Tactile dematerialization, sensory politics:

Helio Oiticica's Parangoles

Anna Dezeuze

Like the word parangole, a slang term from Rio de Janeiro that refers to a range of events or states including
idleness, a sudden agitation, an unexpected situation, or a dance party, the more than thirty objects so
titled by Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica have an indeterminate status. Produced mainly between 1964 and
1968, these flags, tents, and capes made out of jute and plastic bags, painted or printed fabrics, and
sometimes including painted or stenciled texts, are meant to be used by the viewer. A Parangole cape on a
hanger is not a Parangole: its complex textures can only be revealed through the gestures and movements
of the person who wears it. As the artist explained in a 1965 text, the spectator of these works becomes a
participant or "participator" (participador). (1)
Hitherto little-known outside Brazil, Oiticica's work rose to international prominence when it was featured
in the 1997 Documenta X, joining a selection of works which, as one critic explained, "featured a critical
political sensibility at the expense of aesthetics." (2) Indeed, the director of Documenta, Catherine David,
who also cocurated the first touring retrospective of Oiticica's work in 1992, has stressed the transgressive
aims of his practice in texts focusing on the artist's conceptual, rather than formal, innovations. (3) In
contrast, Brazilian critic Sonia Salzstein warned in 1994 against readings privileging the social and political
dimension of Oiticica's work because they tend to "surreptitiously overwhelm his work with a sociological
argument," making one "lose sight of its aesthetic thought." (4)
Oiticica's texts have played an important role in reinforcing the perception of his works as "conceptual"
practices, as promoted by Documenta X as well as in recent surveys, exhibitions, and anthologies. (5) In the
2002 Conceptual Art: An Anthology, for example, Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson included texts in
which Oiticica defined the Parangole as "anti-art par excellence" and discussed his aspirations "to create
new experimental conditions where the artist takes on the role of 'proposer,' 'impressario,' or even
'educator.'" (6) In general, his works and writings have become points of reference in discussions of the
specificity of Latin American Conceptual art, which is described as more political in intent than its European
and North American counterparts. (7)
The main political aspect of the Parangoles seems to lie in their reference to the favelas, the slums or
shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro. Encouraged by Oiticica himself, critics have emphasized the crucial role
played by the artist's involvement, from 1964, in the samba school of the Mangueira favela. Learning to
dance the samba, participating in the carnaval, and making friends in Mangueira, the young man from a
middle-class family discovered a whole new dimension of experience that effected a radical turn in his
work. Indeed, many of the Parangoles were made for and sometimes in collaboration with his Mangueira
friends: some texts included in the Parangole capes, for example, are known to have been suggested by
specific individuals. Moreover, Oiticica chose to display the Parangoles publicly for the first time by inviting
dancers from Mangueira to wear them at the opening of the 1965 exhibition Opinao 65 at the Museum of
Modern Art in Rio. The irruption of the poor into the bourgeois atmosphere of the museum caused such a
scandal that the director had them evicted. As censorship worsened in Brazil during the later 1960s,
Oiticica's association with Mangueira would increasingly be linked to a political resistance to the
dictatorship that had taken over the country in 1964.
Oiticica's discovery of Mangueira was also singled out at the time in Brazilian critic Mario Pedrosa's 1966
article, "Arte ambiental, arte pos-moderna, Helio Oiticica." (8) In this important theorization, Pedrosa
described the new "post-modern" phase in twentieth-century art as a move away from "the hermetic
individual subjectivism" (o subjetivismo individual hermetico) of modern art, dealing exclusively with
"purely plastic values" (valores propriamente plasticos), and toward the increasing prominence of social and
political concerns. According to Pedrosa, Oiticica's "post-modern" turn corresponded precisely to the
moment when the artist abandoned the "ivory tower" (torre de marfim) and discovered Mangueira, an
"initiation" that would forever transform his conception of the role of art and artists. (9)
While it seems impossible to dissociate the Parangoles from the context in which they were first produced,
the exact nature of their political dimension is difficult to describe. Moreover, Oiticica's claim, in his
writings, that the Parangoles can be worn by any viewer seems to be contradicted not only by his
dedications of some of these works to specific individuals but also by the photographs, taken in his lifetime,
in which the capes are usually worn by his Mangueira friends. In this article, I will seek to disentangle the
Parangoles from the complex web that links the objects with Oiticica's texts, their original context and
reception, and the photographs that have been repeatedly exhibited and published. To do so, I will use as a
starting point an experiment I conducted with photographer Alessandra Santarelli in London in December
2002 and March 2003. Without showing her existing photographs of the Parangoles, I asked Santarelli to
take photographs of myself wearing Oiticica's 1966 Parangole P 11 Cape 7. Drawing on my personal
experience of wearing the Parangole as well as the photographs that were produced during the two
sessions--one in a studio, the other outdoors in a park--I will explore the nature of the relation between the
artist's formal experimentation and his political objectives. Instead of rehearsing the rather reductive
opposition noted earlier between David's "anti-aesthetic" stance and Salzstein's praise for his "aesthetic
thought," I hope to demonstrate not only that Oiticica's Parangoles succeed in uniting both of these
apparently conflicting aspects, but that the very articulation of this polarity constitutes their strength and
their significance within the history of 1960s art.
