Hélio Oiticica with Bólides and Parangolés at his studio, Engenheiro Alfredo Duarte Street, Rio de Janeiro, ca. 1965. Photo: © Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

The Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main (MMK) is presenting the biggest European retrospective exhibition of the work of the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, running until the 12th January 2014. You will know Oiticica, perhaps without realising, because in 1968 Caetano Veloso used the title of one of his artworks for a music album which would make it world famous: Tropicalia. Oiticica’s Tropicalia was an installation inspired by the favelas of Brazil, with it’s own beach hut, sand, real plants and living parrots. Every contemporary art museum wants to have its own Tropicalia now, and yet the work of Oiticica, more metabolic than object based, more affective than retinal, is still to be discovered.

I am not interested in Oiticica’s parrots (now swooning absurdly under the artificial light of the museum) or in the Tropicalia cool revival in the world of fashion. I’m interested in Oiticica as a figure that condenses and anticipates the becoming of the 21st century artist: migrant, precarious, intern, temporary artist in resident, pansexual, visionary, vulnerable, sick, prematurely dead. Cognitive bio-political worker.

In 1971 Oiticica, 35 years old, would travel from Brazil to New York with a Guggenheim grant for artists. Before arriving in New York, Oiticica had already developed an immense and incredibly innovative body of work that would herald the paradigm shift that would transform future curators and cultural managers —who at this time were still disconnected from the kinds of social and political practices that enriched the work of Oiticica. His work anticipated the move from work to relation, from the individual to the interpersonal, from visual reception to a multi-sensory experience, from object to subject and from art as sort of clinical diagnosis to art as universal shamanism.

Hélio Oiticica, Parangolés, 1965-1979. Installation view, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst. Photo: Axel Schneider © MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst.

Before arriving in New York, Oiticica had already elaborated not only his Tropicalia but also the notion of “environmental art” and “metaphysical colours”, the “Bolides” (mouldable structures that could be manipulated by the public) and the “Parangoles” (pieces of material that served as improvised outfits for starting a social ritual of dance and creation)… His arrival in New York and the securing of the Guggenheim grant do not serve as ‘recognition’ for Oiticica but rather as metamorphosis: just as Gregory transformed into an insect, Oiticica transforms into a migrant from the South without resources and wandering the streets of downtown Manhattan. When the grant finishes in 1972, Oiticica begins working odd jobs, including a trafficker of cocaine, pills and hash. Oiticica died in 1980 of a cardiac arrest.

It was during this period of bare survival in New York, in which the identity of the precarious migrant and drug dealer was threatening to devour the artist, when his artistic collaboration with Nelville D’Almeida occurred. They made a work together entitled Block-Experiment in Cosmococa: a combination of installations verging on the cinematic, the architectural and the performative which took place in Oiticica’s apartment on the Lower East Side. There is no visual documentation of the installations but Oiticica’s innovative texts that reconstruct the installations (protocals of the work, conversations, letters, reflections), could be found today in an anthology of the best literary experiments of the 20th Century.

Hélio Oiticica, Bloco-Experiências in Cosmococa – programa in progress, CC2 Onobject. Installation view, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst. Photo: Axel Schneider © MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst.

Each Block-Experiment in Cosmococa was an installation that assembled at least four elements: an interior design of the space that marked out the conditions of reception with a series of objects (hammocks, sofas, balloons…); the projection of a series of slides (popular images of cultural icons: Marilyn, Hendrix, ect.) onto the surfaces of the 6 sides of the room (including the ceiling and the floor); the design of a sound environment; and finally a performative protocol in which instructions are presented that immediately establish certain relations between vistor-participants and the work. A substance similar to cocaine (who knows if it was actually the real cocaine that Oiticica was trafficking to live off) appears in lines across the faces of Marilyn or Hendrix.

Once again Oiticica, like a clairvoyant or a lookout, points out the track that would follow: in the 1970’s the relations between the North and the South would be regulated and mediated by the production and trafficking of drugs. The United States were entirely tied up in Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, Chile, Columbia, Cuba… by huge lines of coke. In the “war against drugs” that Nixon declared in 1971, cocaine would become the “scapegoat” that would allow the US to acquire a moral advantage over its political adversaries. Used legally in many pharmacological compounds and trafficked illegally to the USA through trade routes from the Caribbean and South America, cocaine is in the 1970’s the prime object of mass consumption, as distributed as Warhol’s Campbell soup. The difference between Campbell soup and cocaine (a difference which also distinguishes the publicist work of Warhol and the shamanic rituals of Oiticica) is of course that the latter is a powerful technology for the modification of consciousness.

