blackbird online journal spring 2002 vol.1 no. 1

 

MARK HARRIS | On Aspects of the Avant-garde




image loop of slides 27-29, Hélio Oiticica, Bolidès.

Some of the bodies from the mid 60s commemorate his gangster friends murdered by police. [slides 27 - 29, Bolidès] In one of these you have to lift up a heavy tray of earth to reveal the photo of the corpse as if laid in a grave. They include materials salvaged from the street similar to those used in constructing favela houses. You are expected to handle and explore these boxes enjoying a range of tactile and cognitive experiences. Their rich colors evolve as an unusual extension of Malevich's and Mondrian's utopian vocabularies into an invitation to bodily engagement as a means to freedom.
This extends even further in the capes,

RM: Jesus, there's so much more

the parangolé works, which were meant to be used in performances. With their quotations from their participants—"I am possessed," "I embody revolt," "Sex, violence, that's what pleases me"—their use in lively dances and their symbolic materials—

Audience: Do the accent again.

RM: What?

Audience: Do the accent again.

RM: Sorry. Ok.

MH: You don't have to take the piss. Use your own voice.

(mattress filling for a friend who disliked work), they seem to me to treat the making and reception of artwork with the greatest intimacy as if this would open up new functions for art without falling into the same pattern of avant-garde opposition and recuperation.

So much of his art is a celebration of time off from productivity while still engaged in the extension of enquiry and experience. Oiticica's term "Creleisure" defines this condition. His explanation anticipates Kristeva' formulation of revolt. "Creleisure" is the conversion of formalised capitalist leisure into a state of creativity that is communal, transformative and permanently at work on the world.

I'll finish with a quote from Guy Brett who has done so much to bring these Brazilian artists back into view: "Oiticica positioned himself to feel concretely in his own person the gulf between the festive, the communal and their pale and privatized bourgeois derivations, a gulf which so many Western intellectuals, from Baudeleaire and Rimbaud to Pasolini, have lamented in one form or another."

RM: Thank you.

MH: Did he read it all right? Could you follow it? Well, if there's some questions, I'm happy to answer them.

I probably need another drink.

Audience: Who called?

MH: Who called? Pete. This guy I'm curating a show with in London at 1 000 000 mph, it's this gallery I showed at last summer. Pete Lloyd Lewis. And we're trying to set up this show which involves getting buskers to play Billy Joel tracks, because the gallery has an interest in Billy Joel. "Still Rock and Roll to Me" is the one . . . because no matter how bad they play it, somehow it's still about it being rock and roll. But they're upset about playing Billy Joel. They want to play something else.

Any other questions? There's a lot of material in the talk. I don't want you to be distracted by the interruptions. It's just gone too long, maybe, too hot. I'll put on the other video there, too, to see you out, and if you want, you want to ask any questions, come up and have a chat.

Thanks very much.

 



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