Intimate Spectatorship
Any attempt to document the experience of wearing a Parangole stumbles on the problem that a single
photograph is insufficient to capture the temporal process of discovery which it requires. Lifting the cape,
turning my head, moving my body, I can relish the contrasting bright colors, touch the rough green fabric
and the soft cotton cloth, and compare its two sides. I can pull out the long piece of gauze from a pocket in
the cape and read the words on it, hold it up in front of my face like a semitransparent mask, or use it as a
kind of shroud to cover parts of my body.
The temporal dimension of the viewing experience figured among Oiticica's earliest artistic concerns and
was intrinsically linked to his exploration of the formal qualities of color. In 1960, he noted that "when ...
color is no longer subjected to the rectangle [of the canvas] or the forms represented on this rectangle, it
tends to become 'embodied' [se 'corporificar']; it takes on a temporal dimension, creates its own structure,
and the work thus becomes the 'body of color' [o corpo da cor]." (10) In fact, the trajectory of Oiticica's
works, from his 1959-60 hanging, brightly painted Spatial Reliefs and Nuclei to the later Parangoles, can be
read as an incessant search to convey this material, corporeal, and sensual "body of color." Inviting viewers
to move around or inside the work in order to observe its structure and formal qualities, Oiticica sought to
transform the spectator into a "discoverer" (descobridor) of the work. (11) In order to achieve this, Oiticica
set up an intimate relation between the work and the viewer. Suspended works are hung low enough for
one to peer into the nooks of their folded planes (as in the Spatial Reliefs) or the numerous corners of their
mazelike structures (in the Nuclei), while in his Bolides Caixas (Box Bolides, or Box Fireballs), started in 1963,
one is invited to open the hinged doors or drawers of painted boxes of varying sizes to discover related hues
of yellow, red, pink, and orange, and alternating smooth and granular surfaces, as well as pigment and
fabrics.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In the late 1950s Oiticica belonged to the Neoconcrete group in Rio de Janeiro, whose 1959 manifesto
referred to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writings as an alternative to the kind of Pavlovian, mechanicist model
of perception explored by the Concrete artists in Sao Paulo. (12) Desiring to distinguish themselves from
these Concrete artists, the Neoconcretists sought to emphasize the temporal, bodily encounter of the
viewer with the artwork. Although created after the official end of the movement, Oiticica's Box Bolides are
direct extensions of his painted Neoconcrete objects and are exemplary of Neoconcretism as a whole. In
their use of simple geometric volumes and their focus on the relation between viewer and work,
Neoconcrete works can be compared to works by certain American Minimalists. Indeed, one of the most
striking points of comparison between Neoconcretism and Minimalism is both movements' affinity with
phenomenology. (13) Both Oiticica's Box Bolides and Donald Judd's boxlike works, for example, dramatize
the "dialogue between subject and object" that lies at the heart of the phenomenological experience,
according to Merleau-Ponty. (14) By setting up relations between inside and outside, between volume and
void, and between the object and the space in which it has been directly placed, the box format in these
works highlights some of the characteristics of perception described in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of
Perception: its mobilization of several senses rather than a disembodied gaze, its relation to movement, and
its privileging of the "primordial experience" of encountering objects in the world directly, with a sense of
wonder that precedes scientific distinctions among time, space, form, structure, and color.
