Schober

Anna Schober

Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés: Body-Events,

Participation in the Anti-Doxa of the Avant-Garde

and Struggling Free From It1

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Anna Schober

Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés: Body-Events,

Participation in the Anti-Doxa of the Avant-Garde and

Struggling Free from It1

Beginning in the early 1960s, the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica chose “the salad of life, the rubbing of bodies” (“Creleisure” 133) as the starting point for his work. In this sense, his series of wearable multicoloured textile-creations called “Parangolés”2 are related to the various activities of dance, or at least to very animated walking, but also to the act of demonstrating. We could say that the parangolés provoke variations on a stalking directed at the public. Furthermore, the orange, yellow, red or multicoloured forms, partially embroidered with symbols and characters, invite intense actions, such as swinging, rustling, blowing up, folding up, and whirling around. These “situations,” in the form of clothes or capes, thus need a body to fill them out, to use them, and to set them in motion. When they are uninhabited, the parangolés are nothing more than floppy, sadly drooping covers. Only if they have a body to fill them in and other bodies to watch them can they become what Hélio Oiticica calls a “link between ‘creativity’ and ‘connectivity.’” One and the same name, parangolé, conceals quite different things: they can be very simple calf-long, monotone orange capes, worn around the shoulders and tied at the neck with a string or creations of voluminous stiffly-draped webs of cloth, or they can even be made of plastic (yellow, orange, or transparent), such that, when they are worn, they form bulges and deep folds, and when someone dances in one it creates a multicolored, shimmering spectacle. On yet another occasion, we are confronted with

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sculptural, three-dimensional, barrel-like textile covers; or another time, we are dealing with multilayered wraps, one over another, which are made partly of upholstery and partly made out of colored (red, green) textiles, but sometimes also out of gunny sack, paper, or wicker, and whose inner layers are sometimes embroidered with phrases such as “incorporo a revolta.”

These arrangements, made by Oiticica since 1964/65 under the name parangolé, should, according to the artist’s stated intention, bring the following together: collective participation—that is, the wearing of the clothes/capes and dancing in/with them (the melting of bodies to collective-bodies); social and aesthetic protest (the participation in a transgressive orgy); playful participation (in environments, objects, other bodies, or a collective-body) and a mystically-enhanced experience (the uniting of my body with those of my mythical figures and profane “gods”). The spectator becomes a “participator” in these arrangements and the artwork becomes a so-called “environment-structure” in which the participants find a space through the activity of “wearing-watching”: someone puts on one of these works and sees what is happening to another work that somebody else is inhabiting. In this way, parangolés are appropriated by their wearers; the environment is also transformed in a specific way—it becomes a stage for dancing, demonstrating, and the performing of non-everyday movements. Oiticica is not interested in dance as a human expression or an “ego-trip”, but as the “inventive liberation of the capacities of play” (“Parangolé Synthesis” 166).

Briefly, the program of the parangolés is to implement the “programmes of the circumstantial.” With the aid of these multicolored textile creations, there should be an event, an interruption of the usual course of things, which Oiticica calls an “object-event,” a “meetings-event,” and an “amoment” (“Parangolé Synthesis” 165). These events, too, are conceived by him as coming from the body, for example when Oiticica gives the advice: “amoment breast-feed the moment.” These events should not, according to Oiticica, be celebrated for and in themselves, but their potential for the appropriation of places, objects, ideas and bodies should be highlighted:

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I find an ‘object’, or an ensemble of objects made up of parts or otherwise, and take possession of it as something which has, for me, a particular significance, that is, I transform it into a work: it might be a can containing oil, which is set alight [...] I proclaim it a work, take possession of it: for me, the object has acquired an autonomous structure—I find in it something fixed, a signifier which I want to expose to meaning; this work will later take on a number of meanings, which augment one another, which add up through general participation. This comprehension of the malleable meaning of each work is what explodes the pretension of wanting to ground it in a set of orders: moral, aesthetic, or otherwise (“Position and Programme” 100).

Besides Hélio Oiticica, several other artists in the Rio de Janeiro or the Sao Paolo of the 1960s were also busy making similar interventions in collective body-structures. For example, the artists Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape created works that, like those made by Oiticica, cannot find a place in the world without the participation of the audience. In 1968, Lygia Pape invited men, women and children in public spaces in Rio de Janeiro to put their heads through holes cut in an enormous (98 x 98 feet) white cloth, such that they became separated from the bodies: their eyes could no longer see how their hands and legs were moving. At the same time the walking, whirling, and dancing of those bodies displaced the mathematical order of the pattern of holes. As early as 1963, Lygia Clark had made a related sculpture (which she remade later in a slightly different way): she encouraged “participators” to link with each other and to get into a chain with one another through elastic bands tied around their waists and ankles. Here too the movement of one participant influenced those of the others. And in 1983 she wrote a kind of manifesto in the form of a poem:

We are the proposers: We are the mould, it is up to you to breathe the meaning of our existence into it. We are the proposers: Our proposition is that of a dialogue. Alone we


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do not exist. We are at your mercy. We are the proposers: We have buried the work of art as such and we call upon so that thought may survive through your action. We are the proposers: We do not propose you with either the past nor the future, but the now (“We Are The Proposers” 233).

