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Morphology in the Studio: Hélio Oiticica at the Museu Nacional Author(s): Irene Small Source: Getty Research Journal, No. 1 (2009), pp. 107-126 Published by: J. Paul Getty Trust Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23005369 . Accessed: 21/09/2013 12:27 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . J. Paul Getty Trust is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Getty Research Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 12:27:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Morphology in the Studio: Helio Oiticica at the Museu Nacional Irene Small I I begin with a piece of ephemera, a slice of historical context in most banal form (fig. 1). It is a weekly schedule of the Brazilian avant-garde artist Helio Oiticica’s activi ties, written out in his hand, probably from early 1964, shortly before he invented his new order of art object, the parangole. With meticulous precision, the artist has divided his days into temporal blocks, noting when he would work at his job (mornings, Monday through Thursday); when he would eat (lunch at noon, dinner at seven o’clock); when he would go to sleep (at half past eleven, except weekends); and even when he would relax (the beach on Sundays, samba rehearsals on Saturday nights). Oiticica’s most fre quent activity is “working in the studio.” What the schedule reveals, however, is the com ings and goings that occur around the making of art, the truly quotidian progress of the day-to-day. I foreground this schedule because it demonstrates the coincidence of two partic ular activities: the artist’s attendance at samba rehearsals and his daily job at the Museu Nacional, where he worked for his father, the entomologist Jose Oiticica Filho. Oiticica’s participation in the samba culture of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (shantytowns), a culture sig nificantly removed from his middle-class background, is well-known. The artist himself and subsequently his commentators frequently cited this culture as the inspiration for his most innovative works, the parangoles, a series of multilayered painted capes, ban ners, and tents meant to be worn on the body and danced with (see fig. 5). The parangoles marked a critical juncture in Oiticica’s formal investigations into what he called “color structure in space,” the way in which color’s phenomenological address to the viewer might extend beyond the flat surface of a canvas into time and three-dimensional space.1 From 1959 to 1964, Oiticica experimented with creating such chromatic structures, rang ing from suspended reliefs (whose folded or nested forms encouraged the viewer to cir culate around them) to moveable sculptures that the artist called bolides (in which one could manipulate color through touch). The parangoles, however, opened up a new realm of participation in which viewers, and viewer behavior, could no longer be conceived of as separate from the work of art. As a participant wearing a parangole dances, his or her movement continually regenerates the artwork’s form. The parangole thus incorporates the viewer into the Getty Research Journal, no. 1 (2009): 107-26 © 2009 Irene Small 107 This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 12:27:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ftQiLfi’iLiO I At— 5, jo (‘0,00 Uco i5,t>o i^Oo &,CG 2.100 23fA 5eiJ TR-4B ATl’uee. >»(%«r r /f7b~r P*bai» jP-ffi /Wvif J ce^e; SX.4. 0«»p« ALgetW IMJi**) p/t-e-A <&&!* vism C°’J*4-‘ *4./o *Ut U«u|.; ir. WW C^4/f &£ KAii’q 4een~ SatC. it«<‘,i ft>»jlf) tMtMit TM-o. .4TTu TM£. ftrtu&. ‘ztfJe?. CA& Pit.— vrs/f^ Pot^’S. 0>tzl Ue<*. ?;«>l tki-Ut, Syttttoe /*<*£’ P+G A-7t ^ ?}«<**) seMA/jfe, h-nitj. P-QM *~T?aq. AT£u£§ cu. fO&Mlk kyij&Y> TM$ ris rw «£•_) £^Pdne t>e e/#hc Stft H’ $?> tclAiiL (taUlWfcfi fcc^QJh) 7*48 ftriuQ Ai4(ko (4aAj vY/C^j fmf) P-H A-tcvisl (•utdfrif J A fwln -ewi ^uei) lAnrf. im> ffeuei (f’ikt. OUt l/fic) ‘ Fig. l. Weekly schedule of Helio Oiticica, ca. 1964. Rio de Janeiro, Archives Helio Oiticica/Projeto Helio Oiticica. Image courtesy Archives Helio Oiticica/Projeto Helio Oiticica 108 GETTY RESEARCH JOURNAL, NO. 1 (2OO9) This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 12:27:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions work of art at the same time as he or she animates it from stasis into motion, thereby voiding the subject-object split of a traditional work of art. For Oiticica, the parangole’s collapse of this implicit viewing structure, combined with its strong associations with the marginal social world of thefavelas and the carnival culture of dance, rendered the form exemplary of radical art’s rejection of the museum in favor of a new participatory realm.2 Indeed, when the artist “inaugurated” his new order ofparangole at the exhibi tion Opinao 65 at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro with a number of his friends from