In 1970 Brazilian art critic Frederico Morais curated the exhibition Do corpo à terra in which a new “aesthetics of the margins” emerged. The exhibition was organized in the Pálacio das Artes and in the nearby Parque Municipal in Belo Horizonte, where several happenings and environmental interventions took place. Morais named them examples of “Guerrilla Art”. Amongst these, Cildo Meireiles’ Tirandentes: Totem-monumento ao Preso Político (Tiradentes - Monument to the political prisoner) consisted of burning living chickens in front of a horrified audience; while Artur Barrio spread into the streets fifteen Trouxas Esangüentadas (Bloody Bundles) made by rags, bones, animals’ meat, red paint, and strings. Both performative actions had a great impact on the attending audience and raised the concern of the military police, which had to intervene.
Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica took part in the exhibition as well (although he eventually denied his participation), yet his work was executed by the American artist Lee Jaffe. It was called Trilha de açucar (Sugar trail): a long line of white sugar poured in a trench dig in the Serra do Curral, famous for its red soil and mines. The use of sugar in this context went beyond the attributed unconventional role as “pictorial pigment”. It indeed echoed Portuguese colonisation, for being a product imported by colonisers and cultivated by the African slaves. Because of these entanglements with Brazil’s colonial history and its high value on the market, Oiticica’s employment of sugar elicited uneasy reactions and considerate criticism: journalist Francisco Bittencurt wrote in the Jornal do Brasil that ‘Trilha de açucar was an offence to the poor people of Belo Horizonte’.
Interestingly, this work was followed by the series Cosmococas – program in progress, multimedia environmental installations made by Oiticica in New York, which combined the appropriation of the images of pop culture idols with the use of cocaine — a highly charged commodity similarly exploited in the West. As much as sugar, cocaine was employed as a pictorial element in the composition, yet it also had political and historical ramifications, for being an illegal product, harvested locally yet transformed into a luxury good by the international black market.
Following these premises, this paper aims to investigate the aesthetic and social implications that the use of both sugar and cocaine have in the practice of Hélio Oiticica and in the context of a postcolonial country. The use of powdery pigments witnessed great importance in the artist’s work since the 1960s and pertained to Oiticica’s penchant for a “poor” aesthetic and his research into colour, exemplified in the Bólides (Fireballs,1963-1964). These were objects of various shapes that contained materials of different textures and colours, from pure pigments to liquids and fabrics. Oiticica defined them as ‘trans-objects that give structure, body, to colour’. This paper aims to reveal the trajectory taken by Oiticica’s use of unconventional and syncretic materials, from the Bólides to the later Trilha de açucar and Cosmococas, and their socio-political interference with Western ecologies of thought.
Essential Bibliography
Giovanni Antonio Andreoni, “The Sugar Industry,” in James N. Green, Victoria Langland, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2019);
Carlos Basualdo, Hélio Oiticica: Quasi-Cinemas (Kölnischer Kunstverein, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Wexner Center for the Arts in association with Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2001);
Anne Katherine Brodbeck, “The Salão da Bússola (1969) and Do Corpo à Terra (1970): Parallel Developments in Brazilian and International Art,” RACAR: revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review 2 (2013): 109-123;
Claudia Calirman, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012);
Maria Iñigo Clavo, “Is Brazil a Postcolonial Country?,” Paragrana 2 (2016): 63-79;
Coomber, R. and South, N. (eds), Drug Use and Cultural Contexts ‘Beyond the West’:Tradition, Change and Post-Colonialism (London: Free Association Books 2004);
Isabelle Darmon, “Of Sound and Flavour – Revisiting the Notion of Material for the Cultural Sociological Analysis of Art Domains,” Cultural Sociology 15(2021): 327–345;
Carolina Dellamore, “Do corpo à terra, 1970: Art Guerrilha e resistência à ditatura militar,” Revista Cantareina 20 (2014): 109-123;
Vera Lucia Amaral Ferrini, “Sugar and the Formation of Colonial Brazil,” Latin American History, 2019, available at https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.729;
André Lepecki, “The Non-Time of Lived Experience: The Problem of Colour in Hélio Oiticica’s Early Works,” Representations 136 (2016): 77-95;
Terence E. McDonnell, “Cultural Objects, Material Culture, and Materiality,” The Annual Review of Sociology 49 (2023): 195-220;
Mari Carmen Ramírez ed., Hèlio Oiticica: the Body of Colour (London: Tate Publishing, 2007);
Corina E. Rogge, Joy Mazurek, Micheal Schilling, “The Nucleus of Color: Analysis of Hélio Oiticica’s Studio Materials,” Studies in Conservation 6 (2023); 627-656;
Irene Small, “Material Remains: On the Afterlife of Hélio Oiticica’s work,” Artforum 6 (2010): 95-96;
Irene Small, Hélio Oititica: Folding the Frame (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016);
Lara Demori is Postdoctoral Fellow and Scientific assistant of Prof. Tristan Weddigen at the Bibliotheca Hertziana-Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, where she works on transatlantic encounters between Latin American and Italian artists, between 1960s and 1980s. In 2017, Dr. Demori obtained her PhD in contemporary art history from The University of Edinburgh with a thesis entitled "Art Degree Zero: Piero Manzoni and Hélio Oiticica", which is currently becoming a book (Routlegde, 2024). Until August 2018 she was Goethe-Institut Postdoctoral Fellow at the Haus der Kunst Museum in Munich where she worked on Okwui Enwzor's project "Postcolonial Art, 1955–1980." From 2019 to 2021 Dr. Demori was Marcello Rumma Fellow in Contemporary Italian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was then promoted to Research Associate. At the PMA, Dr. Demori worked on curatorial and research projects related to contemporary art at large from the post-war period to the present, in particular: Giuseppe Penone, Teresita Fernandez, Andrea Fraser and Nam June Paik. Dr. Demori has published widely and organized and participated in numerous international conferences on both Italian and Latin American Modern and Contemporary Art. She regularly contributes to online cultural journals such as Antinomie and Doppiozero.
This paper aims to investigate the aesthetic and social implications that the use of both sugar and cocaine have in the practice of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica and the context of a postcolonial country. The use of powdery pigments witnessed great importance in the artist’s work since the 1960s and pertained to Oiticica’s penchant for a “poor” aesthetic and his research into colour. Following these premises, this presentation reveals the trajectory taken by Oiticica’s use of unconventional and syncretic materials, from the Bólides to the later Trilha de açucar and Cosmococas, and their socio-political interference with Western ecologies of thought.