Within this similar exploration of phenomenological perception, however, Oiticica's Box Bolides and Donald
Judd's works set up very different relations between the work and the viewer: Oiticica's 1964 Box Bolide 9
invites us to play with the sliding panels and open the drawer filled with pigment, while we tend to peer
into and gaze through Judd's 1965 steel and Plexiglas box. Indeed, if the number of fingerprints found on
Judd's works in museums across the world testify to the viewers' irrepressible desire to touch them, this
invitation is frustrated by the industrial dimension of both materials and production: their perfect sheen is
in fact quite spoiled by a fingerprint. Thus, as Briony Fer has demonstrated, Minimalist objects such as
Judd's are articulated through a double bind of anxiety and pleasure, unlike Neoconcrete works, which not
only invite but often require a tactile engagement in the process of their discovery. (15)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Although Judd's work was very different from Robert Morris's Minimalist objects, Morris's description of
the relation between object and spectator in Minimalist sculpture in his 1966 "Notes on Sculpture" is
particularly relevant here. Morris opposed what he called the "public" mode of viewing set up by large
objects to the "intimate mode of viewing" required by small objects, which "is essentially closed, spaceless,
compressed, and exclusive." (16) This very "quality of intimacy" rejected by Morris was, in fact, one of the
defining features of Neoconcrete works. According to the artist and critic Frederico Morais, writing in 1967,
Oiticica's entire oeuvre could be seen as a search for a "sheltered poetry" (poesia abrigada). (17) Morais
associated this kind of poetry with what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called "intimate spaces":
spaces that we possess, protect, and love. The Bolides, wrote Morais, have the poetry of small things which
are "aconchegantes"--a Portuguese word that evokes physical proximity, shelter, warmth, and coziness. (18)
According to Alex Potts, the Minimalist object's "inert thingness, its impinging on the viewer's space" was
still capable, in the 1960s, of "getting in the way of normative patterns of visual consumption." (19)
Neoconcrete works such as Oiticica's force viewers to physically encounter their "thingness" not by
"impinging" on the spectators' space but by inviting them to handle nonanthropomorphic, geometric
objects, thereby encouraging an acute awareness of the spatio-temporal experience of viewing. Thus
Oiticica's and other Neoconcretists' appeal to tactile participation was an effective means of exploring the
bodily relation between viewer and object suggested, yet warded off, by Minimalism; and this, I would
argue, allowed their participatory works to resist somewhat better being assimilated as yet other kinds of
art objects to be passively consumed.
One of the problems that Neoconcretism did share with Minimalism, however, was phenomenology's
appeal to a "generic" spectator, described by Hal Foster "as somehow before or outside history, language,
sexuality, and power." (20) Just as subsequent art practices in the United States were described by Foster as
having expanded upon and critiqued Minimalism's phenomenological approach, so Oiticica's works in the
1960s can be read both as extensions of the Neoconcrete project and attempts to overcome its
shortcomings. Taking as a starting point the Neoconcrete exploration of a new type of intimate
spectatorship allowed Oiticica to develop two crucial aspects of the Parangole to which I shall now turn: an
exploration of identity as a self-reflexive, performative process, on the one hand, and, on the other hand,
the so-called dematerialization of the art object described by Lucy Lippard as one of the key features of
Conceptual art. (21)
Identity as Performance
The failures of Neoconcretism were formulated most vocally by none other than the spokesman of the
group itself, the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar. In a radical change of position that precipitated the break-up
of the group in 1962, Gullar rejected Neoconcretism when he aligned himself with the Communist Centros
populares de cultura (Popular Centers for Culture, or CPCs), in particular that of the National Student Union,
which conceived all art as "bourgeois" and elitist and set out to promote Brazilian popular culture instead.