In of all these examples the artist sees her/his function in the formation of a whole culture; the audience should not figure as passive spectator but should share in the transformations as active creators. Along with Ferreira Gullar, Antonio Diaz, Rubens Gerchman, Pedro Escosteguy or Mona Gorovitz, Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape are part of a collective project that Oiticica called the “New Objectivity.” They were Influenced by the modernist movement 22, established around the writer José Oswald de Andrade, which produced work in all fields of the arts in the 1920s, as well as drawing upon the Brazilian sociology and pedagogy of that time). From the mid-1950s, these artists started developing concepts of participation for artists and spectators and turning toward popular art forms—Samba-Schools, but also other dance-places such as Ranchos or Frevos, popular festivals, football matches, and other mass events. All these places and related activities became starting points for a collective art and were proclaimed as fields of agitation for a new populist Brazilian art. For Oiticica and his comrades, the “New Objectivity” thus describes not a clearly defined group within the art world, but a broader social movement that engineers collective transformations: “Today, the phenomenon of the avant-garde in Brazil is no longer the concern of a group coming from an isolated elite, but a far-reaching cultural issue, of great amplitude, tending towards collective solutions” (”General Scheme of the New Objectivity” 116f).

The “mystical” loading of objects and gestures Hélio Oiticica’s parangolés differ markedly from ordinary

contemporary dance and demonstration clothes; they are reminiscent of the draped capes we know from pictures of wandering pilgrims or itinerant workers who always carry their sleeping-bags and their raincoats with them. The orange-

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yellow textiles and the drapes also call to mind clothes of the Hari Krishna monks who populated European and US-American streets in the 1970s and 1980s. But the material and the movement-following “expressive” bulges and folds of the parangolés quickly dispel any connotation of “monkhood” or “pilgrimage.” They suggest a more profane use and call to mind, for example, opulent, eccentric Brazilian carnival-costumes. Nevertheless, Oiticica’s textile covers seem to function as a kind of “bridging object,” which can enable a mythic communal experience to be turned towards the earth.

With the parangolés, Hélio Oiticica creates garments that seek to manipulate the very specific structure of perceiving and believing that emerged with modernity. The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom also describes such modern rituals as necessary transformations of earlier religious rituals: “people were incapable of being alone in the world. No sooner had they buried the wretched god of the Jews and Christians than they had to go traipsing about the streets with red flags or in sloppy saffran sack dresses. Clearly the Middle Ages would never end” (117). Nooteboom here creates a relation between the death of God and the so-to-speak “mystical” loading of objects and gestures—more specifically “clothing objects.” In this way, he shows that with the advent of modernity an unsurpassable gulf opened up vis-à-vis traditions, as well as the religious and customary social structures that accompanied them. But for him this does not imply that there is no longer any ecstasy, any mysticism, or any energy of belief such that these could continue to exist in a different way. Details of the earthly world (Nooteboom mentions red flags and the orange-coloured Hari Krishna monks’ clothes, but these could also be images, faces, gestures, or any other detail of the world of appearances) can become “passages” for us that set us in motion and transform us. When such an event of perception, such a “mystical” collision with details of the earthly world, happens, the “participators” experience moments of belief, or find something that seems worth investing in and becoming doggedly involved in. Some of the objects, clothes, gestures or faces can thus fall outside of the daily stream of impressions and begin to embody the experience of a “more.” It is characteristic of this modern form of


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experience, however, that such an experience of a “more” needs objects, things, details taken from the world of appearance; the participants need to clash with an object, a body, or a sound in order to grasp such an event. Again Cees Nooteboom writes: “What a strange animal was man, always somehow needing objects, made ‘things with which to facilitate his journey to the twilit realms of the higher world’” (112). Such transformations of our approach to things, beliefs, and perceptions as described by Nooteboom—but also as described by other thinkers of modernity, such as Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel or Hannah Arendt—are always characterized by a huge regional “non-simultaneousness” (Ernst Bloch). History happens through a multitude of parallel, emerging—sometimes crossing—“histories”, which pass on continuities and lead to ruptures.

The parangolés are situated in just such a transitional area between religious-mythical rituals and profane ones, something Hélio Oiticica repeatedly refers to in his theoretical reflections. According to Oiticica, in Brazil in the second half of the 20th century, dance transformed itself from an incarnation of the mythical to a collective, playful, profane intensity: “DANCE represented for me aspiring to myth, but, more important, was already in-corporation today it is nothing more than corporate climax” (Parangolé Synthesis 166). With the parangolés, he wanted to offer a concrete, tangible, wearable “situation” that could enable such an intense experience of absorption into a collective. Textile covers in the form of clothes that distinguish themselves from usual ways of dressing momentarily become a starting point for the achievement of security in a collective, which is increasingly absent in everyday life. This missing fullness of experience is repeatedly described by Oiticica as “non-fragmented,” “bodily,” “concrete,” and “mythical.” The parangolés offer a “NON-VERBAL corporal proposition taken to a level of open experimentalism absorption of time: end of fragmented display: to speak of cosmos should not imply something extra-concrete but the adaptation of power to invent the NON-FRAGMENTED” (Parangolé Synthesis 166). In putting on such textile covers the wearer can, according to Hélio Oiticica, transform himself/herself into an incarnation of a “new life” or of “revolt” and so become absorbed into the fullness of non-fragmentary collectivity.

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Nevertheless, Oiticica contrasts his parangolés with the idea of a “return” or of the praxis of a celebration of the “mystical.” For him, the fracture that separates modern experience and modern perception from tradition and inherited authority is insurmountable. The modern experience of the mythical no longer relates (as tradition experience did) to the hereafter, but to the playful, concrete situations of an earthly world. Parangolé is “not reducible to MYTHICAL NITTY-GRITTY because it is PLAY-CONCRETION PARANGOLÈ-SYNTHESIS is non-nostalgic for mythical states to dress in the cape is c o n c r e t i o n PERFORMANCE DANCE <PARANGOLÉ-PLAY>” (Parangolé Synthesis 167).

