"This catalogue accompanies the first full US retrospective of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) in over two decades, organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art. It explores Oiticica's most acclaimed works, such as the "Parangolés" and the installation "Tropicália," as well as his involvement with music, literature, and response to Brazilian politics and the social environment. Essays by US and Latin American writers cover the entirety of his career, from his immersion in the 1960s counterculture to his life and work in New York City and final return to Rio de Janeiro, with special emphasis on his New York period between 1971 and 1978"--

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.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Dec. 10, 2006-Apr. 1, 2007, and at Tate Modern, June 6-Sept. 23, 2007.

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.

Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, Experiments in Exile charts a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, wherein common reception of popular cultural forms is linked to a potentially expanded, non-exclusive polity. By carefully analyzing the materiality of the multiply-lined, multiply voiced writing of the “undocuments” that record these social experiments and relay their prophetic descriptions of and instructions for the new social worlds they wished to forge and inhabit, however, it argues that their projects ultimately challenge rather than seek to rehabilitate normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. James and Oiticica’s experiments recall the insurgent sociality of “the motley crew” historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the trans-Atlantic, cross-gendered, multi-racial working class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading James’s and Oiticica’s projects against the grain of Linebaugh and Rediker’s inability to find evidence of that sociality’s persistence or futurity, it shows how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and seek to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms, which are for them always also aesthetic forms, in the barrack-yards of Port-of-Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the assembly lines of Detroit and the streets of the New York. The formal openness and performative multiplicity that manifests itself at the place where writing and organizing converge invokes that sociality and provokes its ongoing re-invention. Their writing extends a radical, collective Afro-diasporic intellectuality, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, where blackness is understood not as the eclipse, but the ongoing transformative conservation of the motley crew’s multi-raciality. Blackness is further instantiated in the interracial and queer sexual relations, and in a new sexual metaphorics of production and reproduction, whose disruption and reconfiguration of gender structures the collaborations from which James’s and Oiticica’s undocuments emerge, orienting them towards new forms of social, aesthetic and intellectual life.

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.

Helio Oiticia (1937-80) was one of the most influential artists of the late twentieth century. At the end of the 1960s Oiticica was invited to exhibit at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. This book captures not only a pivotal moment in the life and career of a unique artist but also in the development of the avant-garde in London.