ivory tower,isolated from discourse, as with the prevailing art criticismdominant at the time and the disciplinary limitationscircumscribing its horizons. We might even consider Oiticica’scharacteristic eclecticism as programmatic — a notion that

seems appropriate considering his deep admiration for Oswaldde Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófagico’ (‘Cannibalist Manifesto’,).57 In this sense, it is indicative that the terminology heuses in many of his writings between and is effectivelybased on diverse, if not opposing schools of thought, such as ErnstCassirer’s Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Phylosophy of


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Symbolic Forms , –) and Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice(Creative Evolution, ).58 Although Oiticica remains indebtedto Cassirer’s objective idealism, its influence over his thinkingis curbed by his enthusiastic reading of Marcuse’s versionof Critical Theory. Rogério Duarte brought Marcuse’s booksEros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud ()and One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of AdvancedIndustrial Society () to Oiticica’s attention in , whenboth lived in Jardim Botânico. The subsequent change in histhinking is apparent, for instance, in the shift from notionsof objectivity toward ideas associated with the affective andlibidinous. Marcuse, whom Duarte suspected of idealism as

early as ,59 was soon complemented by the rapidly growinginfluence of postcolonialism in the writings of Frantz Fanon,60 particularly during Oiticica’s time in New York, when, asCC5 Hendrix-War illustrates, he developed a profound fascinationwith the Black Panthers, connected in his mind to the media-theoretical construct of the Global Village. McLuhan’s hypothesesthat ‘with electric media Western man himself experiencesexactly the same inundation as the remote native’ and that

‘electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregsof industrial marketeers, the non-literate with the semiliterateand the postliterate’61 are no doubt a suitable scaffold for anon-hierarchical and emancipatory (re)organisation of classsocieties originally structured by racism, such as those of Braziland the US.

In late s Brazil, the arrival of the military regime propelled

the rise of a latent mood of general opposition in progressivecultural circles that finally coagulated in the performance andmedia strategies of the Tropicália movement.62 Still, beneaththe surface, the counterculture that developed was anything buthomogeneous. Participants soon drew distinctions on all sortsof levels; differences of opinion were argued out in personal


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interactions as well as in the name of entire movements.In cinema, for example, a fierce debate emerged between theexponents of the Cinema Novo and those of Cinema Marginal(D’Almeida counts among the latter). On an intellectual level,the exchange of arguments took place in numerous columnsand articles, and occupied a great deal of space in the journalO Pasquim . As many letters between and suggest,Oiticica played a particularly important role as a mediator after, when, with much of the Brazilian avant-garde scatteredinternationally and split over diverging ideologies, the linesof demarcation grew more complicated than the image of twoopposing camps would imply.63

During this time, underground magazines, such as O Paquim ,Presença and Flor do Mal, took on the important missionof providing a platform for the voices of exiles and bannedartists. They also facilitated forms of solidarity and continuitybeyond the idea of national cultural production. Against thisbackground, the use of technologically reproducible mediacharacteristic of the Block-Experiments in Cosmococa seems

intrinsically related to such transatlantic relationships. Theuse of writing, film and photography, for instance, incorporatedcirculation and distribution strategies: it was relatively easyfor Oiticica to send instructions, slides or soundtracks to Rioor São Paulo (or Paris or London) to put his quasi-cinemas intocirculation. Oiticica developed his works while in exile in moreor less direct exchange with the deterritorialised Braziliancounterculture. In an incessant stream of letters, he documented

his work in detail, sometimes enclosing entire series of slidesand photographs. In addition to his Héliotapes and Super footage(—),64 the film Agripina é Roma Manhattan (; fig.)and the quasi-cinemas of to offer clear evidence of howOiticica conceived his own art in an ongoing dialogue not justwith New Yorkers but also with Brazilian artists there and


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elsewhere: Neville D’Almeida, Júlio Bressane, Antonio Dias,Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, and many others. His notebookentries and other writings must be considered in this light, sincesome of them were intended for publication in Brazil. A few ofthe published texts, written in an unconventional variation onthe epistolary form, combine descriptions of works with essaysin social criticism and philosophy, as well as photographs thatdocument a life filled with drugs, queer sexuality, rock musicand severe financial difficulty.65 This form of collage illustratesthe persistence with which Oiticica attempted to connect lifeto art and politics in his work. Asked whether he missed Rio andthe favela on Morro de Mangueira during his time in New York,

Oiticica gave a characteristically blunt answer: ‘I cannot missMangueira because I myself am Mangueira. Longing is somethingpeople feel who’ve acquired a taste for something; by contrast,I’ve eaten the whole fruit.’66