In his book A Cultura posta em questao (Questioning Culture), written in 1963 and first published in 1965,
Gullar developed a ruthless self-analysis of his own Neoconcrete poetry and an impassioned critique of all
artworks that valued "formal and stylistic factors over issues of content" (supervalorizacao dos fatores
formais e estilisticos sobre os de conteudo). (22) Gullar called for artists to acknowledge that their apparent
neutrality was in fact embedded in the ideological position of an oppressive bourgeoisie that praised and
bought their works. Instead, artists should assume responsibility as citizens and communicate with "the
people" in order to deal with the real problems plaguing Brazil. Deeply influenced by Gullar's position,
Oiticica would increasingly emphasize the ethical responsibility of the artist, starting in his writings about
the Parangoles and culminating with his 1967 manifesto on the "New Brazilian Objectivity," in which he
stressed the importance of the artist's engagement with sociopolitical concerns, and explained that artists'
"communications" should not be directed to "an elite reduced to 'experts,'" but orchestrated "against this
elite." (23)
Oiticica's highly politicized discourse should not, however, obscure the artist's other, more formal,
preoccupations reflected in the Parangoles. At the time when Oiticica signaled his distance from
Neoconcretism by shifting away from man-made, painted objects to found materials and sprayed or
predyed fabrics, one of the recurrent motifs of his writings was his desire to differentiate his works from the
Duchampian readymade. His Parangoles, he pointed out, evoke tents, capes, or banners without being
direct appropriations of existing objects. While the "poor" materials and the way they have been roughly
stitched together may evoke the precarious, rapidly built shelters of the Mangueira favela, Oiticica
explained that what appealed to him most in them was what he called their "structural organicity." (24)
Most important for him were the structural relations between the heterogeneous elements, in which the
properties of each part contribute to the sensory experience of the work as a whole. Thus, as Carlos
Basualdo has demonstrated, Oiticica started from a formal concern--how to "embody color" in structural
forms that would be discovered in ever-more-complex participatory experiences--and found a logical
solution to this problem in the vocabulary of the local culture of the favelas. (25)
If the Parangoles span the repertories of erudite and popular cultures, they do not, however, iron out the
tensions between the two. (26) For just as the Mangueira dancers provoked a disruption by leaving the
context of the carnaval to enter that of the museum in 1965, I, a white, European, middle-class art historian,
can only feel uneasy about the distance that separates me from the culture of the favela when I put on a
Parangole. (27) If part of the experience of the Parangole lies in discovering the object by one's self, its
other dimension consists in revealing these hidden elements to others through one's own movements.
After all, the bright colors and shiny fabrics are the same as those worn by samba dancers in the spectacular
Rio carnaval, and the short texts included in the Parangoles act like speech bubbles transforming the wearer
into an enunciator as well as a reader. Oiticica described this double experience of the individual--at once
private and collective, intimate and spectacular--as the ciclo "vestir-assistir" (wearing-watching cycle) of the
Parangole, which includes the experiences of wearing, watching, and looking while being looked at. (28)
In 1966, the Brazilian critic Harry Laus described Oiticica as the "the marginal man of art" because he lived
at the margins of both the bourgeois sphere that he had left behind and the favela culture to which he
would never fully belong. (29) Oiticica's personal situation led him to maintain an ambivalent, marginal
position in relation to both cultures, and the Parangoles seem to invite participants to experience this
ambivalence by making them self-conscious of their appearances and their relations to the objects being
worn. My own self-consciousness increased as I wore the Parangole outdoors and a woman walking in the
park came over and asked me what was stenciled in white capital letters on my banner. "Sex and violence,
this is what I like," I replied. Seeing the appalled look on her face, I felt suddenly uncomfortably aware of
the statement that I was making to others, as if I were carrying a political banner in a demonstration.
That Oiticica meant this statement sincerely is supported by his anarchist celebration of certain forms of
violence. His 1966 Box Bolide 18 Homage to Cara de Cavalo is an emotional work that includes photographs
of and a poem to Cara de Cavalo, a friend of Oiticica's and a criminal who was shot down by the police. For
the oppressed, Oiticica explained in a 1969 text, crime is often "a desperate search for happiness," violence
as a means for revolt may be justified, and figures like Cara de Cavalo should be celebrated as heroes or
martyrs. (30) Yet the Parangole is more than a political banner: it also functions as a kind of costume
capable of encouraging playacting. Although Oticica's friend Nildo coined the wording for the 1967
Parangole that reads "Estou possuido" (I am possessed), for example, I would argue that he is no more
"authentic" or "sincere" a wearer of the Parangole than I am. I could easily reassure the woman in the park
that claiming I liked violence was, in my case, ironic; but, in retrospect, I realize that I had in fact enjoyed the
opportunity of mischievously shocking a potential audience: the anxiety of being misunderstood and the
pleasure of taking on another persona seemed inextricably, and ambivalently, paired. Nildo may also have
taken delight in playing at being "possessed" in order to make his friends laugh and possibly scare bourgeois
passers-by. "You can never presume what will be a person's 'acting' in social life: there is a difference of
levels between his way of being in himself and the way he acts as a social man." This comment by Oiticica in
his text about Cara de Cavalo was triggered by the contrast between his own perception of his friend and
society's vilification of him as "public enemy number one." (31) Favoring anarchism over Communist
policies, Oiticica opened an alternative path to thinking about popular culture and Brazilian identity beyond
binary polarities that would have served to "primitivize" his Mangueira friends. Instead of embracing
popular culture like Gullar and the CPCs, Oiticica explored class differences, through the Parangoles, by
shifting the key question from "Who am I?" to "Who am I in the gaze of the other?" And this question, of
course, poses the issue of power. On the one hand, the texts in the Parangoles give a voice to the unheard:
a carnaval dancer accusingly saying "We are hungry," for example, would no doubt disturb the feel-good
spectacle expected by eager tourists. On the other hand, these texts also ask me, the wearer, to reflect on
who decides what I am--who actually "possesses" or owns me.
