Comprehensive edition regarding the first 5 multimedia installations as originally envisioned by artist Oiticica (b. Brazil) and conceived in collaboration with the filmmaker D'Almeida (b. Brazil). The Cosmococa photographic series consist of single rolls of film in accordance with the artist's concept of "quasi-cinema", participative spaces that transcend the cinematographic experience and call into question the contemplative nature of the art object and designed as collective experiences making the spectator an active participant. The present edition is faithful to the artist's original concept in it's presentation of facsimiles of both his notebooks in which the works were conceptualized and Oiticica's own typewritten transcriptions along photographs of installations recently mounted at the Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo and at the Centro de Arte Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro, two multimedia installations that precede the original photographs for Cosmacoca. The book also contains critical essays by César Oiticica Filho (curator of Projeto Hélio Oiticica), Paulo Herkenhoff and Kátia Maciel.

How Brazilian postwar avant-garde artists updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. Brazilian avant-garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental but productive out-of-jointness. They were modernist but distant from modernism. Europeans and North Americans may feel a similar displacement when viewing Brazilian avant-garde art; the unexpected familiarity of the works serves to make them unfamiliar. In Constructing an Avant-Garde, Sérgio Martins seizes on this uncanny obliqueness and uses it as the basis for a reconfigured account of the history of Brazil’s avant-garde. His discussion covers not only widely renowned artists and groups—including Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, and neoconcretism—but also important artists and critics who are less well known outside Brazil, including Mário Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Amílcar de Castro, Luís Sacilotto, Antonio Dias, and Rubens Gerchman. Martins argues that artists of Brazil’s postwar avant-garde updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. He describes defining episodes in Brazil’s postwar avant-garde, discussing crucial critical texts, including Gullar’s “Theory of the Non-Object,” a phenomenological account of neoconcrete artworks; Oiticica, constructivity, and Mondrian; portraiture, self-portraiture, and identity; the nonvisual turn and missed encounters with conceptualism; and monochrome, manifestos, and engagement. The Brazilian avant-garde’s hijacking of modernism, Martins shows, gained further complexity as artists began to face their international minimalist and conceptualist contemporaries in the 1960s and 1970s. Reconfiguring not only art history but their own history, Brazilian avant-gardists were able to face contemporary challenges from a unique—and oblique—standpoint.

An illustrated study that casts a new light on Oiticica's most important work of “quasi-cinema” on its fortieth anniversary. Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) occupies a central position in the Latin American avant-garde of the postwar era. Associated with the Rio de Janeiro-based neo-concretist movement at the beginning of his career, Oiticica moved from object production to the creation of chromatically opulent and sensually engulfing large-scale installations or wearable garments. Building on the idea for a film by Brazilian underground filmmaker Neville D'Almeida, Oiticica developed the concept for Block-Experiments in Cosmococa—Program in Progress (1973–1974) as an “open program”: a series of nine proposals for environments, each consisting of slide projections, soundtracks, leisure facilities, drawings (with cocaine used as pigment), and instructions for visitors. It is the epitome of what the artist called his “quasi-cinema” work—his most controversial production, and perhaps his most direct effort to merge art and life. Presented publicly for the first time in 1992, these works have been included in major international exhibitions in Los Angeles, Chicago, London, and New York. Drawing on unpublished primary sources, letters, and writings by Oiticica himself, this illustrated examination of Oiticica's work considers the vast catalog of theoretical references the artist's work relies on, from anticolonial materialism to French phenomenology and postmodern media theory to the work of Jean-Luc Godard, Andy Warhol, and Brazilian avant-garde filmmakers. It discusses Oiticica's work in relation to the diaspora of Brazilian intellectuals during the military dictatorship, the politics of media circulation, the commercialization of New York's queer underground, the explicit use of cocaine as means of production, and possible future reappraisals of Oiticica's work.

An illustrated study that casts a new light on Oiticica's most important work of “quasi-cinema” on its fortieth anniversary. Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) occupies a central position in the Latin American avant-garde of the postwar era. Associated with the Rio de Janeiro-based neo-concretist movement at the beginning of his career, Oiticica moved from object production to the creation of chromatically opulent and sensually engulfing large-scale installations or wearable garments. Building on the idea for a film by Brazilian underground filmmaker Neville D'Almeida, Oiticica developed the concept for Block-Experiments in Cosmococa—Program in Progress (1973–1974) as an “open program”: a series of nine proposals for environments, each consisting of slide projections, soundtracks, leisure facilities, drawings (with cocaine used as pigment), and instructions for visitors. It is the epitome of what the artist called his “quasi-cinema” work—his most controversial production, and perhaps his most direct effort to merge art and life. Presented publicly for the first time in 1992, these works have been included in major international exhibitions in Los Angeles, Chicago, London, and New York. Drawing on unpublished primary sources, letters, and writings by Oiticica himself, this illustrated examination of Oiticica's work considers the vast catalog of theoretical references the artist's work relies on, from anticolonial materialism to French phenomenology and postmodern media theory to the work of Jean-Luc Godard, Andy Warhol, and Brazilian avant-garde filmmakers. It discusses Oiticica's work in relation to the diaspora of Brazilian intellectuals during the military dictatorship, the politics of media circulation, the commercialization of New York's queer underground, the explicit use of cocaine as means of production, and possible future reappraisals of Oiticica's work.

"This book investigates Oiticica's unique relationship to cinema and his keen interest in the cinematic experience, breaking new ground in the understanding of one of the most significant artists of the second half of the twentieth century. Oiticica used the term "quasi-cinema" to refer to his experiments in film and slide projections, including the lavish sequence of installation proposals called Block Experiments in Cosmococa, the slide series Neyrotika, and the film Agripina e Roma-Manhattan. Essays by Carlos Basualdo, Dan Cameron, and Ivana Bentes, along with copious extracts from the artists own writings, situate these works in the context of Oiticica's oeuvre and the discourses that continue to shape contemporary art."--BOOK JACKET.

A distinctive voice in art criticism since the 1960s, Guy Brett has followed an independent path in mapping and interpreting contemporary art. 'Carnival of Perception' is a collection of his writings which traces the outlines of a collective reality, expressed in a play of wit and spirit.

Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) was one of the most brilliant Brazilian artists of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a forerunner of participatory art, and his melding of geometric abstraction and bodily engagement has influenced contemporary artists from Cildo Meireles and Ricardo Basbaum to Gabriel Orozco, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Olafur Eliasson. This book examines Oiticica’s impressive works against the backdrop of Brazil’s dramatic postwar push for modernization. From Oiticica’s late 1950s experiments with painting and color to his mid-1960s wearable Parangolés, Small traces a series of artistic procedures that foreground the activation of the spectator. Analyzing works, propositions, and a wealth of archival material, she shows how Oiticica’s practice recast—in a sense “folded”—Brazil’s utopian vision of progress as well as the legacy of European constructive art. Ultimately, the book argues that the effectiveness of Oiticica’s participatory works stems not from a renunciation of art, but rather from their ability to produce epistemological models that reimagine the traditional boundaries between art and life.