thefavela, the carnivalesque group was denied entry to the museum. The inauguration of the parangole was thus forced to occur outside the museum, an event immediately upheld as indicative of the order’s radical, anti-art aims.3 The parangole’s antipathy to the rarefied environment of the museum has defined the interpretation of Oiticica’s work since the order’s first appearance in his career. As critics have rightfully argued, a parangole displayed on a museum wall is not a. parangole, but a formal vestige of the work, a material husk awaiting vivification through a partici pant’s action.4 Yet, what has never been adequately explored is the fact that the artist conceived of the parangole and, importantly, designated it with a name, while in the employ of a different museum, the Museu Nacional.5 The Museu Nacional is a natural history museum located in the former palace of the amateur scientist Emperor Dom Pedro II in the Sao Cristovao neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. Here, Oiticica helped his father classify Lepidoptera, an order of insects consisting of butterflies and moths, from 1961 through 1964.6 It was in precisely these years that the artist also developed the internal taxonomy with which to classify his own works, a system he would use in one form or another throughout his life. I believe that the taxonomic system Oiticica learned at the Museu Nacional pro vided the conceptual basis for the biological, organic framework of his oeuvre and for what the artist would later term his program-in-progress.71 would further argue that it is the underlying logic of this taxonomic system, rather than the parangole’s rhetorical sta tus as anti-art, that provides a method for understanding how art objects like bolides or parangoles might operate within a realm “beyond art.” The move of Oiticica’s artworks out of the Museu de Arte Moderna, in other words, is critically related to the artist’s deploy ment of the epistemological framework that he absorbed contemporaneously within the Museu Nacional, a conceptual conjunction that troubles the redundant antinomy of art/ life through methods drawn, paradoxically, from the observation and classification of (biological) life itself. Foundational within this epistemological framework is the concept of morpho logy, the comparative study of organic form and its change over time. Morphology’s philosophical roots lie with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who coined the word and established its basic principles at the end of the eighteenth century.8 Goethe believed that the task of science was to discern the “inner meaning” of living form. Fixed form (Gestalt) was only an abstraction of an organism’s deeper principle of change (Bildung).9 In UberdieAufga.be der Morphologie (On the tasks of morphology, 1817), the physiologist 109 Small Morphology in the Studio This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 12:27:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Karl Friedrich Burdach termed this principle an organism’s ground (Gruna), that is, its origin and cause.10 Such formulations, rooted in morphology’s idealist tradition, reso nate with early art historical concepts of style. Johann Joachim Winckelmann sought evidence of the classical Greek ideal by constructing a historical model of the growth, maturation, and decline of ancient art. The ideal itself was abstract, as was the Urpflanze, Goethe’s archetypal plant and symbol of generative growth. Although immaterial, both aesthetic ideal and generative principle could be discerned through the disciplined per ception of material form.11 Both morphology and art history thus sought underlying principles of development through the comparative analysis of individual specimens or works of art.12 Further, this development was frequently conceived as a telos. Alois Riegl’s Kunstwollen, or artistic will, proposed an inner relation between the progres sion of a logic of forms and its unfolding historical context. Oiticica himself described the “constructive will” of Brazilian art in 1967—a Kunstwollen that mapped Brazilian avant-garde practice onto the country’s concrete social conditions of underdevelop ment—and in doing so evoked both as processes of dynamic formation.13 Like Goethe’s Bildung, this “constructive will” was an inner necessity, a transformative force rooted in the generative conditions of form itself. If morphology’s philosophical aim was to discern an organism’s “inner meaning” (that is, its will to change), morphology in the taxonomist’s laboratory was a rather dif ferent affair, consisting mainly of the painstaking study, comparison, and classification of organic form. Jose Oiticica Filho, for example, was a specialist in the Sphingidae, a family of butterfly native to the Americas of which he discovered several new species. For each new species, Oiticica Filho submitted an article for publication in which a “type” specimen was named