Covers for collective body-existences“God is dead” means, above all, that God no longer

has a body. In modernity, we are not dealing with a world that is a spatialization of God, but with a world of bodies. A world composed of places assigned by the gods became, as Jean-Luc Nancy has shown, initially a world in which engineers and conquerors, the satraps of the disappeared gods, constructed “natural cartographies” of endless spaces and bodies (54f). And that leads, through a plural enfolding marked by “non-simultaneousness,” to an always unforeseeable, unplannable mingling of bodies which arise, which clash with each other, but which also pass each other by.

In speaking about the body, one refers to a range of things: for example, one’s own lived body, the perceived bodies of Others, the demonstrative bodies we find in advertising or in educational discourses, the ideal bodies of our imagination, etc. The body is thus not something that is fixed once and for all, but a more or less graspable, heavy extension and exhibition, or what we could call an ‘existence-place.’ We are always dealing with very different bodies, even if we use our ‘own body.’ Because it is this ‘own body’ that is perceived as alien—at one time as imperfect, heavy, bulky, and in the need of perfection, care, nutrition, improvement, or trimming; at another time as desirable, beautiful, stately, or full of energy. In comparison to this ‘own body,’ the bodies of Others whom we meet as friends, at work, or whom we see in the media, are


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for us proper bodies; whilst our own body always extends itself in various directions, we can use this body of the Others as a demonstrative body: in order to learn how to move, how to dress, how to love, how to flirt, how to talk, and how to decide. And such superimposition of images entangles us with bodies such that there are also “ideal bodies” as they appear outside of the everyday processes in which we are involved. And these ideal bodies then point to everything lacking in our own everyday, mostly insufficient bodies, which are so difficult to grasp.

‘Modern bodies’ thus also means bodies trained in a novel way—that is, by way of different instruments and new approaches. Some of the body-training instruments of the 20th century, for example, are the enormous quantity of images transmitted by diverse media, but also places designed in new ways (streets, suburbs, working-places, shopping malls, leisure- and transition-places), transport-tools (trains, cars, airplanes), as well as changed ways of dressing, eating, or caring for our bodies. All of these training processes, which constitute the care of the self, processes of identification and repulsion, acquire a place in bodies, a “here” or a “look.” It is through such events and the processes of identification and repulsion that are inherent to them that the articulation of bodies takes place—that is, a bringing-forth of a that (that has a body or that is a body), although the sense of insecurity cannot be completely shaken off, that there, where we are, one can see only quivering shadows. Moreover, our bodies are not only “signified bodies,” but are in themselves also seen, just as they make references and respond.

With his parangolés, Hélio Oiticica conceives of interventions in the specific collective bodies that formed in Brazil in the 1960s. In this as well as in related dwelling-works, for example, his “nests” (“Babylonnests” or “non-repressive leisure places”), Oiticica wants, above all, to trigger a specific displacement of body training. Oiticica confronts the intensified and transformed body-training structures in Brazil in the 1960s with specific clothing-accommodation-situations, which trigger different perceptions and stimulate non-everyday actions. Like all of the other artists and intellectuals of the New Objectivity, he was in search of images and of an idiom capable of using

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the energies of reform that were at work in Brazil in the 1960s. He also sought to translate these energies into movements that were more faithful to the utopian projects of crowds than were those strategies which found their expression in the inauguration of the new capital (Brasilia), as a demonstration of modernist development and competent self-rule. For this reason, he repeatedly drew attention to the fact that the act of dressing or of nest-accommodation already implies a “corporeal-expressive transmutation of oneself” (“Notes on the Parangolé” 93). In this way the initiation in an experience of “creative perception”, which can also influence the usual comportment of the viewers, occurs: “Perform should no longer be preform but simultaneous action at a level of process” (Parangolé Synthesis 166). Oiticica thus sees the parangolés (similar to the simultaneously emerging “nests”) as “initiation-clothes” or “initiation-accommodation.” Such creations and the activities they can provoke should trigger a process he also calls “CRELEISURE,” which consists of the making of a world that “creates itself through our leisure, in and around it, not as an escape, but as the apex of human desires” (Creleisure 136). This world emerging through “CRELEISURE” could then enter into a struggle with the cultural, ethnic, social and political conformity he recognized in Brazil in the 1960s.

To formulate these tactics, Hélio Oiticica took on José Oswald de Andrades’ concept of a search for a new national characterization of Brazilian culture, which he also called “Anthropophagy” or “Tropicália.” By “Tropicália,” Oiticica (like Andrade) understood the reduction of exterior influences and the creation of a constructive collective will that starts from one’s own peculiarities: “Here, social underdevelopment signifies, culturally, the search for national characterisation, which specifically translates itself in the first premise, constructive will” (General Scheme of the New Objectivity 110). In this way, processes of collective participation could overcome cultural colonialism and at the same time become absorbed in a “Super-Anthropophagy.”

In his parangolés or his nidos, Hélio Oiticica also deals with the fact that we do not acquire contours by being alone with ourselves (alone we disperse into various psychic entities), but only by stepping into the world do become identified as a body. This also shows us that our identity is purely relational because


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if we put on the parangolés and move and act with them inside a collective, we transform both ourselves and the collective creations in which we are participating. Thus, we visibly form a collective will out of contradictory activities and movements, which enter into struggle with other collective bodies. Oiticica writes:

My entire evolution, leading up to the formulation of the Parangolé, aims at this magical incorporation of the elements of the work as such, in the whole life-experience of the spectator, whom I now call ‘participator’. It is as if there were an ‘establishment’ and a ‘recognition’ of an inter-corporeal space created by the work upon its unfolding (Notes on the Parangolé 93).

