vivências: all that within me feels, is thinking

"If we pay attention to what things do, what agency they have, then we need all the more to understand the locally constituted limits to that agency (which may be greater or lesser than those we assume). We also need to understand the forms of the relationships in which things operate." Lissant Bolton

 Lissant Bolton, an anthropologist specializing in the Pacific, considers Alfred Gell's thoughts about the agency of art, recognizing that the form of relationship between things - the locally constituted limit - needs to be better understood for a proper awareness of their agency, without falling into the "trap" of western classifications (Bolton 2001). Cassandra Barnett takes this idea of relationship to its logical conclusion in suggesting that it is the relationship itself that is the source of agency.

These thoughts about agency and relationship get us closer to the concept of connectivity, but are still hamstrung by the western system rooted in a subject-object divide. Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), a Brazilian artist who created a body of work in which he experimented with concepts of agency, energy and connection, felt that "the object no longer has a central, autonomous role as the end of aesthetic expression; henceforth its role is a 'relational', participatory one" (Brett 2004).  

 Oiticica's exploration of color, a process which took him further and further away from the picture plane, resulted in an art that was indeterminate and became about "not objects, but possibilities of living, the absorption of art-processes into life processes - situations to be lived" (Oiticica, quoted in Brett and Figueiredo 2007). This is "vivências" which can be translated as "vital experience" (Ramirez 2007). If we accept Fernando Pessoa's translation of vivências, "all that within me feels, is thinking" (Brett 2004), then it is sensation that provides our cognition and thus our vital experience. 

 In "The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens," philosopher Brian Massumi describes the process by which we experience objects in the world as one governed by relations saying, as Barnett does, we can only apprehend objects because of these relations and through our "lived experience" with them (Massumi 2008; Barnett 2011). Anthropologist Tim Ingold touches on this when he says that we are not in the world, but of it.  

Oiticica's trajectory as an artist and the open-ended, multi-sensorial nature of Oiticica's installation, Tropicália, works as a material articulation of Ingold's "relational thinking" which reinserts humans into their proper place in the world: firmly planted on the ground, not as rational, detached observers, but as participants immersed in the action of relationship and perpetual becoming, action from which we cannot extricate ourselves.

Philosopher Bruno Latour calls this reinsertion a movement "sideways" into the "flow of experience" and a break with the "traditional face-to-face of subject and object," an ocular format (Bolton's locally constituted limit) that allows us to ignore our place in, as Oiticica phrased it, our "life process.”

Hélio Oiticica

Born in Rio in 1937, Oiticica was homeschooled until the age of eleven in a rich mix of the sciences, arts and humanities by his mother and by his father, who was an engineer, mathematician, entomologist and experimental photographer.  

Frequent visitors to museums and art exhibitions, the Oiticica family was steeped in the burgeoning Rio cultural milieu of the 1940's and 1950's; an environment that gave rise to abstract avant-garde groups gathered around the art theorist Mário Pedrosa, who in 1948 wrote his thesis "On the Affective Nature of Form in the Work of Art.”

During this period Pedrosa and the poet Ferreira Gullar fed Brazil's radical alteration in thinking about art. Gullar's theories of the non-object[1]saw artwork as an "unforeseeable field of stimuli" in which the haptic and optic are in sync and the background for the non-object is part of a "spatial transformation" in which it is not an abstraction but an entity in the physical world.

[1]"Non-object" is a Neo-Concrete term that views structure as a living organism that can only be understood phenomenologically.

These ideas influenced Oiticicia who saw that "the idea does not exist outside of the object; it never did, there is only invention," and concluded that the background and idea for a work of art are elements in the world that can be experienced, as a "permanent state of invention."

No doubt influenced by his scientific and experimental photographer father, Oiticica's art can be viewed as a series of investigations that test energy, relation and connection. Beginning with the belief that color is a significant medium of exchange and an entity with autonomy outside of the painting, his early paintings were inspired by the work and theory of artists Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, and by Brazil's Neo-Concrete movement which explored the tension between structural boundaries of painting and time - "a sort of temporal subjectivity" that sought to release color from its bondage on the plane (Ramirez 2007).

