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My thoughts on Helio Oiticica's To Organize Delirium                 By Matt Mesiano

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My thoughts on Helio Oiticica's To Organize Delirium                 By Matt Mesiano

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The art exhibit by Helio Oiticica at the Whitney Museum of American Art is an interesting collection of pieces by the Brazilian born artist.  As I do not know much about art, at first glance, I did not know what to make of all the different parts of his exhibit.  Once I watched the videos and listened to the commentaries of all the different pieces, everything started to make sense. I was able to enjoy and appreciate what I was looking at once I had some background information of the environment that Oiticica was part of.

One of the pieces that I liked the most was the Rijanviera, like everything else this piece did not appeal to me until I listened to the narration and understood where Helio was coming from.  I can see the connection from his life in this piece.  Being able to walk through the sand, and into the tight room with the water, and then back out into the sand, is a nice representation of how he moved from Brazil to NY, and then back.

Overall, I enjoyed looking at all the pieces of this exhibit.  It is an interesting view of Helio Oiticica’s life. Like I said earlier, knowing his history makes this exhibit much more meaningful.  I have never been a fan of installation art, but I would be interested in seeing this in person, since the videos don’t give you the sensory input of the different works.

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Watch this short Video about "The organize Delirium"

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Watch this short Video about "The organize Delirium"

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Peruse this online exhibit to see all the works in the show !

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Peruse this online exhibit to see all the works in the show !

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Browse through all the photos, watch the video of the exhibition and write downs notes of what you see and what you find.

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Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium | Whitney Museum of American Art

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Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium is curated by Lynn Zelevansky, Henry J. Heinz II Director, Carnegie Museum of Art; Elisabeth Sussman, Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art; James Rondeau, President and Eloise W.

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Next I would like you to read a review of the exhibition. To understand what an art review looks like (example below)

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Next I would like you to read a review of the exhibition. To understand what an art review looks like (example below)

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Since the fire that destroyed the majority of the artist's oeuvre in 2009, Projeto Hélio Oiticica has been remaking lost works and producing exhibition copies of survivors so that museum visitors can use them as they were originally intended. Irene V.

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Also read this review in the New York times about the Exhibit !

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Also read this review in the New York times about the Exhibit !

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Art Review

What can art do for you? Brighten your wall. Return your investment. Snag you a pass to a V.I.P. lounge. That's about it in the art fair age. And if those are your criteria of aesthetic value, I can't think what you'd make of "Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a survey of scrappy, ephemeral work so high on politics, drugs and crazy love as to seem to be from some other planet, which it is: Planet 1960s/'70s, as occupied by one sometimes-transplanted Brazilian artist for 42 brief years.

Hélio Oiticica (pronounced Oy-ti-SEEK-a) was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937 into a family of scholarly leftists. His grandfather, a philologist, published an anarchist newspaper; his father was a photographer and a scientist focused on butterflies. Oiticica inherited their broadband curiosity. He was a live-wire gay kid: a talker, a reader, a looker, a dancer. He entered art school at 16 and quickly became the baby member of the Neo-Concretists, one of Brazil's leading avant-garde groups.

His art, like theirs, was abstract: A 1955 Oiticica painting - a bright checkerboard of mango-yellow and red - opens the show. But the thinking behind their work and his was, in its way, practical. Color and form, purposefully orchestrated, could change the way people feel, think and behave, and thus change the world. Oiticica later disavowed his early pictures as standard, derivative modernism, and he wasn't wrong. But he held on to their originating idea: Art is potent to the degree it merges with life.

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Oiticica's "CC5 Hendrix-War" (1973) anticipates the work of Pipilotti Rist. Credit Agaton Strom for The New York Times

By the 1960s, he began to physically demonstrate this merging. He took paintings off the wall and suspended them in the middle of a room. He hammered painted panels into boxlike containers - he called them "Bólides" ("Fireballs") - that could be picked up and handled. He built free-standing booths called "Penetrables" that could be entered, like walk-in paintings. The point was that in all cases the viewer - the term he preferred was "participator" - physically interacted with the art, and by doing so moved art into life.

