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| In 1969 Oiticica had said that experiences were
no longer possible in galleries and museums, and that the idea of a retrospective
was not interesting to him. His 1969 'experiment' at the Whitechapel Gallery
in London, included older work that was placed within a conceptual framework
that included the chacara (backyard) of Tropicalia and the 'mind-settlement'
of Eden. By the 1990s this framework would surely have been different. Perhaps
he would have devised some poetic 'token' of Eden, rather than literally
repeating it; taking a more ironic slant on the effects of the passage of
time. Perhaps our attempts to reanimate Eden was itself an expression of
a well-meaning museum mentality. If we had decided that the participatory nature of Hélio's work depended on his presence and could not be reanimated in the institutional context, we would either have to abandon any idea of an exhibition, or exhibit only work which respects the institutional limits and conventions, such as the early reliefs and paintings: exactly the way certain conservative formalists would like to see Hélio treated! In reality there have always been two ways of referring to the work of another: the imaginative and the factual. A good example of an imaginative, or 're-creative' reference to Oiticica was Haroldo de Campos's Hagoromo, a theatrical event in which the Brazilian writer made a poetic correlation between Oiticica's Parangolé and the feather-mantle which is the theme of a classical Japanese Noh play. The factual approach was to follow as closely as possible Oiticica's own instructions for the presentation of his work. There may be a certain point where the re-creative attitude joins the documentary, for the extreme poles of the two attitudes -'taking liberties' versus slavish adherence to the literal - are incapable of effecting a renewal, and this is where the crux of the issue really lies. The Oiticica exhibition was a mixture of the two sides of the artist institution division. There were noticeable differences of protocol between museum cultures in Holland, France, Spain, Portugal and the United States; and some excesses, as when the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon declined to take advice on the presentation of Oiticica's Parangolé, saying they had plenty of experience in mounting "historical costume displays." It was extremely revealing that the aspect of the work which caused the most difficulty and discomfort to some of the museums was the most obvious and least problematic to the public: the invitation to participate. This crystallized in the presentation of Oiticica's Parangolé, which was never satisfactorily solved. Yet even if it was impossible to entirely break through the institutional mold, I remember the expression of a number of people who said the exhibition had an atmosphere they had never encountered in a Western museum before: "The feeling that I could breathe freely," was how one Dutch person put it, making an expansive gesture with his arms. This suggested to me that the process of questioning institutional constraints is one in which everyone becomes involved, even involuntarily. The process has no dogmatic prescriptions and no final answer. No one is outside it and there is no superior wisdom. The person who denied the possibility of a museum show of Oiticica's work was no more right than the one who brought to life again a Parangolécape, or the void of the Nest.... |
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