Oiticica first explored these theoretical insights as a painter with Rio de Janeiro's Grupo Frente between 1955 and 1956, experiments which led to the "deconstruction of the grid" (Ramirez 2007). His Metaesquemas [Meta-Schemes] series and Bilaterais [Bilaterals] series, began to give color form.

Color fully takes on a "body" (Oiticica quoted in Rameriz 2007) with his Relevos espacials [Spatial Reliefs] (1960) and Núcleos [Nuclei] series (1960-63), also known asPenetráveis [Penetrables], in which he "liberated color into space" (Ramirez 2007) and expanded the viewers' experience of color. Hanging from the ceiling, the viewer moves through and around the Spatial Relief and Nuclei panels, inviting visitors to experience an embodied, sensorial and temporal relationship with color.

Further serial experiments: Bólides [Fireballs] and Parangolés [Capes], worked to fully express the "vivências"of color. Encouraging physical manipulation and interaction with color through touch, movement and active engagement, Bólides and Parangolés brought intimacy to the experience of color, which, though released from the picture plane, had now shed its autonomy and come into relation with the viewer. 

 The year 1964 marks Oiticica's introduction to Samba and the Mangueiraneighborhood, a favela in 1960's Rio. A pivotal moment in his life and practice, Oiticica's experience of Mangueirainformed the creation of the Parangolés and all his subsequent work. As a gay man from a middle class, cerebral family in 1960's Brazil, Oiticica's bodily experience of Samba and the accepting, open social life in Mangueria opened his eyes to a new way of moving through, and being in, the world. He relates his experience:

"[The social layers] became somehow schematic, artificial for me, as if I was suddenly seeing from a great height their scheme, their map and I was outside them. Marginalization, which exists naturally for the artist, became suddenly basic for me, a complete 'lack of social place,' and at the same time the discovery of my 'individual place' as a whole person in the world, as a social being in the complete sense, not belonging to any layer or elite, even an artistic one.... social in its most noble sense."

From this point forward, Oiticica's work was participatory and collaborative, open-ended "open propositions" (Brett and Figueiredo 2007).  His signature "proposition," Tropicália, in its various iterations, is a multi-sensory installation, an interactive environment "aimed at making each person feel within themselves, through accessibility, through improvisation, their internal liberty, the path to the creative state" (Oiticica, quoted in Brett and Figueiredo 2007). 

Tropicália

Tropicália includes penetráveis, favela-like colorful if unsteady structures, in an area festooned with live tropical plants, fragrant herbs, floral textiles and live parrots, all which reside on a ground covered with gravel and sand.

Outside, visitors would hear the birds and the voices of others walking through Tropicália.Inside, invited to take off their shoes and walk in the sand and gravel, they felt the materials against their skin, found poems within the foliage, listened to and played with the birds, smelled patchouli and sandalwood, and wandered through the rickety penetráveis structures.

Each penetrável was constructed and erected differently, some with titles or messages attached. Penetrável (PN2)1966, called Purity is a Myth (now located at the Tate Modern), is a simple, uncovered shed that contains a bag of sand and the inscription "A pureza e um mito." Penetrável (PN3)1966 (also at the Tate Modern), called Imagetical, is a more extensive construction of wooden panels covered in colorful plastic, fabric and paint, forming a narrow labyrinth.

The visitor, passing into a small corridor, progressed through a darkening hallway, space becoming smaller as the light diminished. Rounding a corner, the visitor came upon the glow of a television, flickering in the dark. Oiticica likens this process to a movement through the spiral of a shell and calls the television a "bombardment of global images" (Canjo 2004).

With Tropicália, Oiticica moved from a focus on the object, or even color per se, to a practice centered on the body with relation and participation the central attention. The penetráveis, the sand, the color, light, sound, smell and space all served to create a space that was mere medium for the actual artwork: process, cognition, relation and bodily sensation. 

Relational Thinking

Anna Dezeuze suggests that audience participation became an important component in Latin American art of this period because there were few bourgeoisie collectors to buy art and many "less literate" to understand it.

This cursory and dismissive explanation for artists' engagement with participatory work overlooks both the intellectual rigor with which Latin American artists in the 1950's and 1960's tested the problem of the dematerialization of the object and the intellectual life of the "less literate."