and morphologically described. In 1961, when Helio began to work as his assistant, Oiticica Filho was preparing new research on the Oiticica butterfly, a genus named in his honor by an American colleague in 1949. According to a report filed by Oiticica Filho to the head of the zoology section of the museum in September 1961, the Oiticica genus had “unfolded into two,” thus warranting renewed attention and possibly a new name.14 Here, in condensed form, lies the tension between morphology’s philosophi cal interest in transformation and the finite classifications of its operational demands. In Carl Linnaeus’s binomial system, from which all modern taxonomy derives, a name was merely a marker for a thing, and thus arbitrary and unmotivated. And yet this name was motivated, not in relation to what it designated, but to the system by which such a designation could be made. In compensation for the arbitrary relations between names and the teeming diversity of natural things, Linnaeus’s system offered an inter nal logic of hierarchical categories, each grouping nested within the next. To discover a new species was not to create form, but to organize an unnamed form within an existing schema of knowledge, each act of nomination a reinstantiation of the system itself. At its most basic level, therefore, taxonomy is the organization of knowledge. And occasionally, the organization of knowledge also rearranges its pattern. This is what Foucault calls epistemic shift.15 In the wake of Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution, for 110 GETTY RESEARCH JOURNAL, NO. 1 (2009) This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 12:27:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions example, morphology was pressed to identify the individual developmental of a single organism (ontogenesis) as well as the genealogical development of species (phylogene sis).16 Taxonomy, in turn, shifted from the listing of discrete organisms to their classifica tion as a reflection of phylogenetic descent. In place of fixity and independent categories of living things, evolution proposed interrelatedness and constant change. In doing so, it put under ontological and operational pressure the category of the species, the most basic unit of taxonomic identification.17 If organisms were under permanent evolution, a spe cies was only a theoretical reality. Designation was merely an epistemological approxima tion. Like a photograph, or perhaps a work of art, it offered a temporary stilling: a static image of a living form itself in the process of continuous change. For this and many other reasons, taxonomy (or systematics, as the modern practice is called) continues to be a science prone to revision and contentious debate. The theory of evolution provided an explanation for the existence of hybrids, variations, overlap ping species, and the like.18 But it was up to the taxonomists to establish a stable system of nomenclature to take such intermediate phenomena into account. The “unfolding” of the Oiticica genus that preoccupied Oiticica Filho in 1961 at the Museu Nacional is just one case. This was an epistemic shift lowered to the daily toil of the laboratory: faced with the possible emergence of a new genus or species, one could “lump” or one could “split.” Most often, Oiticica Filho chose the latter. As he wrote in one report, citing the French biologist Lucien Cuenot, “Dans le cas difficiles, il est preferable d’etre diviseur.”19 Every taxonomic revision results in a new relationship in the order of living things—not, of course, in nature, which proceeds according to its own course, but in dis course, representation, and art, where the residue of knowledge is displayed. In 1961, for example, the task fell to Helio Oiticica to help rearrange the Museu Nacional’s Sphingidae specimens in their wooden trays according to the latest taxonomic research.20 The younger Oiticica was also at work in the library, where he was responsible for cataloging biblio graphic files for the American species of the Sphingidae order “from Linnaeus until the present time.”21 Knowledge was reordered, then, in the physical spaces of the filing cabinet and the exhibition display. In the filing cabinet, the organization of knowledge was revealed to have a history, each file a diachronic slice through various systems brought to bear upon the natural world, each one subsequently superseded and rendered obsolete. In the exhibi tion display, knowledge was ordered spatially according to the most recent system, each specimen reshuffled within a synchronic epistemological map. For Oiticica, I would argue, nomination has its roots here: in the library, the laboratory, and the museum. II As previously mentioned, Oiticica established the internal taxonomy for his work between 1961 and 1964, the same years in which he worked at the Museu Nacional. As the artist’s meticulous inventories reveal, his orders of objects obey a rigorous