Guerrilla Tactics, the "Suprasensorial," and the "Constructive Will"
Whereas in the studio photographs, the careful control of lighting and contrast between the black
background and the bright colors emphasized the formal qualities of the Parangole as an object, the
outdoor session was less staged and more spontaneous. Caught in a dynamic process, the undulating
shapes of the cape were transformed into wings, and the long piece of gauze extended my body into a kind
of tail, as I ran, jumped, and climbed trees--activities in which I do not usually indulge when taking a walk in
a park. Instead of being burden-some and shroudlike, the Parangole seemed to mingle freely with the kites
being flown on Hampstead Heath.
According to Mario Pedrosa, "It was during [Oiticica's] initiation into samba that the artist shifted from a
visual experience ... to an experience based on touch, movement, and the sensual enjoyment of materials."
(32) In addition to the materials and the structure of favela architecture, Mangueira's most important
revelation for Oiticica was the experience of dancing itself: according to the artist's account, dance freed
him from what he called the "excessive intellectualization" that was threatening his work and encouraged
him to explore the performative aspect of the objects by inviting people to wear them. (33) The aerial
dimension of samba could only have struck Oiticica as he learned dance steps such as the parafuso, or
"screw," which, as Waly Salomao described it, consists in "jumping from the floor and spinning in the air like
a screw." (34) Significantly, as Salomao remarked, the Brazilian expression entrar em parafuso means to "get
into a state." This "state" of trancelike immersion or absorption, achieved through the body's movements, is
what struck Oiticica most. (35)
When the Brazilian poet Haraldo de Campos described the Parangole as a "hang-glider for ecstasy" (asa-
delta para o extase), he not only aptly emphasized the aerial or ecstatic characteristics of this immersion,
but also pointed to the Parangole's status as a tool or vehicle to reach this state. (36) For Oiticica, writing in
1967, the aim was not to simply create "tactile works," but rather to produce "propositions" or "exercises."
These exercises were meant to lead participants to experience what Oiticica called "suprasensation"--an
expansion of the senses that facilitates the discovery of one's "internal creative center" and the "expressive
spontaneity" usually repressed in everyday life. (37) For Oiticica, the Parangoles, samba, carnaval, and
hallucinogenic drugs were all means to an end: to create a "suprasensory" (suprasensorial) state, a space
where people can feel liberated from the rules and regulations of a repressive regime and thus discover
their capacity for revolt.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The process of creating a space of dissent within everyday life is precisely what Michel de Certeau described
when he celebrated "tactics" over "strategy" in his 1980 L'Invention du quotidien. (38) Strategy is a means
of calculation and manipulation in order to gain power over another, where the distinction between one's
own space and the other's is clear-cut. Where this distinction is impossible, tactics are the only ways to act
within the "other's space." Oiticica shared this kind of "tactical" processes with Yippie leader Jerry Rubin,
whose 1970 Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution encouraged all young Americans to rebel against the status
quo. (39) Modeling themselves on guerrilleros rather than organized parties, both Oiticica and Rubin
emphasized action over theoretical projections and elaborate systems, and the local rather than the
universal as the starting point for a political program. Like Rubin's "scenarios of the revolution," works such
as Oiticica's Parangoles can be used in more than one context.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Mari Carmen Ramirez has described Oiticica's and other Latin American artists' works in the 1960s as
"tactics for thriving on adversity," thus highlighting the relation between de Certeau's definition of "tactical"
actions and Oiticica's motto "on adversity we live" (da adversidade vivemos), which he included in one of
his Parangoles and as the concluding sentence of his text on the "New Brazilian Objectivity." (40) Oiticica
repeatedly celebrated the transformation of precariousness into strength, a process nowhere more visible
than in the architecture of the favelas, which embodies human creativity and invention arising from the
most dire of circumstances. Brazilians, according to Oiticica, should face the fact that they live in a Third
World country and "shoulder and swallow the positive values given by this condition." (41) In this context
artists should be driven by a "constructive will" as well as a sense of rebellion, simultaneously encouraging
