kuratiert von Carlos Basualdo

Hélio Oiticica: Quasi-cinemas explores Oiticica’s interest in the cinematic experience, an aspect of his art that has received little attention internationally. The exhibition will feature his “quasi-cinemas,” experiments in film and slide projections carried out in the 1970s that included in a series of nine Block-Experiments in Cosmococa. Developed by Oiticica in association with Neville D’Almeida, the Cosmococas are participatory environments combining slide projection, music, objects from everyday life, and images of counterculture icons, often superimposed with cocaine drawings.
The exhibition will include three of the Cosmococa installations: CC1 Trashiscapes; CC3 Maileryn (with Marilyn Monroe’s image from a Norman Mailer book); and CC5 Hendrix-War. CC1 Trashiscapes incorporates mattresses and emery boards, plus projections of various objects from urban life, including images of Luis Buñuel from a New York newspaper. CC3 Maileryn includes sand and balloons, along with altered images of Marilyn Monroe. And in CC5 Hendrix-War, slides of altered images from the cover of Jimi Hendrix’s album War Heroes are projected on the gallery’s walls and ceiling; hammocks are hung web-like across the gallery, and Hendrix’s music fills the space. With these works—which Oiticica called “‘a multi-media salad,’ without the obtrusive dressing of ‘sense’ or point of view”—he and D’Almeida sought to question the relationship between the audience and cinema. D’Almeida will come to the Wexner Center to oversee the installation of the works.
Also on view are the quasi-cinemas Neyrótika—slides of young men taken by Oiticica in New York, and never shown in the United States—and Agripina é Roma Manhattan, the only film he ever made, also never shown in this country. A final component of the exhibition is a gallery space where visitors can browse through materials by and about Oiticica, including books, CD-ROM, tapes, and duplicated images of earlier work.

Always striving for the “direct life experience,” Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) was a prime force in Brazil’s avant-garde cultural scene in the 1960s and 70s, infusing pop culture, social issues, film, music, and experiential elements into his art. Oiticica explored issues of the image, the relationship between fine art and pop culture, and the relationship between artist and audience.
Oiticica was a member of the Neo-Concretist movement in Brazil—a group of artists and poets who were interested in moving art off the canvas into the realm of life—and was also an influence on the Tropicalism movement, a cultural phenomenon that reflected on the Brazilian identity in the context of contemporary culture.
By the mid-60s, Oiticica had abandoned traditional painting and sculpture in favor of free-form constructions (“parangolés”), such as banners and capes meant to be worn or inhabited. He started his involvement with cinema around this time, acting in the groundbreaking movie Câncer by Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha. In 1970, after earning a Guggenheim grant and moving to New York, Oiticica began to experiment with pop culture and cinema, influenced by and responding to such artists as Andy Warhol and Jean-Luc Godard.
Until recently, Oiticica was little-known outside Brazil. His work gained international recognition in 1992, when the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris hosted a retrospective of his work. Since then, he has been included in many international shows, including Documenta X in 1997 and the most recent Havana Bienal. His last solo exhibition in the United States was in 1994, when the Walker Art Center showed the aforementioned European retrospective.
Oiticica developed many of his works in close association with Neville D’Almeida (b. 1941), an independent Brazilian filmmaker who directed such films as Mangue-Bangue (1970) and Jardins de Guerra (1968). D’Almeida will help install the Cosmococas at the Wexner Center, and will also participate in the symposium on September 21.