numeric and descriptive code.22 B39 Bolide Luz 1 Apropriagao 3 (1966), for example, refers to an object thirty-ninth within the bolide order, first within bolide containers of light, and third within in Small Morphology in the Studio This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 12:27:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Fig. 2. Helio Oiticica (Brazilian, 1937-80). Study for “Nucleo em lona,” 19 August 1963. Rio de Janeiro, Archives H61io Oiticica/Projeto Helio Oiticica. Courtesy Archives Helio Oiticica/Projeto Helio Oiticica a sequence of “appropriations” of objects or experiences drawn from real life. Oiticica’s titles thus reiterate—through the act of naming—the historical and relational position of a given object within the internal system of the work, an “order of things” whose logic issues first and foremost from the artist himself.23 It seems sufficiently clear that the artist adapted this taxonomic armature from at least three systems: the nested box-within-a-box structure of Linnaeus’s hierarchical taxonomy; the chronological coding that communicates phylogenesis, the evolutionary development or diversification of a species; and the sequential numeration of the artist’s series.24 It also appears that the emergence of a new order of object within Oiticica’s sys tem, much like the development of a new species, depended on pressing the conceptual, structural, or utilitarian qualities of one, or even two, preexisting orders so far that the resulting “species” became a new kind of thing. Two studies from just before and after Oiticica invented the parangole order—which, to reiterate, consisted primarily of flexible fabric structures, usually multilayered painted capes —are exemplary in this regard. A study from August 1963 documents Oiticica’s thoughts for an unrealized work the artist labeled “Nucleo em lona” (Nucleus in sailcloth) (fig. 2). The artist’s indication of sailcloth as material suggests that he was reconceptualizing the layered chromatic structures of his preexisting nucleo order, which consisted of painted and suspended wooden plaques, through the use of a flexible rather than rigid support. A study from September 1964, meanwhile, refers to a realized work, Parangole3 Tenda 1 (Parangole 3 Tent 1), which Oiticica finished in 1965 (fig. 3). 112 GETTY RESEARCH JOURNAL, NO. 1 (2009) This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 12:27:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions v^ri r “ftuCecfattf ” P* «V<” Pi(»*i 5 X f/V” f™” 7 itm *< ??. J ‘»«’f i. Ct’ ftM’if «»« “<s’ fe=”” u’s””=”” ;=”” vit-=”” -‘=”” %<=”” “”=”” ii=”” .=”” ‘:’=”” fi=”” ■=”” i.a.5=”” -tt=”” ,v«=”” .-<.1=”” *<=”” ■’=”” “•=”” ‘■’=”” •*=”” ysa=”” ..=”” •■=”” -=”” «•;.=”” ‘”=”” £»««.-.«.=”” (f^ui=”” «•…=”” 1=”” ;■*=”” ‘=”” *=”” ~k;’=”” j,;f<.-»$)=”” imrrrrmnnvijj=”” ,(<•«*»=”” t=”” v—=””>.:?/ n iwi i!t«i Fig. 3. Helio Oiticica (Brazilian, 1937-80). Study for “Penetravel” Parangole, September 1964. Rio de Janeiro, Archives Helio Oiticica/Projeto Helio Oiticica. Courtesy Archives Helio Oiticica/Projeto Helio Oiticica Significantly, in this preliminary study, the artist used a different name — “Penetravel” Parangole—which suggests that before parangole became its own order, it was a second ary descriptive term that modified Oiticica’s preexisting order penetravel.25 When one considers that within Oiticica’s aesthetic system, penetraveis were spatial structures such as cabins or labyrinths, the conceptual evolution of the parangole as a wearable chromatic architecture becomes considerably more clear. As such evidence suggests, Oiticica internalized the epistemological assumptions of biological taxonomy and applied them to an aesthetic field. Designating new orders of art was thus akin to the establishment of a new species or genus, each artwork within that species a variation on a type. But Oiticica also intervened in this system, thereby pushing its limits as a mode of organizational thought. Butterflies have hard, external skeletons 113 Small Morphology in the Studio This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 12:27:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Fig. 4. Microscopic photography of male and female butterfly genitalia of the Arseunura Duncan genus. From Jose Oiticica Filho, “Tipos de Saturnioidea no United States National Museum. 