A Brazilian's Work in the 70's Now Looks New

April 20, 2004 -- To organize delirium." It is the phrase Haroldo de Campos, the Brazilian poet, came up with to explain what his friend Hélio Oiticica was up to. I couldn't put it better.

Oiticica's name may not ring a bell, although in the last decade he has finally become known outside Brazil and beyond cult followers. Before he died in 1980 at 42, he was one of those deeply charismatic figures (like Lygia Clark) who contributed to the great experiment that was Brazilian art in the 1950's and 60's. The military government that came to power in 1964 gradually ended a cultural efflorescence that was South America's equivalent of Paris in the 20's or New York after World War II.

Not that New Yorkers or Parisians paid much attention at the time. Oiticica (pronounced oy-tee-SEE-kah) remained on the margins of Europeans' and Americans' consciousness at best.

Better late than never: one of the benefits of 21st-century economic and cultural globalization is the overdue nod toward artists like him, who turn out to have been doing things 30 or 40 years ago that pass for new today.

Witness the show now at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, originally organized by Carlos Basualdo for the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. It features works from the 1970's, when Oiticica left Brazil and settled in New York City for nine years. His trajectory is instructive. He began in the 1950's making abstract paintings and sculptures, colorful geometric constructions, a little like big origami, in a familiar European modernist idiom. The works sometimes hung from the ceiling. By 1960 these had evolved into structures large enough to walk into.

Then (in what seemed like a big leap, although it evolved naturally out of the previous sculptures) he started to experiment with unconventional materials: he made works from tents, like homemade shanties, to sleep in, and filled big jars with colored dirt you could dig your hands into.

He made miniversions of Earth Art, constructions made of stones, cement blocks and plastic bottles picked up from the street and studiously arranged, and he also designed banners and capes. He talked about "fusing together color, structures, poetic sense, dance, words, photography" — about appropriating "things of the world which I come across in the streets, vacant lots, fields, the ambient world, things which would not be transportable but which I would invite the public to participate in."

The world is a museum, he said. There's art everywhere.

He became what Dan Cameron, the New Museum's senior curator, calls a social sculptor, staging ad hoc events, conceiving what has now come to be called (the word can make your heart sink by this point) installations. People were invited to walk barefoot through sand, dance to music, parade, smell incense, put on colorful clothes and buff their nails.

It all sounds quaint, perhaps, but at the time, and especially where Oiticica was coming from, it was radical and fresh. To encounter his work from the 60's today, even if you are somebody congenitally resistant to this sort of art, is at least to sense the openheartedness, which for Oiticica was the reason to make art in the first place.

In Brazil he worked among the residents of Rio's slums, making a virtue of their material poverty. The work had an implicit social thrust, but it was not explicitly political. It dovetailed, formally speaking, with Happenings, Fluxus and much else going on in Europe and the United States, but with specific local roots — local roots and a universal message. Oiticica wanted nothing more than for people to kick off their shoes and to immerse themselves in the karmic pleasures he devised.

In 1970 he was included in the "Information" show at the Museum of Modern Art, then won a Guggenheim fellowship to come to New York. He stretched out his stay, taking odd jobs and ending up struggling to make ends meet, a familiar arc. He first lived in a loft on Second Avenue across the street from the Fillmore East (the show includes his funny little Super 8 film of the theater and the neighborhood), then moved to Christopher Street.

He threw himself happily into the worlds of experimental cinema, rock 'n' roll and downtown art. He saw performances by Yvonne Rainer and Yoko Ono. Works by Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, Dan Graham and Peter Campus all must have rung a bell. He befriended Jack Smith, whose four-hour slide shows in his loft in the East Village made a particularly big impression on him.

So did John Cage and Andy Warhol: Oiticica seems almost to have wanted to be a Brazilian Warhol, to create his own Factory, to make his own version of Warhol's films, to immerse himself in the whole Warholian universe of underground gay culture, drugs and celebrity.

Out of this he made what's at the New Museum: erotic photographs of young men as a slide show set to Cagean sound bites from the radio. With Neville D'Almeida, a Brazilian filmmaker, he devised quasi-cinemas, multimedia environments he called Cosmococas. Oiticica would organize these in his loft, but he also wrote elaborate instructions so they could be re-presented elsewhere. These were dedicated to pop stars like Marilyn Monroe and Jimi Hendrix.

Three of them are in the show. In a room slung with colored hammocks, a Hendrix soundtrack plays as slides of his album "War Heroes " flash on the walls and ceiling with lines of cocaine in different patterns on the album. Oiticica and D'Almeida called these cocaine drawings.

More cocaine drawings, this time featuring Monroe, from the photograph on the cover of Norman Mailer's book about her, flicker in another room filled with sand and balloons.

The soundtrack is Yma Sumac, the 50's Peruvian singer and Latin music diva. Last, among scattered mattresses and pillows, are cocaine drawings of the filmmaker Luis Buñuel, from a cover of The New York Times Magazine.

I suspect the descriptions of the works make them sound juvenile or pointless, which they are not. A buoyancy derives partly from the music and also from a sly humor, self-mocking and pervasive. Oiticica seems to have been without pretense, and this allowed his work to be vulnerable. "Creleisure" was a word he concocted for idly participating in art that is incomplete without the visitor's contribution. His work depended on other people's open minds.

Unlike his earlier art, I should add, these New York works had a slightly aggressive tone that he no doubt picked up from the streets, even though it didn't really seem to suit his temperament. He plugged into the chaos that was the city in the 1970's and found the place both seductive and depressing.

The art bespeaks a naïveté that is charming and anachronistic. Cocaine as a pigment for drawing and an outlandish symbol of delirium and lawlessness is a concept that seems to come from another time.

The textbook significance of Oiticica's work is its foreshadowing of current video installations and other multimedia creations. Oiticica was a low-tech pioneer. That alone is not why his work is worth seeing, although it's a pity the Guggenheim Museum canceled its plans to present a full-scale Oiticica retrospective that was in Paris a decade ago.

It would have seemed prescient to exhibit him before the onslaught of 90's installation art.

Instead we get this late, somewhat tangential slice of his career. So be it. It's a reminder of an artist willing to take risks. We can still learn a thing or two from him. Art was for him a state of mind and a condition of the heart — a university for the soul with an open-admission policy.