In New York, Oiticica had a Guggenheim grant, but it expiredin . Despite financial constraints, he resolved to carryon in ‘Babylon’ — as he liked to call Manhattan — where he

had left off earlier with Tropicália and Éden .67 He worked ondeveloping the inhabitable structure Babylonests (—): abattery of several compartments or cabins with leisure facilities(mattresses, magazines, music, etc.) that had first appeared asNests in England in and was later shown as Ninhos in thegroup exhibition ‘Information’ at the Museum of Modern Artin .68 Ninhos , which consisted of cabin units, gainedpopularity after a scandal: during a guided tour a young couple

was discovered having sex in one of the compartments.69 Aswith previous works, such as PN — Gil and Caetano’s Tent (;fig.) — literally a tent installed at the Whitechapel Galleryas a refugee space with magazines and audio tapes of Tropicaliamusic — the Babylonests functioned as protective cocoons inwhich the experience of vulnerability and of being uprooted


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could be understood. Installed in his loft on the Lower East Side,they represented an ‘experimental practice of liberty’ turnedupside down, or, paraphrasing Oiticica’s Tropicalist call ‘toconsume consumption’, a programme of alienation from alienation .His letters evidence that Oiticica invited all kinds of differentpeople to stay in his Babylonests : Mário Pedrosa; Warhol starHolly Woodlawn; Waly Salomão; or his ‘Golden Boys’, youngmen he met in Central Park or around St Mark’s Place for sexualencounters.70 His loft in New York became a gathering placefor all sorts of more or less active dissidents and minor crooks,who participated in Oiticica’s day-and-night programme.This mixture shows that Oiticica did not see social and political

opposition as grounded in contrasts — ‘straight’ and ‘queer’,‘north’ and ‘south’, or ‘democracy’ and ‘dictatorship’. Histhinking instead moved in ‘subterraneous coalitions’ outsidethe ‘liberal’ and ‘fascist’ mainstreams.71

In the late s, Oiticica’s home in Rio de Janeiro’s JardimBotânico had already served as a downright clandestine meetingpoint where (middle-class) bohemians mingled with people from

Mangueira. Friends and acquaintances stayed overnight, andsome moved in for extended periods of time or even indefinitely.Among Oiticica’s temporary tenants in and were keyfigures of the Tropicália movement,72 such as Waly Salomão— Oiticica helped him edit Me segura qu’eu vou dar um troço (Hold Me Because I’m Going to Have a Fit , ), his first volumeof poetry, during that time73 — and Rogério Duarte. In the trio organised the Apocalipopótese event and a conference at

the MAM in Rio de Janeiro, ‘Amostragem da Cultura (Loucura)Brasileira’ (‘A Sample of Brazilian Culture (Madness)’), thatdrew polemical responses. Both Oiticica and Duarte also madeappearances in Rocha’s film Câncer (—; fig.), partiallyshot on the terrace of Oiticica’s house. The release of Salomão’spoetry book and Rocha’s Câncer in sets both works in the


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temporal vicinity of Oiticica’s quasi-cinema installations,one of which — Neyrótika — was presented in São Paulo inJune of .74 The fact that Rocha and Oiticica were neighboursin Manhattan in — as were Oiticica and Salomão in — illustrates the constant shifting and rotation of personalwork and spaces that is characteristic for most of the Brazilianavant-garde productions of those years.

Even if he called New York ‘the only place in the worldthat interests me’, once he arrived Oiticica was thoroughlydisappointed by the contemporary art scene, and truly suspiciousof the liberal narratives of social progress and the distinctive

chic of the metropolitan bohemia. A letter to Guy Brett fromMarch states: ‘i don’t know what is going on here, but thereis such a bourgeois art scene, conformism and reactionarismgoing on, unbelievable’.75 As another letter to the film-makerIvan Cardoso shows, Oiticica’s assessment is ultimatelynegative, and went from the specific (Paul Morrissey’s Factoryproductions) to the general (the wider cultural context):

Trash [] is the name of Paul Morrissey’s film producedby Andy Warhol: commercial: but beautiful: it is thedefinitive commercialisation of the underground: […]all of Park Avenue is currently asking: have you alreadyseen the film Trash?: thinking that they are hip: and feelinglike allies of the marginal: but they are just raising marginalactivity to a bourgeois level: this reactionary way of doingthings is fully accepted in Trash: which doesn’t change

anything about Morrissey’s fascinating sensitivity.76

Oiticica, who had been a great admirer of the first Warhol/Morrissey production, Chelsea Girls , in , by hadreached the conclusion that the selling-out of New York’s queerunderground had long begun — a tendency he was experiencing


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with the Tropicália movement around the same time, and wasopenly upset about.77 But this was not the case with Jack Smith,who, he believed, remained resistant to ‘neoconservative’commercialisation: ‘Jack Smith’s thing is quite different.’78