If we appear with other parangolé-wearers and form a collective body, two things occur: on the one hand, our body receives its meaning as an acting, individuated subject (a parangolé meaning). On the other hand, the individuated bodies of this collective body also belong to each other—the “community body” finds its place in all those bodies that constitute it, although no one body is able to control the community-body completely. It is indeed possible to make a start inside this structure, but others are needed to carry on what has been and those others will necessarily transform things. In relation to such processes, Cees Nooteboom talks of a “chemical compound of fate, chance and design.” For him this combination produces “a chain of events that produc(es) another chain of events, which were said to be inevitable, or random, or to happen according to a secret plan that was not known to us, though by now things were getting pretty esoteric” (11). Hélio Oiticica, however, places such processes very explicitly in the context of a global experience, as when he states:

We play with SIMULTANEITY and CONTIGUITY and the multitude of possibilities of individual experience which lie within the collective-mind of MCLUHAN’s GLOBAL VILLAGE: it is not a question of preaching (or its contemporary equivalent ‘turning on’ which should not be ‘to convert’ someone into our own system of beliefs (as a mode of seeing-feeling-living)) it’s more a

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question of mutual experimental incorporation through the play of simultaneous permeating experiences: as in [...] DANCING BODIES reeling and writhing never in one place long enough to form a ‘point of view’ (“Block-Experiments in Cosmococa—program in progress” 181).

The “injury” of the avant-garde tradition and participation in it In several texts related to the parangolés and similar

works, Oiticica repeatedly highlights his difference from the artistic tradition. He rejects customary metaphysical, intellectual, and aesthetic positions, in which the viewer is not raised to the level of “creation.” For him, no particular idea or aesthetic model is to be imposed, but through artworks, such as parangolé, the viewers gain the opportunity to participate in collective action, whereby they can find something to inspire them to realize something. Oiticica also mentions the possibility that the participating bodies may also meet and find nothing. In contrast to other avant-garde manifestos, there is equality here in the relation between author and receiver. The viewer is not somebody who does not understand, who is roused to outrage, who hates or laughs, but somebody who understands, who sympathizes, who loves, and becomes enthusiastic. With this new relationship, Oiticica draws a very clear distinction to other avant-garde groups like the Dadaists, the surrealists, the situationists or the Cinéma Lettriste, who, regardless of their differences, argued that with the aid of certain aesthetic tactics, such as montage, alienation, or parody, the audience could be “cultivated” and turned in a very specific direction—be it by using tricks for the “piercing” of “false” images and ideologies, for gaining a “truer,” “more just,” or “more emancipated” view, or for refreshing a perception that has become neutralized by force of habit. Oiticica distinguishes the “New Objectivity” from the elitist gesture of this tradition, for example, when he says:

‘New Objectivity’, being a state, and not a dogmatic, aestheticist movement (as Cubism was, for instance, or any of the other ‘isms’ constituted as a ‘unity of thought’), is more an ‘arrival’, made up of multiple tendencies,


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characterised, significantly, by the ‘absence of unity of thought’, but unified nevertheless by a general verification of these multiple tendencies grouped into general tendencies (General Scheme of the New Objectivity 110).

The parangolés show us that bodies that are usually fixed in a position can become illuminated, educated, freed, or shocked—because otherwise they would not understand and realize—when they are moved to a place where they can participate and act inside a collective. Oiticica thus wants to initiate a displacement of bodies—from a place where they are passive viewers to a place where they can act and use everything they have at hand:

The crucial point of these ideas [...] is that the artist’s task is not to deal in modifications in the aesthetic field, as if this were a second nature, an object in itself, but to seek to erect, through participation, the foundations of a cultural totality, engendering deep transformations in man’s consciousness which, from being a passive spectator of events, would begin to act upon them using the means at hand: revolt, protest, constructive work, to achieve this transformation, etc. (General Scheme of the New Objectivity 117).

And it is precisely because these interventions imply a displacement of bodies that they can be called “political.” Since, as Jacques Rancière has shown, an action is “political” when it breaks sensual forms, for example, by removing a body from the place to which it has been assigned or by changing the definition of a place. For him, subjectivization does not create subjects ex nihilo, but transforms identities defined by a “natural order” of distribution of functions and creates in entities an experience of struggle. He writes:

A political subject is not a group that ‘becomes aware’ of itself, finds it voice, imposes its weight on society. It is an operator that connects and disconnects different areas, regions, identities, functions, and capacities existing in the configuration of a given experience. […] Any

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subjectification is a disidentification, removal from the naturalness of a place, the opening up of a subject space where anyone can be counted since it is the space where those of no account are counted, where a connection is made between having a part and having no part.3

With his parangolés, Hélio Oiticica opens up just such a subject-space, in which everyone can count himself/herself as belonging, and can act collectively simply by wearing such textile creations and by dancing and demonstrating.