When you move into life, you move into politics. In 1964, a military coup brought a right-wing junta to power in Brazil. Oiticica fiercely opposed it, though his politics didn't fall along conventional left-right lines. His hatred of the government was absolute. But so was his rejection of dominant left-wing rhetoric that advocated a new cultural nationalism, a return to a mythical, precolonial "real" Brazil. Oiticica positioned himself outside both camps, in outsiderness itself.

Being gay was probably a motivator. It put him outside whether he wanted to be or not. It fine-tuned his social-justice radar. He began spending time in Rio's hillside slums, or favelas, home to a population of working poor that the government wanted to expel. There he steeped himself in Afro-Brazilian samba culture, learning its dances and music, which inspired his radically interactive series of works called "Parangolés."

Dozens of manuscript pages from Oiticica's New York writing - scripts, letters, poems and lists - form the most gripping part of the Whitney Museum of American Art's retrospective. Credit Agaton Strom for The New York Times

The Parangolé is a dance costume. Made of cheap, bright enveloping fabrics, painted with taunting slogans and portraits of hero-martyrs, it revealed its full identity as a combination cape, tent and banner only when seen on a moving body. It was a literally activist art form; videos of some being danced are among the show's highlights. In 1965, when Oiticica was in a show at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio, he brought a troupe of Parangolé-draped performers to the opening and was refused entry. The performance went on anyway, outside the museum, which is where, he often said, he wanted his art to be.

By the mid-60s, Oiticica's art and career were on a roll. In 1967, at the same museum, he produced his best-known piece, "Tropicália." Reconstructed at the Whitney, it's an artificial garden with banana plants, live parrots, two favela-style huts and a pebble path winding through sand. What might be taken as a homage to Brazilian exoticism is the opposite. The plants are in plastic pots; the staticky noise of a television leaks out from a hut; the words: "A pureza é um mito" - "Purity is a myth" - are scrawled on a wall of a second hut.

In general, the visual arts had low visibility in Brazil, but the name of Oiticica's show, "Tropicália," soon went viral. The popular musician Caetano Veloso borrowed it as a song title. His tune, widely interpreted as an anti-authoritarian anthem, climbed the charts and spawned a new countercultural movement, Tropicalismo. In 1969, Mr. Veloso was arrested as a dissident, and then fled to London.

"Cosmococa 1: CC1 Trashiscapes," an installation at the Oiticica show at the Whitney. Credit Agaton Strom for The New York Times

Oiticica was already there, overseeing a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery. A year later, he was in New York, where he had work in the much noticed "Information" show at the Museum of Modern Art, and planned to build an installation in Central Park. After a quick return to Brazil revealed worsening repression, he decided to make New York his home, at least for the short-term. He stayed for seven years.

The Whitney edition of the current retrospective, which appeared earlier at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, puts particular emphasis on Oiticica's New York sojourn. Partly, I suspect, this is to justify a show that significantly challenges the Whitney's founding definition of "American art." But it's also because Oiticica's New York years have been little studied. They're a blank, even to most historians. The Whitney curators, Donna De Salvo and Elisabeth Sussman, have tried to fill in that blank.

The story they tell isn't an easy one, but it's rich. Oiticica arrived in the city with high expectations. After his MoMA success, he got lots of welcoming hugs. The Central Park project felt exciting. (A maquette is in the show.) Gradually, the momentum slowed. The hugs soon grew fewer. The city, he learned, forgets, ignores. That was O.K. The mainstream art world, everywhere, left him cold. As in Rio, so in New York he kept to the fringes, exploring the city's gay life, visiting the favelas of the South Bronx, enmeshing himself, through his use and sale of cocaine, in the local drug culture.

"PN1 Penetrable," center, a 1960 Oiticica work. Credit Agaton Strom for The New York Times

Time passed. The Central Park project, envisioned as a big adult playground, a theater for creative leisure, never happened. In New York, Oiticica exchanged object-making for filmmaking. The Whitney projects several short films, or fragments, on gallery walls, but they're interesting mostly as 1970s atmosphere. Focus - Oiticica's focus - is a problem. It's hard to locate from the work on view what he was finding important, politically and aesthetically, and why. Some of his period enthusiasms - Mick Jagger as revolutionary hero - just feel naïve. Anyone who knew his earlier work knew he could think better than that. And he was thinking better, and feeling deeper, as he watched from afar the political horror show that Brazil had become.