Oiticica’s encounter with Smith was crucial to the genesisof the quasi-cinemas.79 According to several letters, the first‘living performance’ event Oiticica attended was Claptailismof Palmola Economic Spectacle in early , presented inSmith’s loft in the ‘Plaster Foundation’ at Greene Street.Carlos Basualdo finds here the earliest occurrences of the term‘quasi-cinema’. In a letter to Waly Salomão that Oiticica drafted

in April , we read:

it began at ten-thirty, three hours later, and he spent halfan hour on the first three [slides] alone: he moved aroundthe screen in such a way that the slides were cut upon projection, and he shifted the placement of the projectorto give each one just the right cut: the rest of the slide spilledover into the environment: incredible; the expectation and

anxiety that overcame me were worth it: it was a kindof quasi-cinema, for me just as much cinema as you canimagine: the same complex simplicity that you could feel ingodard: more than that, in my view: the images, the durationof each slide on the screen, etc., was brilliant and extremelyimportant: sound track of AM radio music… Latinmalagueña music, incredible things, noises: telephone,cars in traffic, etc.; it ended at one in the morning: I went

away transformed! 80

For Oiticica, Smith represented nothing less than ‘a kind ofAntonin Artaud of cinema’.81 In his text ‘Block-Experimentsin Cosmococa — Program in Progress’ he would go even furtherand declare Smith the precursor of the Cosmococas :


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for me JACK SMITH was its precursor: he extracted from his cinema not a naturalistic vision imitatingappearance but a sense of fragmented narrative mirrorshatters: the slides displaced ambience by a non-specifictime duration and by the continuous relocation of the projector framing and reframing the projection onwalls-ceiling-floor: random juxtaposition of sound track(records): these BLOCKS the first five of which were programmed by NEVILLE — I replace for me IMAGE’s problems consumed by TROPICÁLIA (etc.) by a levelof SPECTACLE (PROJECTION-PERFORMANCE)towards which I am attracted through NEVILLE’s

cinema experience…82

Yet, we may add, there is a crucial distinction betweenOiticica and D’Almeida’s Cosmococas and Smith’s practice.Smith saw other avant-garde underground film-makers(for example, Jonas Mekas or Warhol and Morrissey) ascorrupt accomplices of consumerist society and the cultureindustry, and decided in to not complete or distribute

any of his film projects.83 The footage and slides he nonethelesscontinued to produce and accumulate were presented in‘living performances’ or ‘live-film’ sessions. Usually stagedas semi-public events at his loft, these performances wereaccompanied by seemingly incoherent alternating slide andfilm projections, and soundtracks produced by playing oldvinyl and shellac records more or less at random. The filmfootage was likewise spontaneously pasted together from

whatever was at hand, and disassembled again after ithad passed through the clattering projector. Yet Smith’sconcept of live film depended on the artist himself as themaster of ceremonies — a role that, according to Oiticica,Smith enjoyed playing.


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By comparison, Oiticica and D’Almeida’s participativeconception of the Cosmococas prescribes a structure that ispositively contrary to Smith’s: it is modular, and thereforerepeatable, through and through. As Beatriz Scigliano Carneirodescribes it, each of the Block-Experiments in Cosmococa consistsof a ‘series of slide projections […], of a soundtrack, texts, aproposition for public participation in a given environmentand a set of photos and posters — reproduced from the slides —to be sold separately’.84 The duration of each sequence, set atapproximately twenty minutes, may be ‘replayed’ as many timesas desired. Given their modular nature, they may also be relocatedand re-staged in private settings. Still, something like Smith’s

‘arbitrary editing’ appears in the Cosmococas as well, althoughhere in the act, captured on celluloid, of cutting the cocaine.This act attests to the simultaneously literal and semantic natureof the substance, its being a medium. Together with the loopedaudio tapes, the rotating slides represent a machine-like formof permutation dependent on the particular arrangement andsequence that can be played through an infinite number oftimes, bringing out the contrast between Oiticica and

D’Almeida’s vision of a non-stop cinema and Smith’s spontaneouslive film. That vision may be described as radically participativein that the duration, particular composition and progressionare left to the participants to decide. It makes perfect sensethat the Cosmococas be distributed in the form of sets forsale or given away. The dissemination and circulation of theCosmococas , and the repeatability of ‘private performances’,create conditions in which the norm of the standardised

feature-length programme and the hypnotic spectator-spectaclerelation may be ultimately overcome. As with Tropicália ,the Cosmococas aim at the dissolution of the powers of orderrepresented by the prevailing regime of space and time,promising to establish closer solidarity among a scatteredinternational community.