5—Genero Arseunura Duncan, 1841 “Arquivos do Museu National 43 (1957): cover, 19,29. Courtesy Arquivos do Museu Nacional and complex genital structures that fit together during mating in what can loosely be described as a lock-and-key configuration. In order to classify a specimen or establish a new species, therefore, Lepidopterists use microscopic photography to compare the male and female genitalia of a pair of specimens with other known species already mor phologically described. This morphological analysis is evident in an article by Jose Oiti cica Filho on genus variation that appeared in the Arquivos do Museu National in 1957, an article that Oiticica likely had to file as part of his bibliographic tasks (fig. 4). Thus, while taxonomy is essentially a zoological filing system, a way of cataloging living things, it is also an epistemology, a theory of how we know what we know about the world. In the case of Lepidoptera, paired sexual difference is the basic unit of epistemological coherence, the foundational binary out of which a taxonomy is built. In Oiticica’s wearable works, this epistemological notion of fixed sexual difference is exchanged for one predicated on mutability and potentiality. In P5 Parangole Capa 2 (1964-65) or the artist’s Hermaphrodite Bdlides (1968; now lost), the transformable and containing capacities of Oiticica’s bolide order are translated to the realm of living bodies (fig. 5).26 In these human-sized “containers” (complete with newspaper-lined pockets and material prostheses made from painted underwear, twisted nylon strips, and tactile pouches of colored pigment), the body is not a static, sexed entity but a series of non normative, irregular, and mutable modalities—a “content” whose social and sexual char acteristics can be discovered and modified at will. Indeed, in 1965, when Oiticica inaugurated his new “species” of parangole at the Museu de Arte Moderna, he released a mimeographed pamphlet containing a pair of pho tographs and two texts in which he described the new order, as if to mimic the publication 114 GETTY RESEARCH JOURNAL, NO. 1 (2009) This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 12:27:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Miro da Mangueira Dama com a CAPA 1 parongol* ( 1965) Eduardo Ribeiro desdobra a CAPA 2 parangole ( 1965 ) Fig. 5. Helio Oiticica (Brazilian, 1937-80). Parangoles including P5 Parangole Capa 2,1964-65. Rio de Janeiro, Archives Helio Oiticica/Projeto Helio Oiticica. Photo: Andreas Valentin, 1979. Courtesy Archives Helio Oiticica/Projeto Helio Oiticica Fig. 6. Helio Oiticica (Brazilian, 1937-80). Mock-up for pamphlet to be distributed at the inauguration of the parangole at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, 1965. Rio de Janeiro, Archives Helio Oiticica/Projeto Helio Oiticica. Courtesy Archives Helio Oiticica/Projeto Helio Oiticica 115 Small Morphology in the Studio This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 12:27:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions of a new species within the entomological world (fig. 6). In these texts, the male/female pairs of the Lepidoptera order are replaced with paired participants who engaged in what Oiticica called the “wearing/watching cycle.”27 In order to fully experience theparangole, Oiticica wrote, participants needed to transform their body through the wearing of the cape as well as witness a similar transformation enacted on the body of another through watching. An epistemological structure based on binary sexual difference is thereby replaced with the phenomenological alteration of optical and tactile cues. In displacing fixed form with form in a process of change, Oiticica’s parangoles redefined corporeal experience from what a body is to what a body can do. Perhaps most significant about Oiticica’s deployment of the taxonomic logic of biological nomination systems was how it offered an ontological bridge between objects and behaviors resting in the falsely polar categories of art and life. As noted earlier, discov ering a new species does not involve the creation of form, but the organization of existing form into new knowledge, a procedure we might extend from the designation of living organisms to objects or practices of other types. For example, an article entitled “Bases para uma classificagao dos adornos plumarios dos Indios do Brasil” (Bases for a classifica tion of feather adornment of the Indians of Brazil), published in the pages immediately following Oiticica Filho’s aforementioned article, provides a taxonomic catalog of wear able feather objects in the collection of the Museu Nacional (fig. 7). Perhaps Oiticica was looking at this article in March 1964 when he made a study for an unrealized headdress parangole, or in November of that same year when he wrote “Bases fundamentals para uma definii^ao do ‘Parangole”‘ (Fundamental bases for a definition of the “Parangole”), a text whose title bears obvious similarity to the ethnographic item from the Museu Nacio nal. Unlike the latter article, however, Oiticica’s text, which he released on the occasion of Fig. 7. Illustrations of wearable feather objects in the collection of the Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro. From Berta G. Ribeiro “Bases para uma classificagao dos adornos plumarios dos indios do Brasil,” Arquivos do Museu Nacional 43 (1957): cover, 78,113. Courtesy Arquivos do Museu Nacional 116 GETTY RESEARCH JOURNAL, NO. 1 (2009) This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 