Hélio Oiticica
Fundação Itaú Cultural. São Paulo
Hélio Oiticica: Museu É o Mundo (Museum is the World) opened on Saturday, March 20. Curated by Fernando Cocchiarale and César Oiticica Filho, this retrospective is a small but comprehensive account of Oiticica’s oeuvre. While the upper floor of the building displays the artist’s earlier work, such as the Metaesquemas (Metaschemes), Bilaterais (Bilaterals) and Pequeno Núcleo (Small Nuclei) series, the other two floors combine several of Oiticica’s installations, including Tropicália and Rhodislândia, and mid-1960s series such as Bólides (Meteors) and Parangolés (Capes). The latter mark a pivotal change in Oiticica’s propositions, already showing signs of the artist’s future concern with positioning “marginality” as a social critique.
Arranged around Oiticica’s alternatively concise and digressive theoretical writings and artistic statements, the show explores sometimes contradictory possibilities for displaying his work. While some of the pieces exhibited including exhibition copies from the series Parangolés are within the reach of the viewers and as such allow for the fulfillment of Oiticica’s original insistence on participation, others, such as Bólide Caixa 18 Homenagem a Cara de Cavalo (Bólide Box 18 Homage to Cara de Cavalo), are trapped within Plexiglas cases.
The former works, from the César and Claudio Oiticica Collection in Rio de Janeiro, made for the most memorable moment of the exhibition opening: an event in which individuals from Teatro Oficicna and the Estacão Primeira da Mangueira, wearing Parangolés, walked out into the Av. Paulista and engaged exhibition participants and passersby alike. This experience is reminiscent of the exhibition Opinião 65, staged at the MAM-RJ, in which Oiticica and dancing, Parangolé clad residents of the Mangueira favela were thrown out of the museum and continued their event at its doorstep. Beyond promoting audience interaction with Oiticica’s work in the gallery, these exhibition copies speak for the continued relevance and contemporaneity of Oiticica’s oeuvre.
