In an incident which occurred during the opening days of the latest São Paulo Bienal, the Dutch curator Wim Beeren ordered some samba dancers to leave the room of an exhibition of Malevich's paintings. The dancers, from the escola de samba Vai-Vai, were wearing Parangolé capes, works of Hélio Oiticica from the mid-1960s, and danced their way through the rooms of the Bienal in a reprise of the event Oiticica staged 30 years before at Rio de Janeiro's Museum of Modern Art, when he first launched his Parangolé.      It so happened that a press photographer was present, and a picture of Mr. Beeren duly appeared in the Jornal do Brasil (13th October 1994), shouting at the dancers to leave with the kind of gesture a restauranteur might use to chase beggars from his door.     Certain observers savored the irony of the occasion. Not only was Malevich's painting a great inspiration to Oiticica (the transubstantiation of Malevich's Suprematist forms into the kinesthetic and ephemeral wraps animated by the dancers could be seen in the press photo) but also, Oiticica´1964 disruption of the institutional proprieties and social snobbery surrounding the visual arts seemed to have lost none of its force.     Oiticica's great body of work is, and will be for a long time, a rich field of study. Only recently has it begun to be widely known (more than a decade after his own death). One of these fields of study is the relationship between the discoveries of the avant-garde in this century, and the popular culture of Brazil (which is, in the broadest sense, a culture of resistance to the dehumanizing effects of poverty, exploitation and denigration). The relationship Oiticica made between these polarized domains is closely linked with another aspect of his work: his continuous challenge to museums as reliquaries of dead things.     Oiticica was one of those artists whose work raises questions concerning cultural particularity, cultural translation, and the "strategies to refigure late 20th century art history to encompass world cultures." Questions which cannot be separated from the conflict of interests and ideology between artists and institutions.The effort to stage a posthumous exhibition of Oiticica's work in major European and American museums in 1992, with which I was involved, raised these questions in acute and complex forms. They remain complex, even though the fundamental issue can be stated quite simply: could the institution adapt itself to the demands and strictures of Oiticica's art, or must his work be adapted to the institution?

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