be outlaw be a hero_ tate

8/13/2019 Be Outlaw Be a Hero_ TATE

1/5

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/be-outlaw-be-hero

Be an outlaw... Be a hero

Hlio Oiticica III

ByErnesto Neto, Marepe, Catherine Yass, Chris Dercon

1 May 2007

Tate Etc. issue 10; Summer 2007

Ernesto Neto

Leviathan Thot

Installation view at the Panthon, Paris 2006

Photo: Flavia Vogel

Artists and curators celebrate the influence of the Brazilian artist on their work

Ernesto Neto

Hlio was the guy who managed to transcend Postmodernism and, as a visionary, to realise the most

astonishing passage from classical Modernism to the volatile experience of present-day contemporaneity.

Softly, yanking from the wall Mondrians colour and space, he embedded it in the body and handed it to the

public. He camouflaged it in architecture, stormed the sociopolitical daily life, overfilled with sensoriality the

gaseous image to emerge as a blide(fireball) in the topology of history.His concepts of interactivity,

coexistence and marginality are fundamental to what is happening now in art and in the world.
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/be-outlaw-be-herohttp://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/be-outlaw-be-herohttp://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/tate-etc-issue-10http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/tate-etc-issue-10http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/be-outlaw-be-hero


2/5

Marepe

My first experience of Hlio Oiticicasart was from curators who found close relationships between my work,

especially theAmbulantes(street sellers) series, and his. I was also familiar with the work ofLygia Clark and

traditional Brazilian music (MPBMsica Popular Brasileira), and had contact with the Tropicalism movement,

its concepts and its experimental character. I particularly like hisParangols, the Blidesand Homenagem

Cara de Cavalo.

In Hliostime there was a need for the affirmation of our culture and the placement of social questions much

closer to the public. Today, these questions are clearer and widespread. When he used the phrase Seja

marginal, seja heri (Be an outlaw, be a hero), he wanted to make explicit the marginal universe. This

universe now wishes to be seen as an integral part of the social one. I believe that, in a certain way, my work

continues Oiticicas through the affirmation of the popular universe (such as the ideas that were also part of the

Tropicalism movement), and when I affirm the aesthetic of its inherent issues, including the African cultural

heritage, matters of social classes, memory and family, always referring to the future and the past.

Catherine Yass

Descent2002

16 mm film on projected DVD

Film still
http://www.tate.org.uk/artists/lygia-clarkhttp://www.tate.org.uk/artists/lygia-clark


3/5

Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery

Catherine Yass

Catherine YassI first encountered OiticicasBlidesbefore I knew anything about him or his more performative art. His work

communicates very directly with your senses. The colours function as form; some feel quite spatial, others

quite solid. Some colours you sink into and some reflect back at you. It seems that he understood that really

well, and in many cases they do more than illustrate the forms that they are on - they do their own thing.

I think his work is important because he manages to speak to, and play with, a veryWestern culture of

Modernism and Minimalism, while at the same time referring to his own culture. Maybe they werent so

different anyway, but he lets them work together, and that is a real achievement. I like the fact that his pieces

feel handmade. In relation to the objects and materials that he put inside theBlides, many of them were

personal homages to specific people, which gives the work a generosity. Some of the boxes look as though

they are made to move inside, although when they are in a museum nobody ever moves them, so I dont know

if you are meant to or not. Sometimes they will look like one thing from the outside, but when you peer inside

they are very different. You can get very sophisticated dolls houses like that, where you dont know if there is a

room on the other side or not. His work suggests a little bit of that - mysterious spaces behind spaces.

In terms of my films, such as Descentand Flight, in which you see the images upside down or rotating, I try to

create a framework where there is a space and a time where people can have their own thoughts. You can

mentally wander around it and try things out, or make your own associations, your own memories. Oiticica is

setting an equivalent frame with his work, in which you can play and maybe find something out about yourself.

He never actually tells people what to think, and, through that, I believe he understood very well about how

politics work. So his art functions like a form of micro-politics.