A couple of reconstructed installations have impact largely because they're prescient of art by others to come. The homoerotic slide show "Neyrótika" prefigures Nan Goldin's " Ballad of Sexual Dependency." And "CC5 Hendrix-War," its images splashing across the ceiling and walls of a room hung with hammocks, anticipates Pipilotti Rist.

But where the political thinking comes in is in his writing, which is the most gripping work he did in New York - daily, voluminously as scripts, letters, poems, lists. Dozens of manuscript pages are here; they're displayed only in facsimile and hard to read, but they simmer with a wired free-associative energy that soaks into the films and gives them some purpose. Just as his father had once cataloged butterflies species, Oiticica catalogs, and fancifully names, varieties of cocaine. (The Brazilian-American artist Arto Lindsay recites the list, with a musical lilt, in recordings made for the show.)

But by 1978, the New York days were over. Weary, broke and harassed by immigration authorities, Oiticica returned to Rio de Janeiro. The show's final piece, "PN27 Penetrable, Rijanviera," is an abstract portrait of the "River of January" city. You enter the modest, cabanalike structure barefoot, walk though shallow currents of gently eddying water and exit - bathed, baptized - onto a beach of soft sand.

The piece dates from 1979, the year before Oiticica died of a stroke. And it provides a return-to-strength punctuation for a show that, over all, feels sketchy and unfinished. Partly this is because it records an unfinished career, but also because much of that career has been physically lost. In 2009, hundreds, maybe thousands of Oiticica works were destroyed in a storage fire in Rio. Some items were rescued and restored; others have been reproduced as copies. The show has examples of both. The copies can be experienced interactively as the artist intended; the archival pieces are treated with hands-off museum reverence of a kind he claimed to deplore.

Did he really deplore it? After all, he preserved quite a bit of work. But he was a person of contradictions: a hedonist with a needle-sharp ethical eye; a marginalist protected by safety nets of class and race. "Purity is a myth" applied to him as well as to his art, and he knew it, and the show knows it, which is why it's moving, the way Oiticica's art is moving. Mostly that art is not beautiful; when he made it, it was worth next to nothing; by the end of his life it had gotten him almost nowhere. But it's alive in a way almost no art feels now.

Correction:

An earlier version of this review misspelled the names of the curators of the Whitney show. They are Donna De Salvo and Elisabeth Sussman, not Donna de Salvo and Elizabeth Sussman.

Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium
Through Oct. 1, Whitney Museum of American Art, 212-570-3600; whitney.org

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Cool Heat: An Art Outlaw Who Still Simmers

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Art Review What can art do for you? Brighten your wall. Return your investment. Snag you a pass to a V.I.P. lounge. That's about it in the art fair age.

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If you find any other exhibits at the whitney interesting, feel free to post them here in the comments.

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If you find any other exhibits at the whitney interesting, feel free to post them here in the comments.

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Hélio Oiticica ( Portuguese: [ˈε.lju ɔj.tʃi.ˈsi.ka]; July 26, 1937 - March 22, 1980) was a Brazilian visual artist, sculptor, painter, performance artist, and theorist, best known for his participation in the Neo-Concrete Movement, for his innovative use of color, and for what he later termed "environmental art", which included Parangolés and Penetrables, like the famous Tropicália.

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In reading these reviews, you will be able to understand what a real art review looks like.

Then I would like you to write your own review, 2-3 paragraphs.
In this review/critique, I would like you to write about this work.

FOR EXAMPLE
How does the work make you feel?
Do you enjoy installation art?
Have you every seen a work of art like this before?
Would you interested in seeing it in person?
Do you feel the artwork is successful, Why or why not?
What could the artist have done to make this better?
ext.

Review the art and make a post in this page.
As peers you will comment on each others reviews and provide insightful commentary.
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Did you have the same impression of the artwork?
Are you impressed with the other person insight on the page?