The Brooklyn Rail

Poetry is what you’re thinking now! That’s my best summary for Hélio Oiticica’s project Secret Poetics. Definitively one of Brazil’s most significant twentieth-century artists, Oiticica is well-known for integrating text into his work, but rarely are his artists’ books and writings given their own attention. And it’s about time.

Secret Poetics is an unconventional “book” in two parts: first, a small black notebook containing an introductory text by Oiticica, and then, second, as a separate book object, the eleven sumptuous poems he calls the text’s “addendum”—Secret Poetics, Addendum 1 (see respective notebook)—handwritten onto an unlined pad of notepaper taken from the University of Brazil, in which the “AD” in “UNIVERSIDADE” has been underlined and repurposed to signify “addendum.” (Both the notebook text and each poem are dated and signed.) Together, this book in two parts provides a critical framework for understanding major themes in Oiticica’s practice—participation, sensory, memory, and language. Add gorgeous images of his “visual” (literary-visual-interactive-process) work, and two great essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and art writer Pedro Erber, and this undersized volume manages to shake a lot of ground.

Most renowned for his interactive art objects and installations from the 1960s and ’70s, Oiticica was a leading artist of Brazil’s Neoconcretismo movement, which rejected the intellectualism and rigidity of the concrete movement that preceded it, ushering in subjectivity, intermedia, immersive, and interactive art. (If Neoconcretism is new to you, think post-minimalism meets Fluxus.)

Oiticica’s work hinges on physical movement and engagements of the body, requiring the viewer to physically activate or release the experience or essence of the work. A few of his most well-known works include his “Parangolé” series, wearable layers of fabric that evoke samba costumes to be worn and enacted by participants (Oiticica was also a dancer); his “Bólide” series (which he was working on at the same time as Secret Poetics), consisting of three dimensional interactive sculptures, some including short poetic texts; and “Tropicália,” a series of labyrinthine, immersive environments evoking the tropical landscape of Brazil, also incorporating poetry. (Rich images of all three are included in the book.)

The big “secret” in Secret Poetics, written in 1964, is not that Oiticica engaged poetry or explored concepts of figurative language, language as material, intertextuality, and textual fragmentation in his work, or even that he wrote poetry; the secret this volume critically reveals is Oiticica’s thinking on some of the major themes that define his art, including sensation, participation, and memory.

“Secret” Oiticica writes in the principal text of the book, “is what I want because I am not a poet, although an urgent necessity leads me to verbal expression.” Indeed, the three notebook pages that are the chief text orienting this series of poems represent a small treatise by the artist on the role of poetry in his art: “The true lyric is immediate, that is, immediacy that becomes eternal in lyrical poetic expression, exactly the polar opposite of my work, which is all oriented toward expression that excludes fleeting, inconsequential accidents, despite embracing them [. . .] experiences, which I try to construct ideally in my artwork (the experience of the work transforming everyday experiences).” Oiticica posits that it is through the experience of these “ideal” art constructions that “certain paths, certain intuitions begin to bud, the flowering of the everyday” and “the poems that will emerge … synthesize those experiences.”

By dividing the object of Secret Poetics into two parts, and labeling the poems Addendum 1, Oiticica actualizes his concept of poetics not as the principal construction or experience, but rather, as what follows. For Oiticica, poetry is a spontaneous capturing of fleeting experience that extends a moment into memory: “what might be inconsequential, day-to-day, becomes experience and is eternalized.” Conversely, he sees his own visual and installation work as a construction of the possibility of such “fleeting, inconsequential accidents” but not the capturing of such moments itself, which can only occur unexpectedly to the viewer/participant. In other words, the poetics are secreted through the art.

Like a Judson Dance Theater performance of the same era—and this is my analogy not his—he sets the work in motion, but it’s the participant in the audience who gets to suddenly, fleetingly, experience walking as dance. Which might be a good way to think about his interactive “Bólide” sculptures that he was making concurrently to Secret Poetics; with each “Bólide” Oiticica was setting a possibility in motion, but it was the participant who got to suddenly experience the fleeting and spontaneous embodiment of the work—the poetics of the moment. Poetry is what you’re thinking now! Also, what endures. Drawing a distinction between his art and poetry, Oiticica roughly divides intention or concept from glancing revelation; it isn’t the constructed artwork that endures, he says, but the poetic moment of engagement qua memory. “Bird, / O beauty!, / that’s already a memory,” he writes, and then, “Beautiful, / the beautiful, / conceptless,” which sums up well what he was after.

Many art movements can point to a spiritual or intellectual lodestar who helped inspire or chart their path; for the Neoconcretist movement, that person was French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. And the eleven poems that Oiticica wrote on the pad of paper titled Addendum 1 give good witness to that fact—perception (of the moment) is sense-uous and physical. These rich and embodied poems work together to consider overarching themes of fleeting, physical engagement to access an elusive and timeless realm of beauty—one that cannot be accessed by intellect or thought. “The smell, / new touch, / restarting of the sense, / absorption, / memory, / oh!” Indeed, the poems often respond directly to Oiticica’s own artworks, seeking to capture the glancing revelation of their physical engagement, something he wanted every participant of his work to experience: i.e. not the “Parangolé” itself but the fleeting and spontaneous moment-addendum of embodying it. (In later writings, Oiticica would evoke the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” as a kind of refrain in his writings about the “Parangolés”—full body embodiment.)

Physicality and bodily perception then are paramount to accessing the “secret” moment of poetry for Oiticica, which is why I wish translator Rebecca Kosick had incorporated more of the rich music and dance of the artist’s lyric in her English rendering. Full-body sensation is foundational to Oiticica’s work and vision. Rhythm, assonance, consonance, internal rhymes and especially end rhymes are rich in these poems; you can hear them, even if you don’t speak Portuguese: “A espera, / frieza, / ir e vir, / naturalidade de por vir.” I wish I could hear that same music in Kosick’s “The wait, / cold, / coming and going, / the natural of the will-be.” Or in the stanzas that follow:

O rio que corre,
segrêdo,
continua,
a procura.
(...)
A imagem,
memória,
o tato,
contato de côrpo.

Becoming in English a less resonant:

The river that runs,
secret,
continues,
the search.
(...)
The image,
memory,
the tactile,
contact with the body.

But translation is always about threading the narrowest of needles through which both meaning and style must pass, and it’s rare that one doesn’t have to be favored. And there is a good argument to favor meaning here. This book is chiefly about better understanding the artistic framework and thinking of one of the leading Brazilian artists of the twentieth century, and in this, the book definitively hits the mark. It also marks a critical chapter in the trajectory of Oiticica’s relationship to language in his work, a transition of sorts between the minimalist texts of his visual-interactive work of the Sixties to the more dense, immersive texts that characterize his textual work in the decade to follow.

But let’s get back to that “secret” river in the poem above. I think it’s safe to say that part of the “secret” in Oiticica’s Secret Poetics is the unknowable, indeterminate, and impermanent nature of revelation (truth?) that engages as a fleeting moment and transcends into memory—a hidden well-spring that Oiticica felt could only be accessed through the spontaneity of experience, “a moment of pleasure can be made eternal by memory.” It’s what he wanted for all participants and viewers of his work—to feel and capture a moment that might endure, a secret poetics.