Nevertheless, Oiticica also inscribes the New Objectivity in a tradition of the avant-garde. The artist is not simply participator among other participators, but becomes an “initiator” and “creator” again. Thus, for example, he maintains: “What matters here, now, is to try to determine the influence of such action on the spectator’s general behaviour; could this be an initiation into perceptive-creative structures of the environmental world” (Notes on the Parangolé 96)? And elsewhere he explicitly calls the artist a “modifier of consciousness” (General Scheme of the New Objectivity 118) or a “proposer,” an “entrepreneur,” and “educator” (119). Here we are again dealing with unequal bodies; the audience is repeatedly removed to a position from which they do not understand on their own, where they don’t know the new language and need to be taught a new practice. The artist becomes the announcer of this new practice as well as their teacher. Hélio Oiticica’s theory thus oscillates between a struggling free from the “thesis of a politics of form” and a reiteration of this thesis.4 This theory participates in the classical discourse of emancipation, but it is in search of a new definition of emancipation. Oiticica articulates his position mostly as that of a searcher—he is in the process of changing the gestures of emancipation and of artistic creation:

The artist’s work, in whatever fixed aspects it may have, only takes meaning and completes itself through the attitude of each participator—it is he who attributes the corresponding signifiers to it: something is anticipated by the artist, but the attributed signifiers are unanticipated possibilities, generated by the


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work—and this includes non-participation among its innumerable possibilities (Position and Program 100).

That this project is bound up with the classical project of the avant-garde shows itself in that in this theory certain strands of the tradition are brusquely rejected as outdated. But unlike in other avant-garde manifestos, it is not the naturalist or realist tradition that is rejected, but certain lines of tradition within the avant-garde itself—for instance, cubism. We find a vehement rejection of “Pop and Op”, but also of “Nouveau Réalisme” and “Primary Structures (Hard Edge).” At the same time, other traditions of the avant-garde are found to be akin to his own artistic work: the Dadaists, but also John Cage and Jack Smith are called as allies, and Nietzsche is cited as part of the New Objectivity’s philosophical background.

The avant-garde narrative of the New Objectivity constitutes itself by problematizing the narration of certain traditions and that of competing contemporary groups, by questioning their legitimacy and by confronting the public with new demands. At the same time, Oiticica rejects the classical avant-garde position of announcing a “new art” and of demolishing traditional forms. He wants to formulate the old problem of inventing a “new art” and of pulling down cultures in a new way and arrives at the following conclusion:

The correct formulation would be to ask: what propositions, promotions and measures must one draw upon to create a wide-ranging condition of popular participation in these new open propositions, in the creative sphere to which these artists elected themselves. Upon this depends their survival, and that of the people in this sense (General Scheme of the New Objectivity 119).

With parangolé, as with all the other works of that period, such as babylonnest, Oiticica works against the code. Deciding to do something unknown instead of something known (the usual life of an artist), he also in a certain way injures himself.5 There is violence at play here, which is violence regarding one’s own body. Accordingly, Oiticica speaks of a violation: a

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violation of [...] ‘being’, as an ‘‚individual’ in the world, distinct and yet ‘collective’, towards one of ‘participator’ as a motor centre, nucleus, not only ‘motor’, but principally ‘symbolic’, inside the ‘structure-work’. This is the real metamorphosis which takes place there in the inter-relation spectator/ work (or participator/ work) (Notes on the Parangolé 93).

At the same time he invites the spectators to enjoy a specific freedom which is the freedom of the author of the parangolés. He invites them to participate in a collective orgy of transgression, but he concedes to them the possibility of remaining, of not being moved, or of becoming entangled in gestures of refusal, of revolt, or of laughter during such participation. But then again, suddenly, he resurrects himself and announces an anticipated or to some extent already known “new life.” In such moments, he poses as artist, teacher, martyr, and/or politician who pursues calculation, seduction, self-sacrifice, and persuasion and who thereby lays his deeds before an audience in order to experience a sense of his work (again different, new, or reciprocated).

Event = MASCULINEvent: FEMININEvent Since the beginning of the 1960s what has been at

the centre of Hélio Oiticica’s aesthetic research is his analysis of the “event.” Accordingly parangolé, for him, is an “object-event” (Parangolé-Synthesis 165) that is primarily connected to the possibilities of play. But he also has other names for this experience that springs from everyday life, such as a “magical experience,” the “finding” of “something,” or “communion with the environment.” Thereby this event is linked for him to pleasure, with a bodily experience which happens in absolutely contingent ways, for example when he advises: “amoment breast-feed the moment: don’t elevate it to the categories of myth or of aesthetic preciousness” (Parangolé-Synthesis 165). This event can thus be the accidental contact of body zones, or a sexual touch. During an event, one is entangled with somebody or with something, and at the same time one defines himself/herself: one differentiates oneself from the ones and one


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binds up with the others. Accordingly the event can, as stated by Oiticica, become MASCULINEvent and FEMININEvent:

ROMERO’s is whole body: nude: showing slightly profile of penis (hard-on or semi-hard-on so as to show a defined profile and never a shrunk penis): do not show the whole of it: defined but hidden: a hint: MASCULINEvent:MEREDITH: show not whole BODY: or tits: Full Face and shoulders and twisted so as to show the shoulder blades: nude back: black back: smart & cool: FEMININEvent: make it as imponent as ROMERO’s imponence (Parangolé-Synthesis 170).

With such references to the mis-en-scène of erotic bodies, Oiticica demonstrates that the sexual body of the one (Romero) and the other (Meredith) is never complete, but via events is always “inventing” himself/herself anew and thereby entering into relations and separations. The event is a contingent movement that goes beyond the communicative and symbolic function of language, an occurrence that addresses me, that involves me as spectator in intensities, holds my attention and leaves traces. The notions “MASCULINEvent” and “FEMININEvent” demonstrate the becoming of bodies, their becoming-the-same and their becoming-different via events. But they also reveal that language can only describe such events with difficulty—that is, with bending and inventions. In his example, Oiticica mentions a possible erotic occurrence, but the event can also be a material happening of a different (although never completely other) kind.

