The exhibition starts at the beginning, with Oiticica’s friendly formalist paintings on paper and cardboard from the 1950s. Image courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art.īut a potential critique of the institutional framework begins to seem petty upon confronting the art: it is stunning.
And I’m consistently bothered by the curatorial snake oil of staging these types of vexing dilemmas front and center, as if by directly pointing to the issue the organizers can recuse themselves of the responsibility of solving it. It is infrequently shown in the US this is Oiticica’s most comprehensive museum survey to date. Oiticica was an artist I loved but of whom I had no first-hand experience, and I imagine that many other visitors will also be encountering his work in the flesh for the first time. I was conflicted about the answer to that question before I saw the exhibition, which debuted at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, stopped over at the Art Institute of Chicago, and is now finishing up at the Whitney. So what’s the better alternative: to refuse to present or recreate the work out of respect for Oiticica’s principles, turning his practice into something that is read about but never seen or to acknowledge the loss and show the work anyway, in the hopes that some new propositions may continue to unfold?
Oiticica’s Argentine contemporary Julio Cortázar once wrote that museums are cemeteries-and there is no curatorial strategy that can resuscitate art from history.
#HELIO OITICICA HOW TO#
Essays in the exhibition catalog meditate at length on how to cope with the many losses that haunt the project: the loss of the artist, who might have warmed to the endeavor (Oiticica died in 1980 at the age of forty-two) the loss of over 1,000 of his works after a fire in 2009 but also the more global loss that always occurs when something that was once so keenly alive becomes a static piece of history. The curators, of course, are well aware of this fact. A trailblazer in the mid-twentieth-century utopian quest to collapse the division between art and everyday life, he was virulently anti-institution, disdainful of the convention of the retrospective, and tensely controlling over the presentation of his work, which was often interactive and site-dependent. To Organize Delirium is a traveling survey of legendary Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica-and he would have hated it. Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium , Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York City, through October 1, 2017 Image courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hanging sculptures, left to right: P58 Spatial Relief, Red, 1960 P52 Spatial Relief, 1960 NC6 Medium Nucleus 3, 1961–63 all by Hélio Oiticica. Recent retrospectives of the artist’s work have been presented at the Art Institute of Chicago (2017) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017) Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2006–07) and the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (2002).Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium, installation view. 1980, Rio de Janeiro) founded, along with his generational peers Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Ferreira Gullar, the Neo-Concrete movement in 1959, using visual geometries as a way of making the spectators aware of their spatial relationship to the artwork. The “Bólides” were made at an important moment in the development of Brazilian art and in the artist’s own trajectory, against a social backdrop in which Brazil’s military regime was becoming ever more repressive, leading to a tumultuous political atmosphere and increased economic disparity. The aim was to involve spectators in such a way that the duration of their engagement with the work feel like a substantial and unrepeatable experience.
#HELIO OITICICA SERIES#
In 1963, Hélio Oiticica, an essential figure in Brazilian postwar art, began to make his “Bólides,” a series of objects, drawing from the language of geometric abstraction, that viewers were invited to physically interact with. This presentation examines an important series of works created by Hélio Oiticica at a crucial transformational period in the artist’s development.
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