Hélio Oiticica and the white simultaneous singularity of Newyorkaises

Abstract

This article focuses on the work of the neo-avant-garde artist and writer Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro, 1937-1980), whose work was seen at the time (and nowadays) as one of the possible ways to build another kind of Brazilian Neo-avant-garde and that is at the core of this present study: a different kind of Neo avant-garde that would be more inconvenient and more libertarian than that which corresponded to the consensual and cliquish ideas found in Brazilian Neo-avant-garde tout court (i.e. the concrete and neo-concrete art and literary movements). In this respect, the article aims, on the one hand, to give an overview of Hélio Oiticica’s work, evaluating thematic choices and literary and artistic procedures. Also, I carry out an evaluative analysis of the specificities and the contributions of this Rio de Janeiro artist’s unorthodox and groundbreaking Newyorkaises (Conglomerado), at the crossroads of different art forms and generic hybridization. Finally, I also examine the cultural encyclopaedia of the literary, plastic and musical pensum that lies behind this experimental writing and the visualist, (neo)avant-gardist and countercultural mode it obeys.