This performative function of bodies and gestures transmitted by the body cannot be accepted and acknowledged in itself, but in order to communicate such events (to ourselves as well), we need other signs (language, clothes, other objects, facial expressions, gestures) to function as a kind of “transporter.” Thereby, there is a re-inscription of the occurrence into a cognitive system. Hélio Oiticica demonstrates this by inventing the two notions “MASCULINEvent” and “FEMININEvent.” A possible material occurrence, around which Oiticica’s theory circulates and which he wants to use for his emancipatory aesthetic interventions, is in this way conveyed by him in language.

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Here the material occurrence is the transformation of bodies into sexually significant bodies. In other cases, the event leads to a jump in our mythical and ideological world-organisation—Oiticica’s searching and creating focuses on this too.

This story of dislocation and re-inscription into a cognitive system that is connected to the event also implies that we situate ourselves via them. In such moments, our body finds a place, a belonging; in order to communicate such a belonging and such a becoming-situated we have to “mould” the event into notions, objects, positions, and gestures, which can then become in themselves starting points for further collisions. We watch out for names for such “becoming bodies,” two names (male-female, native-foreigner)—or more—which never fit completely and are only an index, a mark for something that is always in motion because my body is continually transforming itself when it touches other bodies (demonstrative, ideal bodies, or the bodies of Others). Bodies are thus equal and different at exactly the same time: they link and form community bodies; in doing so, they sometimes enter into significant relations, at other times, they bypass each other, but, in any case, they invent stories and styles of appearance that identify them as “one” (man or women, native, or foreigner, etc.) in order to make such processes usable in the present and deliverable in the future.

Events of appropriation have been named differently: be it kairos (or chance), shock, punctum, third meaning or revolution.6 All of these notions seek to keep the potentiality of such events open. Because such an experience of significance is always still possible, it is a permanent potentiality, which means that it happens contingently and leads to dislocations and displacements—which also implies that such an event cannot be “produced” by one agent or be collected for only one group: it is not fabricated, but it happens to be and, due to this, it can not be prevented even by the most bureaucratic or bookish precautions. Hélio Oiticica can offer a “situation” with his parangolés in which the amoments he mentions might happen, and with the creation of such a situation he can initiate a potential process. But it is no longer in his control whether such significant events really happen and, if they do happen, in which terms they will be negotiated by the participators. This depends on how others receive and


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carry on what he has started. Hélio Oiticica is conscious of how contingency relates to the parangolés, of the potentiality of what he has raised, as he shows, for instance, when he states:

The metaphysical, intellectualist and aestheticist positions thus become invalidated—there is no proposal to ‘elevate the spectator to a level of creation’, to a ‘meta-reality’ or impose upon him an ‘idea’ or ‘aesthetic model’ corresponding to those art concepts, but to give him a simple opportunity to participate, so that he ‘finds’ there something he may want to realise [...] ‘Not to find’ is an equally important participation, since it defines the freedom of ‘choosing’, of anyone to whom participation is proposed (Position and Program 100).

But this position, which is formulated in relation to the sexual, bodily aspects of events, is withdrawn at other times. Here Oiticica entangles himself in certain theorems of the avant-garde since the 1920s, as they have been formulated in order to mask the uncontrollability of events of perception and to be able to push “liberation,” “break,” “deconstruction,” “the joke,” or “ecstatic rapture” tangibly close.

Image-HegemonyHélio Oiticica’s texts and programmes show themselves

to be most clearly related to the classical avant-garde narrative and its traditional emancipatory discourses when they adopt a causality between an aesthetic intervention, on the one hand (the collective participation in a parangolé situation), and a very specific result on a political-ideological level, on the other hand. Oiticica, for example, repeatedly asserts that for him it is completely clear that the position created through parangolés can only be a completely anarchic position:

It is against everything that is oppressive, socially and individually—all the fixed and decadent forms of government, or reigning social structures. [...] Politically, this position is that of all the genuine lefts of this world—not of course of the oppressive lefts (of which Stalin

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is an example): It could not possibly be otherwise. For me, the most complete expression of this entire concept of ‘environmentation’ was the formulation of what I called Parangolé (Position and Program 100).

Here Oiticica again reduces the plurality of contingent possibilities of what might result from the collective participation to a very few—to those of the left and of anarchism, as well as to a “new language” and a “new life.” He does not point out that the process will not necessarily lead automatically to any kind of ethic imperative to cultivate such openness and to be responsible to it, since the result of collective-articulation processes is fundamentally open and unknowable ahead of time. Precisely because of such openness and the uncontrollability of what one has initiated in public there can, on the contrary, also be steps in completely different direction than in the “left,” “anarchic,” or even “democratic” directions. And instead of so to speak mystical processes of “play-concretion” which he is so much aiming for re-sacralized celebrations of a being-together and of the clothes-pieces standing for that can occur. On this point, Oiticica, like many other 20th-century avant-gardists, conceals the uncontrollability of his own procedures and actions and presents himself as already there—in a place full of “liberation,” “rupture,” “deconstruction,” “nonsense,” “myth,” and “ecstatic rapture” where he apparently always wanted to arrive. And in doing so, he is participating not only in the seductive tactics of the traditions of the avant-garde, but also the central message of the classical emancipatory discourses. Because here, too, “the emancipated identities had to pre-exist the act of emancipation as a result of their radical otherness via-à-vis the forces opposing them” (Laclau 17).