12:27:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions the inauguration of the parangole, was not an inventory of objects renamed from an indige nous system of naming and function to another system corresponding to the colonial logic of the ethnographic museum.28 Rather, it was the artist’s first attempt to describe the conceptual framework for, as he wrote, “the discovery of what I call ‘Parangole.”’29 In “Bases fundamentals para uma dehni^o do ‘Parangole,’” Oiticica acknowledges the material and formal (one could say morphological) connections between his works and preexisting objects such as tents, banners, and clothing as well as associated bodily prac tices such as dance. But he also wants to insist that the parangoles have neither mimetic nor appropriative relations to these objects or behaviors, an important nuance he is never theless sometimes at pains to express. As he writes, “The relation to the ‘appearances’ of already existing things exists but it is not primordial in the genesis of the idea, although perhaps it could be from another point of view of the “why’ of this relationship observed during the realization of the work, its formation. What is of interest here at the moment is the intention of ‘how” in this formation of the work.”30 The artist, in other words, wants to gesture to a basic generative structural relationship between his works and preexisting objects and practices, a relation he calls at one point a “convergence,”31 but at the same time to insist on a certain ontological and even perceptual independence for the work of art. Discussing his glass bolides in the same text, for example, Oiticica emphasizes that readymade elements such as glass vessels or raw pigment acquire new significance when integrated in the work of art (fig. 8). Such objects are put in “a relation that transforms what was known into new knowledge and what remains to be apprehended… that residue that remains open to the imagination [and] recreates itself upon the work.”32 This notion of “new knowledge” is the crux of these works’ relation to their exte rior world. Although each work is a physical creation—a new species within the aesthetic Fig. 8. Helio Oiticica (Brazilian, 1937-80). By Bdlide Vidro 1,1963. Rio de Janeiro, Archives Helio Oiti cica/Projeto Helio Oiticica. Photo: Desdemone Bardin. Courtesy Archives Helio Oiticica/Projeto Helio Oiticica 117 Small Morphology in the Studio This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 12:27:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions realm of art—in some basic sense, this new species is also the designation of preexisting form, much like the discovery of a new species of butterfly or moth. Description is thus a mode of invention, a way of producing new configurations of knowledge, of reimagin ing various worlds.33 Indeed, one could say, as a new species, each work is an evolutionary, although nonprogressive, development from both preexisting art objects given meaning within the artist’s conceptual framework and preexisting objects in the world. This is perhaps what Oiticica meant when he wrote, “The ‘Parangole’ would therefore be, before anything else, a search for the basic structural constitution of the world of objects, the procurement of the roots of the objective genesis of the work, the direct perceptive for mation of it.”34 Placed back into the world as newly constituted objects of art, these new species interpret preexisting form and behavior. In that Oiticica’s works are interactive objects whose form is only revealed in temporal dialogue with their viewer, this interpre tation cannot be separated from the embodied knowledge of the viewer him or herself. For Oiticica, taxonomy and the morphological thought that underpins it provided a way to create a self-referencing world of “living” artworks that nevertheless bore a basic structural affinity to the exterior world. As the years have gone by, this structural affinity has partially dissolved. The midcentury wooden and fabric/aveZa constructions pivotal to the artist’s conceptions of divided space have been replaced with brick constructions; the brilliantly colored plastics new to the market in the 1960s are now the stuff of any discount store. What have remained intact, however, are the works’ internal references, a world now made even more insular by virtue of the artist’s taxonomic scaffold. It is this world that is visible in the museum of art, where Oiticica’s works, once liminal, are now fully embraced within the tradition of the avant-garde. The circuitous route I have taken through Oiticica’s work by way of natural history is thus an attempt to rearticulate the epistemic shift of advanced art of the 1960s and 1970s by way of an alternate model of a museum, one that does not stand polemically between art and anti-art, or more crudely, art and life, but functions as a space for the investigation of living things. In the natural history museum, the