Oiticica was looking for a kind of artistic experience that could be “sniffed” like a line of cocaine. In the Cosmococas, Oiticica and Nelville use cocaine as a kind of cognitive “readymade”: they displace cocaine from the networks of trafficking and consumption and they integrate it into a system of signification in which it can function as a dispositive for producing dissident forms of subjectification.

Each Cosmococa is a multimedia texture that, Oiticica states, “functions as an open program for random operations” capable of enacting a series of tools for cognitive, corporeal and sensory de-habituation. Here Oiticica is investing in the organic materiality of processes of subjectification which art proposes and the possibility to create a bio-public: a living spectator whose metabolism is open to the mutation.

Portrait Hélio Oiticica, 1979. Photo : Ivan Cardoso © Ivan Cardoso. Courtesy Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main.

L’article Oiticica: Pharmacofictions est apparu en premier sur Peau de Rat.

Cover of the Exhibition Catalogue Womanhouse (showing Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro). Design by Sheila de Bretteville. (Feminist Art Program, California Institute of the Arts, 1972). Photo © Donald Woodman. Courtesy of “Through the Flower” archive

In October the curatorial and activist collective a people is missing will republish and distribute a video documentary by Johanna Demetrakas entitled Womanhouse (1974, 47 min.) for this first time in France. I still remember when I first saw the documentary; an afternoon in New York in Laura Cottingham’s house. Laura had undertaken an expansive investigation about feminist artistic practices in North America in the 1970’s in order to make Not For Sale (1998), which is without doubt the best documentary about the theme to date.  In her personal archive was the Demetrakas video.  At the time I situated myself as queer, while Laura continued to position herself as a radical feminist. Watching the documentary about Womanhouse together, we reconciled each other and managed not to get trapped in the indeterminable debate between post-structural criticism and socialist feminism.  After all we have the same history in common. On the pretext that she had a double copy of everything, Laura filled my backpack up with videos with the frenzy of a bootlegger or somebody who had been holding a message that had waited years to be told.  Still inexpert, I went back to my apartment in Brooklyn and spent a week working through the videos (by Demetrakas, Martha Rosler, Ilene Segalove, Faith Ringgold, Adrian Piper, Ana Mendieta…and a copy of Not for Sale) as if they had been made only for me, taking notes that would constitute my first classes in gender and performance in the University of Paris VIII at the beginning of the year 2000.  Feminist art in the 1970’s was neither a style nor a movement, but rather a set of heterogeneous operations of the denaturalization of the relations between sex, gender, visuality and power. The documentary Womanhouse changed my way of thinking about artistic practice and helped me to understand that it was possible to transform the university and the museum into spaces of sexual and political emancipation.

Ignored for years by the hegemonic narratives of art history, the project “Womanhouse” emerges today as an indispensable work for understanding artistic practices of the 1970’s as well as for rethinking the future of art pedagogies and the relationships between architecture, performance and social activism. The documentary invites us to approach the first feminist pedagogical project initiated at the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) by Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro and a group of students at the beginning of the 1970’s. In the autumn of 1971, Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro inaugurated the Feminist Art Program. With the school under construction and a lack of space, Chicago and Shapiro took on an idea proposed by Paula Harper: rent a space and transform it into a feminist project.  They found an abandoned house on a waiting list to be destroyed on Mariposa Street in a residential neighbourhood in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Despite the derelict state of the house, Judy Chicago decided that the “mariposa” (butterfly in Spanish; her lucky animal) was a good sign. During the following six weeks a group of 25 women would study, work and perform inside of the house, transforming each of the spaces and the 17 bedrooms into places of work and study. Demetrakas films the collective work sessions in Womanhouse and shows how the space transformed from a house to a place of exhibition between 30^th of January and 28^th of February in 1972. As if it were political allegory (or history’s bad joke), the first exhibition of feminist art would take place in an abandoned house: a domestic space about to be demolished, transformed first into a collaborative and environmental artwork and later into an ephemeral gallery.

Vickie Hodgetts, Robin Weltsch, and Susan Frazier.
Nurturant Kitchen at Womanhouse, 1972.