Chris Dercon

When I started working at PS1 in New York in 1987, it was decided to do an exhibition on Brazilian art,

architecture and music, which got to be entitled Brazil Projects, (held in 1988) which included visual art,

architecture, performance, television and music not unlike the Tropicalism exhibit recently seen at the

Barbican Art Gallery. We had amongst others been very impressed by Kynaston McShines 1970 MoMA

exhibition Information, in which he looked far beyond Europe and America, and had included work by Cildo

Mereiles and Hlio Oiticica. We travelled to Brazil, and in downtown Rio we visited the impressive Projeto

Hlio Oiticicathe foundation that looked after his work and archive that was run by his family and friends. It is


4/5

an incredible well kept, organized archive and gets even better by the year On returning to New York, we

decided we would dedicate an entire upper floor of PS1 to Oiticicas Tropicaliainstallation as well as

some Spatial Reliefsand Parangoles. For us, Oiticicas work was not only a discovery but also a confrontation

with our own lack of knowledge on him, his cultural context and the period. We invited Guy Brett to New York,

who got to write a cover story for Art in America on Hlio, which surprised many.

A few years later in 1992 Luciano Figuereido, a close friend of Hlio and coordinator of the Projeto, Hlios

brothers, Guy Brett , Catherine David, me and a few others put together the first retrospective of his work at the

Witte de With centre for contemporary art in Rotterdam, which travelled around Europe including the Jeu de

Paume in Paris, Tapies Foundation In Barcelona, and to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The Dutch

press was extremely unenthusiastic about the exhibition. They thought it laughable, old fart Brazilian hippy

body art. I guess that exhibition came too early. However, it sparked an enormous amount of interest among

international curators, art institutions and even some gallerists as Marian Goodman. The Projeto Hlio Oiticica

was soon inundated with requests and letters. It started the Oiticica ball rolling.

As Oiticica conceived so many different propositions for art works or participatory works, the exhibition raised

many questions about how to display his work adequately. As curators we had to askwhat do wedo? Do

you show the work as it was and allow the patina of age? Or do you clean , repair, reconstruct? How do you re-

install a piece? What is the correct spatial interpretation of a work likeGrand Nuclei? How far do you allow

participation? To us it was important to consider these aspects seriously, as much of the material at that time

was in poor condition, largely due to the effect of the Brazilian climate. We even organized an international

workshop about this.

Where and how you install Oiticicas work has a strong influence on how it is seen and experienced. Think of

the White Chapel Edenexperience.A perfect match, given the interesting symbiosis of a kind of upbeat but

poor Brazilianess so many Brazilian exiles came to London. The Oiticica exhibition in Houston was installed

in the fabulous wing designed by Mies van der Rohe. It showed Oiticicas radicalism in an unseen way, The

combination of Hlio and Mies created a kind of spectacular ass well as highly didactic ping-pong effect

communicating both with and against the architecture of Mies. Or a ping pong between two different kinds

of modernisms.

One could immediately understand how Oiticica took a special place in the Modernist Movement as such.

Along with other Brazilians like Oscar Niemeyer or Caetano Veloso, Oiticica had found a gap, created a hole

within International Modernismhe had created a Brazilianness of Modernism, which was how to connect


5/5

the local with the international. They did this through their interest in Brazilian nature, the popular arts and so

on. Oiticica brought in a popular lyrical modernism (some call it Tropicalism Modernism). And this sense of

connecting is why Hlio has been such an important influence on other artistsincluding Dominique

Gonzales-Foerster,Pierre Huyghe,Liam Gillick and Rikrit Tiravanija.

One aspect about Oiticica that we didnt research enough about at the time was to explore his numerous

collaborative projects. I have met so many peopleand still dowho said that they worked with himgraphic

designers, artists, groupies, filmmakers. Oiticica was an itinerant urban dweller who left distinct traces

wherever he went. It means that there is a lot of terrain left to cover.
http://www.tate.org.uk/artists/pierre-huyghehttp://www.tate.org.uk/artists/liam-gillickhttp://www.tate.org.uk/artists/liam-gillickhttp://www.tate.org.uk/artists/pierre-huyghe

be outlaw be a hero_ tate

Documents