Brazilians to reject their underdeveloped condition and guiding them in the creation, out of chaos, of a new
cultural and national identity. (42)
While the hovering shapes of Oiticica's Bilaterals or Spatial Reliefs, inspired by the floating forms of Kazimir
Malevich's Suprematist paintings and the hanging reliefs of Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko, seem
to embody the Neoconcrete references to the "constructive will" of early twentieth-century utopias, the
aerial Parangoles evoke flight as a more urgent kind of escape from the oppression of misery. Although I
was far from the favelas and the long period of dictatorship in Brazil, this initial spark of the Parangole's
utopian aspiration came through in my own experience of the work as I defied, for a few seconds, the laws
of gravity and "flew" over Parliament Hill, on Hampstead Heath in London. Thus, rather than being an
illustration of a strict political program, Oiticica's guerrilla type of artwork operates as what Pedrosa called
"the experimental exercise of freedom": as a means both of becoming aware of one's own freedom and of
preparing, of practicing, for another kind of freer society. (43)
In The Sculptural Imagination, Alex Potts makes a convincing case for a return to phenomenology as an
alternative to art-historical approaches that "exclude any close consideration of the visual and perceptual
dimensions" involved in viewing works of art. (44) As we saw, Oiticica's Neoconcrete works shared with the
Minimalist sculpture discussed by Potts a focus on the phenomenological dimensions of the viewing
experience. Yet, unlike Minimalism, which set up a kind of confrontation between the human body and the
autonomous art object, Neoconcrete works acknowledged the possibility of an intimate phenomenological
relation between the viewer and the artwork in a way more in tune, in fact, with Merleau-Ponty's writings.
This Neoconcretist innovation provided a starting point for Oiticica's shift from autonomous objects to
works such as the Parangoles, which can only exist when used, and act as extensions of the participant's
body.
It was thus through an interrogation of formal elements that Oiticica was able to contribute to the
"rethinking of materiality," which, as Michael Newman points out, is a more suitable term than
"dematerialization" to describe Conceptual art's collective attack on "the fetishization of the handmade
object." (45) By making objects to be used, Oiticica was able to successfully free his works from this
fetishization by recasting the materiality of his works as performances instead of commodified objects.
Moreover, the "experimental exercise of freedom" of the Parangole is based on each viewer's unique and
often ambivalent experience, which no photograph can capture. Whether taken in the artist's lifetime or in
the recent collaboration between Alessandra Santarelli and myself, photographs of people wearing the
Parangoles can only ever serve as complements--not replacements--for the experience of the work itself.
Once this is clarified, Oiticica's work emerges as a rare exception amongst the dematerializing conceptual
practices whose "rethinking of materiality" did not prevent them from being refetishized, in a sense, by the
commodification of documentary materials, the increased dependence on the artist's own body as a stamp
of authenticity, or both. Hence, paradoxically, the tactility and sensuality involved in the experience of the
Parangoles--which cannot be replaced by a photograph acting as a commodity object, and which are not
mediated by the artist's body since they are to be worn by the viewer--are precisely what makes the works
lose their materiality as fetishized art objects.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The contingent and precarious Parangoles can be conceived as conceptual tools that mobilize sensual
participation in order to achieve contrasting yet complementary goals. On the one hand, by radically
challenging conventions of museum display that have traditionally discouraged any form of tactile
participation, the Parangoles exist in a social space in which viewers become aware of identity as a shifting,
ambivalent term constructed in a performative process involving self-presentation and the gaze of others,
and exploring issues of authenticity, playacting, and power. On the other hand, the Parangoles encourage a
"suprasensory" state of absorption, bordering on headiness, which can act as an effective trigger for
contestation because it celebrates freedom and pleasure in the face of adversity, conformism, and
repression. Beyond oppositions between guerrilla tactics and sensory pleasure, intimacy and political
activism, Oiticica's Parangoles thus opened the path for a kind of postmodernism in which the aesthetic and
the anti-aesthetic, rather than being mutually exclusive, are sewn together like two sides of the same
whirling fabric.