In Womanhouse, it is domestic space itself, historically naturalized as “feminine”, that is transformed into an object of critique and artistic experimentation. The heterosexual home, a privatized and disciplinary site, is politicized and denaturalized through language, painting, installation and performance. This process of investigation began in 1969 at Fresno State College (now California State University) when, in response to the exclusion of women in the university and the circuits of production and display of art, Judy Chicago began to distance herself from abstract art and organized the first course of “art and feminism” outside of the art school building. In the “Kitchen Consciousness Group”, Judy Chicago and her colleague Kathie Sarachild put in motion an experimental method of collective learning through speech and through the dramatization of exclusion.  Language displaces painting and performance takes the place once held by sculpture in traditional art training.  Chicago groundbreaking idea was that art could transform consciousness and therefore become also a tool of political emancipation. On the other hand, empowerment techniques and consciousness-raising sessions became tools to produce art. Breaking the hierarchy of teacher-student, the participants constructed collective autobiographical narrations of their political experiences of being artists and women. Rape, discrimination, abortion, maternity, lesbianism, masturbation, divorce, contraception… appear now as spaces of not only political but artistic intervention. In a process of dematerialisation of art and intensification of critical practice, learning in the context of artistic practice shifts from forms of material production towards an art understood as a process of cognitive and somatic emancipation.

The aim of art is no longer to produce an “object” but rather to invent an apparatus of re-subjectification that is capable of producing a “subject”: another conscience, another body.

Sandy Orgel, Linen Closet, 1972, Womanhouse project

It is both motivating and moving today to revisit the interior of Womanhouse through Demetrakas’ documentary: to attend the conscious-raising conversations, to enter into the kitchen transformed by Vicki Hodgetts into an entirely pink space in which fried eggs invade the walls as breasts, or Judy Chicago’s “Menstruation Bathroom” which was full of red tampons that would later be unfairly denounced as a cliché of feminist art (Chicago’s was just underlying the power of new biopolitical and hygienic techniques over the body), or to see the linen closet transformed into the body of a woman by Sandy Orgel, or watch Chris Rush performing the work “Scrubbing” in which she performs the act of cleaning the floor in real time before an audience as uncomfortable as they are surprised, or Faith Wilding (today known internationally for her cyberfeminist work) in her performance “Waiting” in which she narrates female existence as an indeterminate process of moments of waiting, or again Faith Wilding and Janice Lester dressed up as a penis and vagina performing Judy Chicago’s “Cock and Cunt Play”.

Screenshot of Womanhouse by Johanna Demetrakas (1974). Faith Wilding and Janice Lester, The Cock and Cunt Play, performance. “Womanhouse” Project, 1972

Womanhouse produced a critical intervention of denaturalization that also brought into focus the interrelations between 4 supposedly distinct institutions: the university, the museum, the domestic space and the body. Womanhouse posed a critique of domestic space as a technology of production and domination of the feminine body while highlighting the institution of marriage and sex as a regime of enclosement and discipline. The displacement of these first feminist art pedagogies to domestic space (to Judy Chicago’s kitchen and to Womanhouse), which were located outside of the university and museum, is a sign of the epistemological limits of educational institutions of the 1970’s. Feminist critique put in question the architectures of knowledge and its epistemological frontiers. It is possible now to understand Womanhouse as part of the work of Institutional Critique that other artists (Michael Asher, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, Hans Haake, Marcel Broodthaers…) were carrying out at the same time, and yet they extended the critique further: to the institution of domesticity and its relations with art education and the museum.

Institutional contempt directed towards the artistic practices and criticisms of feminism would cause the forgetting and even the total destruction of the archive of feminist art from the 70’s: the house in which the Womanhouse experiment took place, the installations, the murals, the architectural transformations, were all destroyed during Roland Reagan’s government. However, the images captured by Demetrakas return to us today, to put it in the words of Georges Didi-Huberman and Warburg, as a kind of ‘ghost’ or ‘survivor’ so that it is still possible to dream our own history and imagine other possible mutations of the institutions of the school and museum.

Curatorial and activist collective a people is missing
Womanhouse, a film by Johanna Demetrakas (1974 VOSTF)

L’article Revisiting Womanhouse est apparu en premier sur Peau de Rat.

La Manif pour Tous, Facebook post.