The parangolés originate from Oiticica’s searching. With them he moves away from participation in customary avant-garde traditions towards what was, for his time, a completely new understanding of how social hegemony forms and how images, bodies, aesthetic interventions, and our participation in image-, thing- and sound-surroundings share in hegemonic production. Thus some of his descriptions of anti-art can also be read as gropingly approaching an explanation of


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“hegemony.” For example, when he points out how an anti-art—as it manifests itself in the parangolés—can be seen as the link between creativity and connectivity: “‘Things’ are found, which are seen everyday but which one never thought to look for: it is the search for oneself in the ‘thing’—a kind of communion with the environment” (“Environmental Program” 105). And in other places he speaks about the possibility

of creating everything from the empty cells, where one would try to ‘snuggle-in’ to the dream of the construction of totalities which rise like bubbles of possibilities—the dream of a new life, which can alternate between the ‘self-founding’ just mentioned and the ‘supra-forming’ born here, in the leisure nest (Creleisure 137).

Here again it becomes clear that Oiticica sees certain parallels between our “modern” alignment of belief and that of mysticism, and that he considers these parallels in his investigations and in his search for adequate forms. Similarly to the way that mystics are united with other mystics by living daily with the belief that God is in stones, in the stars, in the flesh, in the soul, and in the clouds, we form communities by participating in strikes, in demonstrations, in elections, by wearing certain outfits, and by conducting certain actions thereby participating in “revolution” and “emancipation.” Nevertheless, his works also maintain differences from traditional modes of community formation. The totality of being—that is, the “new life” mentioned by Oiticica—no longer appears to be related to a God (nor to his representatives), but to certain particularities, details in the world, although every detail can potentially become a signifier that indicates such “universality.” Every thing in our environment and every body can become an “empty cell,” a potentiality, from which such a “supra-forming” (of hegemony) results. In explaining this, he repeatedly makes reference to a “general constructive will” that began to form itself through the participation of bodies in collective occasions in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s.

Oiticica’s project is, nevertheless, much too rooted in the avant-garde tradition and in its conclusions to be able to make clear the full consequences of his reflections on

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participation, the “mythical” loading of things and the bodily formation of communities. Above all, he did not see that community formation can come from any new perspective on the formation of hegemony, not only from the “progressive” or “anarchic” perspective that he favored so much.

Hegemonic political struggles were to a large extent out of the question because of the military dictatorship that reigned in Brazil from 1964 to 1985; the social and cultural struggles of that time and place led to results completely different from those he was aiming to produce with his programs for an “anthropophagic” Brazilian culture (a new Brazilian culture defended against external domination). In 1968, disappointed by the actually-existing articulation processes, in a text about his work Tropicália, he wrote:

And now, what do we see? Bourgeois, sub-intellectuals, cretins of every kind, preaching ‘Tropicalism’, a Tropicália (it’s become fashionable!), in short, being transformed into an object of consumption, something which they cannot quite identify. It is completely clear! Those who made ‘stars and stripes’ are now making their parrots, banana trees, etc., or are interested in slums, samba schools, outlaw anti-heroes (Cara de Cavalo has become à la mode), etc. Very well, but do not forget that there are elements here that this bourgeois voracity will never be able to consume: the direct life-experience [vivência] element, which goes beyond the problem of the image (“Tropicàlia” 264).

Collective participation in image-, thing- and sound-environments had thus gone in a different direction from the one he desired. For Oiticica, as for other representatives of the New Objectivity, this was a great disappointment, but it also lead to new opportunities for searching. Thus in 1970, in exile in London where he had fled after the military regime intensified its repression of its opponents in 1969, starting from intensified investigations, he announced a new sense to his work: “Where what was ‘open’ becomes ‘supra-open’, where structural preoccupation dissolves into ‘disinterest in structures’, which


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become receptacles open to signification” (Creleisure 136).

Images (See inserts)Picture 1: Dancers of Mangueira including Nininha and Nildo of Mangueira with Capes by Hélio Oiticica, 1979.

Picture 2: Parangolé, Maria Helena de Mangueira with P8 Cape 5 by Hélio Oiticica, Hommage à Mangueira, Musée D’Art moderne, Rio de Janeiro, 1965.

Picture 3: Lygia Pape, O Divisor, Rio de Janeiro, 1968.

Picture 4: Parangolé, Roseni de Mangueira with P5 Cape 2 by Hélio Oiticica, Hommage à Mangueira, Musée D’Art moderne, Rio de Janeiro, 1965.

Picture 5: Parangolé, Nildo de Mangueira, Capa 11 by Hélio Oiticica, “Incorporo a Revolta.”

Picture 6: Hélio Oiticica in Babylonests, New York 1972.

(Endnotes)1 This text is based on a talk that I gave at the invitation of Irene Hohenbüchler at the Institute of Textile Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in January 2004. I would like to thank all of the participants for their suggestions.

2 “Parangolé” means something like ”animated situation.”

3 Jacques Rancière has shown that not every action connected with “power” can be called “political” but he proposed distinguishing between a movement of bodies by the police and by politics—although by this he does not understand simply the institutions of the police and politics and their specific techniques but broader kinds of action far beyond this. The actions of the police lead to an order that arranges bodies and that controls their distribution, that terms ways of being and of saying and assigns them certain places and tasks.On the other hand, for him the political is when it breaks sensual forms, for example if bodies are removed from places to which they have

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been assigned or the definition of a place is changed. See: Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. pp. 40 & 36.