NOTES
1. Helio Oiticica, "Notes on the Parangole" (1965), in Helio Oiticica, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: Centro de Arte Helio Oiticica, 1997), 93.
2. Neal Benezra, "The Misadventures of Beauty," in Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century, exh. cat. (Washington:
Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 1999), 17.
3. See, for example, Catherine David, "Helio Oiticica: Brazil Experiment," in The Experimental Exercise of Freedom, exh. cat. (Los
Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art. 1999), 169-201.
4. Sonia Saltzstein, "Helio Oiticica: Autonomy and the Limits of Subjectivity," Third Text 28/29 (Autumn/Winter 1994): 120.
5. See for example, Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 1998); Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950-1980, exh.
cat. (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999); and Peter Osborne, ed., Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 2002).
6. Helio Oiticica, "Position and Program" (1966) and "General Scheme for the New Objectivity" (1967), in Conceptual Art: A Critical
Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1999), 6, 42.
7. See Mari Carmen Ramirez, "Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America. 1960-1980," in Global
Conceptualism, 53-71; Alexander Alberro, "A Media Art: Conceptualism in Latin America in the 1960s," in Rewriting Conceptual Art,
ed. Michael Newman and Jon Bird (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 140-51; and Peter Osborne, "Survey," in Conceptual Art, 38-39.
8. Mario Pedrosa, "Arte ambiental, arte posmoderna, Helio Oiticica," Correio da Manha, June 26, 1966, repr. in Mario Pedrosa,
Textos Escolhidos III: Academicos e Modernos, ed. Otilia Arantes (Sao Paulo: Editora da Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1998). 355-60.
9. Ibid., 356, 355, and 356.
10. Helio Oiticica, "October 5, 1960," in Helio Oiticica. 33.
11. Helio Oiticica, "A Transicao da cor do quadro para o espaco e o sentido de constructividade" (1962), in Aspiro ao grande
labirinto: textos de Helio Oiticica (1954-1969), ed. Luciano Figueiredo, Lygia Pape, and Waly Salomao (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1986),
53.
12. The Neoconcrete manifesto, written by Ferreira Gullar, cosigned by artists Amilcar de Castro, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Reynaldo
Jardim, Theon Spanudis, and Franz Weissmann, and published in the Sunday supplement of the Jornal do Brasil, March 22, 1959,
has been reproduced and translated into English in various anthologies. For the Portuguese original, see Arte construtiva no Brasil:
Colecao Adolpho Leirner, ed. Aracy Amaral (Sao Paulo: Dorea Books and Art, 1998), 270-75.
13. For accounts of the relation between Minimalism and phenomenology, see Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture
(Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1977) and Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist
(London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). For a comparison between Minimalism and Neoconcretism, see Paulo
Herkenhoff, "Divergent Parallels: Toward a Comparative Study of Neo-concretism and Minimalism," in Geometric Abstraction: Latin
American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, exh. cat. (Cambridge. Mass.: Fogg Art Museum. Harvard University Art
Museums, 2001): 104-31; and Anna Dezeuze, "The 'Do-it-yourself Artwork': Spectator Participation and the Dematerialisation of the
Art Object, New York and Rio de Janeiro, 1958-1967" (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, Courtauld Institute of Art. 2003), chap. 4.
14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 154.
15. Briony Fer, "Judd's Specific Objects," in On Abstract Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 130-51.
16. Robert Morris, "Notes on Sculpture, Part 2" (1966), in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1968), 231. For a detailed account of the differences between Judd and Morris, see James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and
Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).
17. Frederico Morais, "Oiticica: a poesia abrigada," Diario de Noticias, October 5, 1967 [Helio Oiticica Archives, Rio de Janeiro,
Projeto Helio Oiticica].
18. Frederico Morais, "'A pureza nao existe,'" Diario de Noticias, October 6, 1967 [Helio Oiticica Archives, Rio de Janeiro, Projeto
Helio Oiticica].
19. Potts, 4.
20. Hal Foster, "The Crux of Minimalism" (1986), in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge,
Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1996), 43.
21. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, 1966-1972 (London: Studio Vista, 1973).