Rather, participatory art in general and Tropicália in particular, remind us of Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa's 1948 thesis that "art which eschews representation can reveal potentialities which cannot be attained through simple casual relations, leading us to discover ways of feeling and therefore, of being. A new ethics" (Pedrosa, quoted in Posso 2010).

With Tropicália,Oiticica has woven a “web of relationships around the body's internal and external spaces” (Ostoff 1997); it was a work that merged a Modern European abstract aesthetic rooted in the optic - a sense that, according to Ingold, objectifies and isolates - with the expression of Brazil's African oral literature which ritually embodies history and knowledge.

Simone Ostoff notes that this "syncretic" joining of both traditions was well established in Brazil, but with Tropicália,Oiticica was the first artist to use this syncretism as a starting point for investigation.

Alfred Gell might call Tropicália a "material index"[2](Gell 1998) for the 1960's favela; a liminal space that mediates between forest and city, between wilderness and civilization, nature and culture. Tropicália could also be called an index of Oiticica's experience in Rio of straddling two worlds, that of his upbringing and the world of Mangueira.

[2]Gell defines the material index as a "natural sign from which the observer can make a causal inference" using the example of smoke as an index for fire (Gell 1998)

Oiticica, quoted above, describes his experience as a "marginalization," a liminal state, that made the discovery of his place in the world possible (Brett 2004). Luciano Figueiredo notes this as well, suggesting that rather than seeing Tropicália in direct relationship to the 1960's favela, instead we should attend to the existential contribution the favela gave to Oiticica.  

Gell has described the anthropology of art as the "theoretical study of social relations,” however Gell's discussion of relations between "social agents" (objects), or their "material indexes" keeps the focus on the agents and what they do (whether penetrável, person, sand, color, light, parrot or plant), stipulating that in transactions between agents, one is active and the other is passive, or a "patient" as he calls it. Note that here Gell suggests that there are only two agents participating in a "transaction." Oiticica has demonstrated, however, that multiple, active, agents in simultaneous relationship are certainly possible.

In Tropicália, space is activated via the senses and makes the relation - or process - the primary agent, over any objects (including people) which are set in service to it. Gell certainly touches on this when he calls the process and relation between agents a "transaction.” Process is also present in his discussion of enchantment in which He suggests that the making of an object is what gives it agency.

Barnett, however, tells us it is our attitude toward (based on our prior experience with) an object that gives it agency. Gell and Barnett each view social agents as related to process in some way, but nevertheless continue to view agents as separate from each other and separate from the process itself.

Ingold has taken up the idea of process and relationship, challenging the limitation of a given assumption that the individual exists separately and in contention with the "out there" or the "other" (Ingold 2000). Ingold rejects our usual conception of space, saying that there is no disembodied "space," there is only place (or "landscape" as he calls it) where things are - where we are - where things happen, or, as Latour phrases it: where the "flow of experience" occurs (Latour 2016). 

"Thinking of the world as a total movement of becoming which builds itself into the forms we see, and in which each form takes shape in continuous relation to those around it, then the distinction between animate and inanimate seems to dissolve."(Ingold 2000)

This "total movement of becoming" recalls Oiticia's notion of a "permanent state of invention" (Ramirez 2007) and is an embodiment that does not act as an "inscription" but as a movement of incorporation, where new resulting forms are generated (Ingold 2000).

It is interesting to note here that Figueiredo, in his discussion of Oiticicia's Tropicália as a popularly embraced index of Brazilian culture, suggests that Tropicália takes on this popular material index because it relates to the Brazilian idea of antropophagia, or cannibalism. Oiticica himself suggests that Tropicália,with its multiple Brazilian indexes: sand, tropical plants, parrots, bright colors, smells and penetráveis which lead to a television with global images, is a kind of antropophagia (Canejo 2004).

Coined by Brazilian modernist poet Oswald de Andrade of the 1920's, antropophagia describes the concept of cultural absorption as a kind of devouring or incorporation (Ostoff's syncretism) of influences to make something new. 