4 I have shown elsewhere that in manifestos and texts by different avant-garde groups (for example Russian revolutionary art around the journal Novyi Lef, Dadaism, Surrealism, the Cinema Lettriste, the Expanded Cinema, Punk, but also neo-avant-garde groups in Serbia in the 1990s) one can find a repetition of the always similar assertion that certain aesthetic tricks (alienation, montage, parody) can be used in order to achieve political emancipation. There is a correlation between all these different texts, a correlation that is so strong that one can, so to speak, extract a “thesis” from all these manifestos and creeds, even if such a “thesis” is graspable for us only in its always specific modification. See: Anna Schober, “Politik der Form. Korrelationen und Brüche im lesbaren Text der Avantgarde,” Kleine Erzählungen und ihre Medien, Eds. Herbert Hrachovec, Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Birgit Wagner. Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2004. pp. 180-197.

5 The bodily dimension of avant-garde creation has also been examined by Pier Paolo Pasolini. See: Pier Paolo Pasolini “Il cinema impopolare,” Empirismo eretico, Ed. ibid. Milano: Garzanti, 1991. pp. 269–276.

6 Very abstract notions have also always been invented in cultural theory and in philosophy in order to describe such a significant event of perception: Walter Benjamin called it a “shock” and Roland Barthes a “punctum” (in relation to photography) and a “third meaning” (in relation to film). See: Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs In Baudelaire,” Illuminations, New York: Harcourt, 196. pp. 155-200, 163. Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” Image, Music, Text, Ed. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill & Wang, 1977. pp. 52-68. And: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill & Wang, 1981. p. 27.


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Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill & Wang, 1981.

--. “The Third Meaning.” Image, Music, Text. Ed. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill & Wang, 1977. pp. 52-68.

Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs In Baudelaire.” Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, 1968. pp. 155-200.

Clark, Lygia. ”We Are The Proposers.” Lygia Clark (exhibition catalogue). Ed. Fundacio Antonio Tapies de Barcelone. Barcelona: ed. Fundacio Antonio Tapies de Barcelone, 1997. p. 233.

Laclau, Ernesto. ”Beyond Emancipation.” Emancipation(s). Ed. ibid. London and New York: Verso, 1996. pp. 1-19.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus. Paris: Éditions Métailié, 2000.Nooteboom, Cees. All Souls Day. Orlando: Harcourt Books, 2001.--. Rituals. Fort Washington: Harvest Editions, 1996.Oiticica, Hélio. ”Block-Experiments in Cosmococa: program

in progress.” Hélio Oiticica (exhibition catalogue). Ed. Guy Brett. Minneapolis: ed. Du Jeu de Paume, 1992. pp. 174-183.

--. “Creleisure.” Hélio Oiticica (exhibition catalogue). Ed. Guy Brett. Minneapolis: ed. Du Jeu de Paume, 1992. pp. 132-138.

--. “Environmental Program.” Hélio Oiticica (exhibition catalogue). Ed. Guy Brett. Minneapolis: ed. Du Jeu de Paume, 1992. pp. 103-105.

--. “General Scheme of the New Objectivity,” Hélio Oiticica (exhibition catalogue). Ed. Guy Brett. Minneapolis: ed. Du Jeu de Paume, 1992. pp. 110-120.

--. “Notes on the Parangolé.” Hélio Oiticica (exhibition catalogue). Ed. Guy Brett. Minneapolis: ed. Du Jeu de Paume, 1992. pp. 93-96.

--.“Parangolé” Synthesis. Hélio Oiticica (exhibition catalogue). Ed. Guy Brett. Minneapolis: ed. Du Jeu de Paume, 1992. pp.165-170.

--.“Position and Programme.” Hélio Oiticica (exhibition catalogue). Ed. Guy Brett. Minneapolis: ed. Du Jeu de Paume, 1992. p.

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100.--. “Tropicàlia.” Vivências (exhibition catalogue). Ed. Sabine

Breitwieser. Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2000. pp. 262-265.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. “Il cinema impopolare.” Empirismo eretico. Ed. ibid. Milano: Garzanti, 1991. pp. 269-276.

Rancière, Jacques. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Schober, Anna. “Politik der Form. Korrelationen und Brüche im lesbaren Text der Avantgarde.” Kleine Erzählungen und ihre Medien. Ed. Herbert Hrachovec, Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Birgit Wagner. Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2004. pp. 180-197.

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INSERTS for Anna Schober - Hélio Oiticica’sParangolés: Body-Events, Participation in the Anti-Doxa of the Avant-Garde, and Struggling Free From It

Photos courtesy of Cesar Oiticica.

Image 1: Dancers of Mangueira including Nininha and Nildo of Mangueira with Capes by Hélio Oiticica, 1979.

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Image 2: Parangolé, Maria Helena de Mangueira with P8 Cape 5 by Hélio Oiticica, Hommage à Mangueira, Musée D'Art moderne, Rio de Janeiro, 1965.

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Image 3: Lygia Pape, O Divisor, Rio de Janeiro, 1968.

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Image 4: Parangolé, Roseni de Mangueira with P5 Cape 2 by Hélio Oiticica, Hommage à Mangueira, Musée D'Art moderne, Rio de Janeiro, 1965.

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Image 5: Parangolé, Nildo de Mangueira, Cape 11 by Hélio Oiticica, "Incorporo a Revolta."

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Image 6: Hélio Oiticica in Babylonests, New York 1972.

Schober

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Transcript of Schober