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Indepth Arts News:
"Participatory Environments by Vangaurd Bazilian Artist Helio Oiticica"
2001-09-18 until 2001-12-30
Wexner Center for the Arts
Columbus, OH,
USA
Interactive environments designed by Hélio Oiticica, a leader in the Brazilian avant-garde
movement, will be installed in the Wexner Center this fall in a landmark
exhibition organized by the center. Hélio Oiticica: Quasi-cinemas, on view
September 18–December 30, 2001, explores the artist’s unique relationship to
cinema and his keen interest in the cinematic experience. By placing Oiticica in the
context of filmmaking and by presenting these rarely shown works, the exhibition
breaks new ground in the understanding of one of the most important international
artists of the second half of the 20th century.
Oiticica used the term quasi-cinemas to refer to his experiments in film and slide
projection, works meant to redefine the audience’s relationship to cinema. Three of the
room-sized environments, designed by Oiticica and Brazilian filmmaker Neville
D’Almeida, feature slide projections and elements from pop culture -- from Jimi Hendrix
music to images of Marilyn Monroe -- plus such materials as balloons, sand, and
hammocks that visitors are invited to use and inhabit. The exhibition will also feature
other quasi-cinemas, as well as films about Oiticica and the only film Oiticica made.
This marks the first solo exhibition of Oiticica’s work in the United States in seven
years and the first exhibition of his work co-produced by a multidisciplinary institution.
The exhibition is curated by Carlos Basualdo, the Wexner Center’s chief curator of
exhibitions, with assistance from Projeto Hélio Oiticica. It is co-produced by the
Wexner Center for the Arts, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and
the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne.
The exhibition has received major support from BrasilConnects, a non-profit
organization that supports Brazilian arts and culture projects around the world.
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.
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