Absorption, making, unfolding, continuous relationship and generation are the stuff of life, according to both Oiticica and Ingold. Ingold quotes Fred Inglis, "One cannot treat landscape as an object if it is to be understood. It is a living process; it makes men; it is made by them" (Ingold 2000: 198). Oiticica suggested, as noted above, that his art was "not objects, but possibilities of living, the absorption of art-processes into life-processes" (quoted in Brett and Figueiredo 2007). 

It is from this process of relation in the world, from the business of being in the world, that each place draws its unique meaning. A place gains its disposition from the experience or living process it provides to those who engage with it, an experience which comes from the sensory stimuli that constitute its specific character. The living process of Tropicália hinges on an engagement with the senses - sound, smell, touch, sight, smell and movement - which I would argue are themselves forms of process. 

As a physical phenomenon, affective sensory experience is personal, an active "transaction between bodies,"(Kidron 2011) that is materially mediated, occurring between people, places and things. Nadia Seremetakis calls the senses "record-keepers of material experience" (Seremetakis 1994). It is the sensorial attention and response to material stimuli that we here call "affective." It is important to note that by "senses" we include motion, balance, intuition and internal sensors or "introceptors" which are receptors for "ritual patterning" (Guerts 2002), a result of performativity.[3]

[3]With Judith Butler's theory of gender identity in mind, I use "performative" as the repetitive performance of acts that imprint on the body.

The embodied record of material experience informs cognition and memory. This brings us back to Barnett, who says that it is our "relational postures," founded on our memory of past sensory experience, that inform our relationships in the present. 

As mentioned earlier, sensory experience is variable according to Ingold, who tells us that "vision objectifies, sound personifies" explaining further, he says that "sound penetrates, sight isolates- sound fills the space around us, sight cuts out things from the space before us - hearing is social whereas vision is individual - to hear is to participate, to see is to observe from a distance" (Ingold 2000).  

The nature of sensation, therefore, determines the nature of our engagement. Senses were stimulated in Oiticica's Tropicália and expanded beyond sight to include: the sound of birds and television; the touch of sand, gravel, fabric and plants; the smell of herbs and plants; and movement through a variety of physical spaces. Tropicália created an experience that was embodied, participatory, personalized and intimate; the installation, inserted into the landscape of the gallery with these stimuli, created relations between the visitor - who was now a participant - and the environment in an articulation of a "movement of becoming" (Ingold 2000).

Viewed in total, Oiticica's entire body of work is an index for incorporation, and a movement of becoming. After Tropicália,he created even larger "open-propositions," most notable of which was the 1969 "Whitechapel Experiment" at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. The Whitechapel Experiment included his prior works, the penetráveis, bólides and parangolés, with new experiments in sensory, participatory and relational stimulus such as Eden, an environment like Tropicália that invited participants to step into water, lounge and inhabit "nests." Guy Brett explains the Whitechapel Experiment: 

"There is nothing there to be deciphered. The value of these works is not proved by reference to some external interpretation. Like games, or rituals, we bring them into existence by involving ourselves. They are effective only in so far as we truly take part." (From the 1969 exhibit catalog, reprinted in Brett and Figueiredo 2007)

 The gaze, which mistakes isolation for objectivity, in fact feeds our "denial of the lessons of experience" (Latour 2016). Participation, as Brett notes above, moves us from the position of exterior subject, floating in space like some all-seeing eye looking upon the object, into a position of relation and process with the world around us.

Although in truth, with the act of participation our "position" hasn't moved at all. According to Latour and Ingold, we have always been - and always are - situated within the flow of experience, whether we see it or not. Participation merely breaks our illusion of separation from the world, which is a place that we are of, rather than at, and where we are always in relation, in the moment and movement of becoming, of "being alive" (Ingold 2011), whether we acknowledge it or not. 

The work of Hélio Oiticica fully articulates both his own ideas about the vital experience of being in the world and anthropologist Tim Ingold's theories about systems of relation. Through sensory stimulation and participation, Oiticica removes the artwork as an object, turning us away from the illusion of the subject/object divide.

As Ingold suggests, we are not objects in the world, but formations of the world. Oiticica's art practice, Tropicália and his other open-ended propositions, was about "not objects, but possibilities of living, the absorption of art-processes into life processes - situations to be lived" (Oiticica, quoted in Brett and Figueiredo 2007) and about vivências, about being alive. 

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