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. Entanled Genres, Entanled Media:ropicália , CC2 , CC4 , CC6 It may come as no surprise that Marshall McLuhan’s convictionthat ‘the electric implosion […] compels commitment andparticipation, quite regardless of any “point of view”’,85 inspiredOiticica’s ongoing reflections on the potentials of aesthetic andpolitical participation.86 The fascination with the (utilitarian)aesthetic dimension of technologies of sound, image and writingsuch as the telephone, the gramophone, the tape recorder,photography, film and video cameras, playback devices, type-writers and fax machines left a profound mark on the forms ofproduction and iconographies of the post- and neo-avant-gardes,

including the Cosmococas . We might accordingly speculatewhether the motives behind Oiticica’s dissociation fromthe modernism that had been elevated to the rank of nationaldoctrine in the s might have had to do not only with(cultural) politics and major events in his personal life,87 but also with the omnipresence and expansion of media. Forthis new field, the erosion of the concept of media-specificityunderstood along formalist lines was as important as the

emphatic employment of media.

In the general context of the avant-gardes of the s and s(Fluxus, Pop art, Minimalism, Conceptualism or Anti-Form),this process is tangible also in methods such as serialismand the adoption of (anti-)compositional principles ofsynaesthesia,88 chance or aleatory processes and allegoricalmontages. The category of the ‘new’ or of ‘invention’ is, in

such artistic practices, no longer tied to the production ofconventional objects, and these instead appear as a contingenteffect at the intersections between heterogeneous genres, mediaand techniques. In the context of late s Brazil, such anintersection is evident in the fact that Caetano Veloso named hisinfluential song ‘Tropicália’ after Oiticica’s installation


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from , at the suggestion of the photographer Luis CarlosBarreto, who considered it to have a strong affinity to Oiticica’swork.89 Oiticica’s use of a television to continuously show liveprogrammes in this installation should be considered againstthe backdrop of the importance televised and radio-streamedmusic festivals had for the consolidation of the period’s socialand youth movements — Tropicália.90

As Celso Favaretto details in his book Tropicália: Alegoria, Alegria (), it was not until Tropicália’s sharp impact on Braziliansociety under the military regime that avant-garde artistsof heterogeneous backgrounds, such as Veloso and Gilberto Gil,

Glauber Rocha, the de Campo brothers and Oiticica, joinedforces in a common cultural project of oppositional solidarity.91 Veloso’s and Gil’s participation at the Festival de MúsicaPopular Brasileira in and Veloso’s solo LP Tropicália andthe collective album Tropicália: Ou Panis et Circenses in successfully fused the sound of the electric guitar and the powerof the international protest and youth movements with thenational distribution system of mass media. The televised music

and stage performances of Veloso, Gil, Gal Costa, Nara Leão, OsMutantes, Tom Zé and others functioned henceforth as a sharedpoint of reference not only for a new form of revolt between popand politics, but also for exponents of the marginalised Afro-Brazilian and indigenous cultures, oppositional film-making,poetry and the plastic arts. In an interview from he gavetogether with music lyricist Capinam, Oiticica would state thatthe blurring of boundaries between genres and media has to be

considered one of the key reasons for Tropicália’s revolutionarysuccess, adding, ‘I don’t care about the integration of the arts,I simply don’t see where there’s a difference between them.’ 92

Claims such as ‘A pureza é um mito’ (‘Purity is a myth’)constituted an affront to the formalism of, say, Clement


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Greenberg, which dominated international criticism wellinto the s. The same was true of the integration of ‘kitsch’(Greenberg’s term for the ‘products of mass-media culture’),manifest, for example, in the iconic reproduction of Marilynin CC3 Maileryn ,93 highlighting that the concomitant blurringand dissolution of categories of high and low culture arerelevant for the Cosmococas as well. As Oiticica writes in‘Block-Experiments in Cosmococa — program in progress’:

…something had to give: something had to happen: TVHITCHCOCK’s THE BIRDS is the first great TeleVisingof the natural film sequence to which we were accustomed:

then G-O-D-A-R-D: how can anyone muse over the ‘art ofcinema’ yet ignore GODARD’s meta-linguistic questioningof the quintessence of filmmaking?: as with MONDRIANin PAINTING there came to be a before and after GODARD:in ten years he took the limit consequences which had nevereven occurred to other filmmakers: meanwhile withinthe plastic art things were much slower (to the point ofno interest even): CAGE continued to open the fresh air of

INVENTION: GODARD dissected cinema-language witha checking and multi-evaluation only comparable to TVand ROCK phenomena.94

Besides an affinity with McLuhan’s approach to media,the preference reflected above for works situated beyond theclassical division of artistic genres or enclosed national contextsexemplifies the influence Jean-Luc Godard and John Cage had

over many artists of that time.95 Cage’s influence

hélio oiticica and neville d'almeida, block experiments in cosmococa, program in progress

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