tension between morphology’s classificatory and philosophic demands—between being and becoming—is productively revealed. Here, the very artifice of taxonomy performs the shifting modes of ordering knowledge about the world. No scientist, however, would conflate the designation of a species with the biological life it represents. So too with Oiticica’s “invention” of new species or orders of art: the act of naming is a fixed register of an ongoing formal investigation; the entity named, meanwhile, develops its own life through the actions it invites. Likewise, while the species is the basis for our conception of evolutionary change, it can only be opera tionally rather than ontologically defined.35 In this sense, although Oiticica proclaimed the parangoles to be anti-art, his practice of “morphology in the studio” transformed that ontological question into an epistemological one. “The museum is the world,” he wrote in 1966.36 Such a museum, I would argue, asks not “what is art” but “when is art,”37 “why is art,” and most importantly, “what can it do?” 118 GETTY RESEARCH JOURNAL, NO. 1 (2OO9) This content downloaded from 129.105.215.146 on Sat, 21 Sep 2013 12:27:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Irene Small is assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is working on a book-length study of the work ofHelio Oiticica. Notes I am grateful for the comments of two anonymous readers of this essay as well as for those offered by scholars and staff of the Getty Research Institute, who responded to parts of this material during a seminar within the 2007-8 theme year “Change.” I would like to extend a special thanks to the Proj eto Helio Oiticica and to Alexandre Soares of the Lepidoptera section of the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, whose expertise and generous assistance was invaluable during my research at that institution. Research for this article was funded in part by a 2007 FLAGS Research Grant from Yale University. This article relies on the Archives Helio Oiticica/Projeto Helio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro; hereafter Archives Helio Oiticica. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. l. In November 1964, Oiticica wrote, “A descoberta do que chamo ‘Parangole’ marca o ponto crucial e define uma posi^ao especifica no desenvolvimento teorico de toda a minha experiencia da estru tura-cor no espa^o” (The discovery of what I call “Parangole” marks the crucial point and defines a specific position in the theoretical development of all my experience of color-structure in space). Helio Oiticica, “Bases fundamentals para uma defini^o do ‘Parangole,’” November 1964, Archives Helio Oiticica (docu ment 0035.64), 1. This text was circulated in mimeograph form at the “inauguration” of the parangole at the opening of the exhibition Opinao 65 at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro in 1965. Most recently, Mari Carmen Ramirez has explored the parangoles as the climax of Oiticica’s chromatic investi gations in her exhibition and catalog Hflio Oiticica: The Body of Color, exh. cat. (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2006). 2. See, in particular, Helio Oiticica, “A dan9a na minha experiencia,” 12 November 1965, Archives Helio Oiticica (document 0192.65), 6-11. 3. The scandal of the opening cemented Oiticica’s reputation as a rising star of the Brazilian avant-garde, with several newspaper articles commenting on the samba dancers’ expulsion from the museum. See, for example, Claudir Chaves, “‘Parangol£’ Impedido no MAM,” Diana Carioca (14 August 1965). During an interview televised shortly after the opening and in response to the question “What is a parangoU?” the gallerist Jean Bogichi proclaimed, “Parangol£ e o que e. £ o mito. Helio Oiticica e nosso Flash Gordon. Ele nao voa nos espaijos siderais. Voa atrav6s das camadas socials” (Parangole is what it is. It is the myth. Helio Oiticica is our Flash Gordon. He doesn’t fly through outer space. He flies through lay ers of social space). The interview was quickly transcribed and published in the newspaper column “Artes Visuais “Jornal do Brasil, Caderno B (20 August 1965): 9. 4. See, in particular, Susan Hiller’s response to the display of Oiticica’s works at the artist’s first international traveling exhibition in 1992 in her article “Earth, Wind and Fire, Helio Oiticica,” Frieze, no. 7 (1992): 26-31. See also Luciano Figueiredo, “The Other Malady,” Third Text, nos. 28-29 (1994): 105-16, which closes by citing an episode from the 22nd Sao Paulo Bienal of 1994 (which included Oiticica’s works), in which a curator ordered dancers wearing Oiticica’s parangoles to “get out” of the gallery space. More recently, Anna Dezeuze has emphasized the importance of the sensory experience of the parangoles in her article “Tactile Dematerialization, Sensory Politics: Helio Oiticica’s

 

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