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Cinc projectors de diapositives, enregistrament sonor, pols de màrmol, plàstic i globus | |
CC3-Maileryn. Quasi Cinema (Block-Experiments in Cosmococa-Program in Progress) | |
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Oiticica, Hélio / Almeida, Neville | | | |
CC3-Maileryn. Quasi Cinema (Block-Experiments in Cosmococa-Program in Progress),
1973 |
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937, Oiticica began to study art in his home city where he formed links with Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape's Neo-concrete Group and participated in the Frente Group. From the outset, his work was geared towards condemning the living conditions and the political situation affecting Brazil. Like his friend Lygia Clark, the artist known for artworks that operate as "open propositions" designed to liberate the viewer, Oiticica posited that for artistic production to be ethical, it must be activated by its audience. In the late sixties and early seventies, Oiticica began creating architectural environments he called Penetrables and tent/cape/banner works he named Parangolés. Both the Penetrables and Parangolés were made to be inhabited, examined, worn, even hidden in; they are environmental structures, experienced by the participant. These works linked the joys of play with urgent ethical questions; a young man dancing in the layered drapes of a parangolé emblazoned with the words incorporo a revolta [embody revolt] perfectly manifests the artist's intent.
After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, Oiticica moved to New York where he lived from 1970 to 1978. He began to make films influenced by the cinema of Jack Smith and Andy Warhol and the popular culture of the United States. He undertook a series of projects under the umbrella title Quasi-Cinemas. Some of these were Super 8 films, but most of them were "projection-performances." In 1973, as part of the Quasi-Cinemas, he made the series Block Experiments in Cosmococa, Program in Progress. The Cosmococas are composed of slide projections, environments, soundtracks, and instructions, and are numbered from CC1 to CC9. The first five Cosmococa experiments were made in collaboration with the Brazilian film-maker, Neville d'Almeida.
Cosmococa 5: Hendrix-War, made in collaboration with Neville d'Almeida, consists of a space hung with legions of multi-coloured hammocks. Slides of images from the sleeve of Jimi Hendrix's War Heroes album, which provides the palette for Neville d'Almeida cocaine drawings, are projected on to the walls and ceiling of the room. Visitors are invited to lounge in the hammocks and listen to Hendrix's music, thereby filling the space between the images and the music. Hélio Oiticica's interactive installations, which invite visitor participation, seek out a cinematographic experience which envelops the viewer in a corporeal way.
By using pop culture, American and Latin music, and even cocaine, as malleable art materials, Oiticica acts as a social analyst outside the law. Cocaine might be seen as the medium par excellence in Oiticica's work, at once symbolic of extravagant consumption and the aggressive subversion of the law.
Hélio Oiticica died in Rio de Janeiro in 1980 aged 43. | | | |
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