#Helio oiticica art full
#Helio oiticica art free

The generals who took power imposed a hard line when it came to their Catholic conservatism and “traditional” Brazilian values – but initially concerned themselves with putting workers and peasants in their place, leaving the students and intellectuals free to stew in their radical rhetoric for an interregnum in the second half of the ’60s. In 1964, alarmed by the fomentations of Brazil’s leftist government, the US put its stamp of approval on a military coup. The “dissolution of art into life” was one of the great themes of ‘60s art around the world, but in Brazil the theme had a particular charge. Installation view of Helio Oitcica’s Tropicalia at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Tropicália (1967)Ī kind-of pop-up beach pavilion – an island of sand and rocks studded with plants, little plaques of Portuguese poetry, a cage of live parrots, and walk-in pavilions to explore – Tropicália is likely the most startling and memorable installation here. It was just as radical in its day when it debuted at the “New Brazilian Objectivity” show, at the Museu de Arte Moderna (Museum of Modern Art) in Rio in 1967, crowning a feverish period of experimentation. But the historical context of the work, and the mythos that the artist built up around it (much of it laid out in the exhibition’s fine catalogue), is very important to its magnetism – maybe as important as what you see or feel in the galleries.Ĭonsequently, telling his story for beginners as an introduction might well be worthwhile, passing through a few of his most important installations.

#Helio oiticica art full

To Organize Delirium surveys the full arc of Oiticica’s career, offering, importantly, the first look at Oiticia’s post-‘60s New York years. The specific ways that these threads tie together are what makes him interesting. His art is too funky for people who like their art classical too visceral for those who like their art to be theory-driven but also too brainy for those who like their art to be all wide-eyed, interactive fun. The truth is, though, that the Oiticica we meet in To Organize Delirium is weird and difficult to categorize. Viewed at the time as part of the Conceptual art movement, these environments today feel prescient of a turn towards “relational aesthetics,” and tend to be presented through the lens of contemporary art museums’ notions of audience engagement (Did you hear? There’s a pool table at the museum! And a parrot!). Oiticica moved deeper than Clark into interactive installation art, becoming known for free-standing environments where viewers were invited to navigate among loose mazes of multi-colored panels and symbolic props. Installation view of To Organize Delirium at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Among this cadre, Oiticica would meet his lifelong artistic peers, including Lygia Clark, whose trajectory from geometric abstraction into wilder experiments with interactive sculpture he would mirror. Returning to Brazil, the young artist studied with the most influential figures in Rio’s contemporary art scene, entering at the age of 18 into the hot-house environment of Grupo Frente, an abstract painting movement presided over by Ivan Serpa, who believed in art-making as a model for accessing an experience of free-thinking democratic liberation. He loved Friedrich Nietzsche, whose influence shows in his writing, with its extravagant declarations and ecstatic neologisms. His father, a photographer and researcher, won a Guggenheim grant in 1947, moving the family to Washington, DC, for two years while he worked at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Oiticica (1937-80) had the good fortune to be born to a well-off, cosmopolitan family in Brazil. It’s a worthy task, though, and Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium, the big touring retrospective that arrives this week at the Whitney Museum of American Art (after opening last year at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, where I first saw it), is here to give it a try.

Hélio Oiticica, one of the most famous figures of Brazil’s mid-century surge of experimental art, once said that his goal was to strike “a fatal blow to the concept of the museum, art gallery, etc., and even the concept itself of ‘exhibition.’” Organizing a show about someone like that without taming him is a very difficult challenge, even if his challenges are part of his disorienting charms.