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?     The curatorial group consisted of Catherine David, then of the Jeu de Paume in Paris, Chris Dercon of Witte de With in Rotterdam, Luciano Figueiredo of the Projeto HO in Rio de Janeiro (the Oiticica archive), Lygia Pape, artist and friend of Oiticica, and myself. I do not wish, by what I write, to separate myself from the group and to suggest that I have answers while the others do not. In reality we were all caught up in the same phenomenon. The pity is that exhibitions are treated like products, made and then consumed, and there is so little (published) reflection on the experience afterwards.     The Brazilian critic Sonia Salztein has written that the "precarious and tenuous works" of both Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, "attempt to dissolve an institutionalizing destiny for art in the contemporary world." Their viewpoint allowed them to conceive "the broader project of a Brazilian art directed towards the social scale as a strategy of cultural emancipation." Oiticica rarely referred to his production as 'things' but used terms like "proposals for behavior," "situations to be lived," "preludes to a collective state of invention." If an object was described it was usually in terms of the action by which one encountered it, wore it, or lay down inside it. Participation was essential to it. To renew the perception of his 1960s Bólides (boxes and containers) as an action rather than an object (he called them Transobjects), Hélio enacted in 1978 a ritual by which a quantity of earth, equivalent to the earth many of the Bólides originally contained, was deposited by means of a small rectangular frame on a patch of Rio wasteland (Returning Earth to Earth: A Counter-Bólide). This work was reenacted in each city the 1992 exhibition visited, a repetition Hélio himself had suggested in notes written after the 1978 occasion. But aside from this, it was obviously impossible to know how Oiticica would have refigured his work in the conditions of the 1990s.