22. Ferreira Gullar, Cultura posta em questao; Vanguarda e subdesenvolvimento: ensaios sobre arte (Rio de Janeiro: Jose Olympo
Editora, 2002), 154.
23. Oiticica, "General Scheme for the New Objectivity," 40, 42.
24. Oiticica, "Fundamental Bases for the Definition of the Parangole" (1964), in Helio Oiticica, 87.
25. Cf. Carlos Basualdo, "Quelques annotations supplementaires sur le Parangole," in L'Art au corps, exh. cat. (Marseilles: Musee
d'art contemporain, 1996).
26. Cf. Carlos Zilio, "Da Antropofagia a Tropicalia," in O Nacional e o Popular, Eligia Chiappini Moraes Leite et al. (Sao Paulo: Editores
Brasiliense, 1982), 38.
27. Although Oiticica made it clear that the Parangoles could be worn by anyone, performing for the camera certainly established an
implicit comparison with the existing images of Oiticica's Mangueira friends. In a different setting, and worn by someone foreign to
Oiticica's circle of friends, the close relation between the Parangoles and Mangueira disappears from the photograph's field of
signifieds. The full implications of this shift and the ambiguities of my personal position require a close analysis that exceeds the
scope of this essay.
28. Oiticica, "Notes on the Parangole," 93.
29. Harry Laus, "Oiticica: Marginal da arte," Jornal do Brasil, July 20, 1966 [Helio Oiticica Archives, Rio de Janeiro, Projeto Helio
Oiticica].
30. Helio Oiticica, untitled text (1969), in Helio Oiticica. 25.
31. Ibid.
32. Foi durante a inicicacao ao samba que o artista passou da experiencia visual ... para uma experiencia do tato, do movimento, da
fruicao sensual dos materiais ... Pedrosa, 357.
33. Helio Oiticica, "A danca na minha experiencia, 12 de novembro de 1965," in Aspiro ao grande labirinto, 73.
34. Waly Salomao, "HOmmage," in Helio Oiticica, 241.
35. Paula Braga has discussed this state in relation to the "Dionysian intoxication" celebrated by Nietzsche, whose writings were
influential for Oiticica. Cf. Paula Braga, "Helio Oiticica and the Parangoles: (Ad)dressing Nietzsche's Ubermensch." Third Text 17, no.
1: 43-52.
36. Haraldo de Campos, "Hang-Glider of Ecstasy," in Helio Oiticica, 217.
37. Helio Oiticica, "Appearance of the Suprasensorial" (1967), in Helio Oiticica, 128.
38. Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien, vol. 1, Arts de faire (1980; Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 59ff.
39. Jerry Rubin, Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970). Oiticica owned a copy of this book.
40. Ramirez, 53.
41. Helio Oiticica, "Brazil Diarrheia" (1970), in Helio Oiticica, 19.
42. Cf. Oiticica, "General Scheme for the New Objectivity," 40.
43. Pedrosa's often quoted expression o exercicio experimental da liberdade does not seem to appear in his published writings until
1970, but both Oiticica and another artist close to Pedrosa. Lygia Clark, cite it much earlier. Oiticica quoted this expression in
"Appearance of the Suprasensorial." 127. Clark quoted the related term "the spiritual exercise of freedom" in her 1965 "A proposito
da magia do objeto," repr, in Lygia Clark, exh. cat. (Marseilles: Musee d'art contemporain, 1998), 153.
44. Potts, 210.
45. Michael Newman, "The Material Turn in the Art of Western Europe and North America in the 1960s," in Beyond
Preconceptions: The Sixties Experiment, exh. cat. (New York: Independent Curators International, 2000), 73.

Anna Dezeuze is a research fellow at the AHRB Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism and Its Legacies,
University of Manchester.

Dezeuze, Anna
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Dezeuze, Anna. "Tactile dematerialization, sensory politics: Helio Oiticica's Parangoles." Art Journal 63.2
(2004): 58+. Academic OneFile. Web. 9 Oct. 2013.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE
%7CA118881349&v=2.1&u=capes58&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&asid=c166267f14598c7054e96a0bcf4b79f6

Gale Document Number: GALE|A118881349

Source: Art Journal. 63.2 (Summer 2004): p58.

Document Type: Cover story

Copyright : COPYRIGHT 2004 College Art Association

http://www.collegeart.org/artjournal/