As you may have guessed from my absence from the blog in the last couple of weeks, I have been voluntarily disconnected from the Internet, enjoying a detox, getting used to nourishing myself with water, sun and passing the time accompanied by dogs and goats; materials and presences which are decidedly less volatile that the signs of the screen. Before switching on the computer I had plans to talk about the new cycle of revolutions currently being announced, about transfeminist indigenism in Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Brazil…, about the history of colonization, about those that resisted slavery and the plantation economy, about the necessity to re-edit the work of Eric Williams and Herbert Aptheker in French and Spanish and about the histories still to be written…in the end, I’m going to talk about the first image I received in my inbox. This was a photograph sent by Manif pour Tous (a French group who fight against homosexual marriage and gay and lesbian parenting). Four young guys bare-chested in pink shorts use their bodies to make a tower, intertwining their legs and straining to form the shape of a cross, under a flag which portrays a symbolic heterosexual family (unit of four, holding hands) all against a mountain range and blue sky background. I had to look twice at the origin of this image (my first thought was that this was the “Holidays in the Mountains” cover of the gay magazine Têtu) to make sure that this was in fact an ‘action’ by an anti-homosexual militant group. A similar disconcerting effect occurred while observing the images and actions of the fundamentalist catholic and French far right-wing groups Les Antigones or the masculinist collective Homen. Les Antigones dress up as good “Mariannes” (long white dresses, ribbons the colors of the French flag and traditional bonnets) carrying “bread and salt” to the Russian embassy “to show their solidarity with a friendly ally outraged by Femen.” Meanwhile, Homen restore masculine sovereignty by showing their bare chests (like Femen, but with masks) outside the Hotel de Ville.

Homen Collective (screenshot, YouTube)

Les Femen © Alvaro Canovas

If I’m talking about these images in the context of a Blog dedicated to artistic practice it’s because I would argue that there is, behind these new reactionary activisms of the extreme right, a problem (call it a confusion of..) the aesthetic and performative order. My humble hypothesis is that the awakening of the new civil rights movements of the extreme right is accompanied by the consistent and paradoxical referencing of the forms of performative actions invented by the radical left: black civil rights movements, feminisms, sexual dissidence and AIDS activism.

The reasons for this aesthetic displacement are difficult to elucidate: perhaps the right have forgotten their cultural inheritance. When the homophobic right has claimed as their ancestor the gay and communist Jean Moulin, are we facing a form of oblivion, a negation or simply a banal lack of knowledge of history? How can we understand in alternative ways the recuperation of Antigone as a hero dressed in white bringing bread and salt to the embassy of Putin? Perhaps it’s just that the new right movements don’t dare to assume their true authentic visual-political references: futurism, fascist aesthetics, naturalism…

The right envy the emancipatory potential, the social creativity and the aesthetics of the left: they envy our protests and our bodies, they envy the ways in which we show our skin, they envy the sexual energy of our public actions, they envy our style of revolt. They are jealous of the way our desire leaves domestic space to invade the public square converting assemblies into celebrations, they are jealous of the insolence of our banners. They are jealous of the violent intelligence of ActUp, the post-porn furor of Pussy Riot, the pop efficiency of Femen. They are jealous of our music and our signs. Semiotic jealousy, somatic envy. Aesthetic jealousy, performative envy.

Historically, the actions of blacks, feminists and homosexuals have been characterized through the dissident use of the body in public space. In the 60’s in the geo-political context of the wars of de-colonization, the minorities (of class, race, sex, disability…) invented new forms of political intervention: African Americans refused to be an invisible and segregated workforce; heterosexual women refused to carry out the work of reproduction enclosed by domesticity; homosexuals, transvestites, transexuals and disabled people rejected the condition of ‘illness’, the exclusion from public life and they defended their right to full citizenship. The insistent presence of women, black, homosexual, transsexual and disabled bodies in public space is an answer to specific forms of biopolitical oppression and control. As Dick Hebdige argues in Subculture- The Meaning of Style (1979), the social and political minorities use corporal style (whether this be in the nude or with a veil) as a strategy that allows for an interruption of the processes of normalization, thus re-appropriating a body-code that has been confiscated or resignifying an object or space with which they are associated in normative ways. This process of reapropriation, “détournement” and semiotic resistence plays again the corporal style of the dominant semiotic community.

And here is where the actions of Manif pour Tous, Les Antigones and Homen start to loose the plot. Playing with the signs and codes of subaltern groups, our fellow citizens of the right (who are also representatives of the dominant majority) just end up making a mess. The white dresses of Les Antigones only frighten fashion lovers and the bare chests of Homen (if it weren’t for the masks) looks more like a group of bears off to the Marais. Deleuze has already stated that the fundamental difference between the right and the left is that on the left you have to think. Oh, and happy holidays!

Dona Ann McAdams, Carnival Knowledge, New York City, 1984. ©Dona Ann McAdams

Les Antigones Collective , Paris, 2013. screenshot, Youtube.

L’article Lessons in Style est apparu en premier sur Peau de Rat.