3/17/2023 0 Comments Helio oiticicaIn the mid-1960s, as the creativity of the Brazilian cultural Left reaches a kind of fever pitch (but as the political left is defeated and in retreat) he creates his parangolés, fully interactive event-objects that are activated by a wearer, paradigmatically a wearer from the Mangueira samba school of which Oiticica had become a member. He then fully embraces three dimensions, soon taking on the architectural implications of that move, at which point the work has already taken on an interactive, participatory aspect. At a certain point his paintings explode the rectangular frame and acquire shape, at the same time moving off the wall. He begins as a formalist, in the context of 1950s Brazilian concretism. The arc of Hélio Oiticica’s career is easy to read. In this essay I will be focusing another of the Rio concretists: not the most accomplished of the group, but the artist in whose trajectory a version of this dialectic, at once aesthetic and political, plays out the most clearly. 2 Figure 3: Stella at work on Getty Tomb Figure 4: Lygia Pape, Tecelar, 1960 Both artists are answering different but intimately related interpretations of the question posed by “the entire dialectic of modernist painting from Manet to the present”: in short, of the relationship between the depictive and literal aspects of the artwork. There is nothing coincidental, however, about the two artists’ shared concern with the material support and their shared deductive approach to pictorial content. So the meanings of the two pieces, while completely different, are not opposite but complementary. You felt that they were made by somebody’s hand.” 1 But while the two pictures thematize the beholder and the artist respectively, their meanings do not reside in the beholder or in the artist, but rather, as we have just seen, inhere in the work. The hand of the painter is legible at any gallery-sized distance according to Stella himself, the black paintings “were painterly and expressive. The apparently negative black spaces suddenly emerge as it were through the white spaces to become positive as the beholder approaches the picture and the wood-grain pattern comes into view: hence “tecelar,” from the verb “to weave.” Stella’s oil painting, on the other hand, thematizes the action of the artist. Pape’s woodcut thematizes the action of the beholder. In other words the two pieces do, as they are intended to, different things. Most importantly, the apparently negative black ground in Stella’s painting is easily legible as having been applied by Stella’s wrist, hand, and brush the apparently negative black ground of Pape’s woodcut is easily legible, on close inspection, as having been applied with a natural material caught up in a mechanical process. Stella’s is an oil painting and Pape’s is a woodcut, so the apparently positive white tracing in Stella’s painting is blank canvas and the apparently positive white lines in Pape’s woodcut are blank paper. Getty Tomb is eight feet wide Pape’s tecelar is 20 inches on a side. Figure 1: Frank Stella, Getty Tomb, 1959. Stella’s piece is slightly oblong and Pape’s is square: considering the privileged position of the square in Brazilian concretism as a kind of non-arbitrary default, one might even say that Stella’s has shape, and Pape’s does not. The striking similarity of Frank Stella’s 1959 Getty Tomb and a Lygia Pape tecelar of 1956 is on a first approach merely a graphic coincidence. Hölderlin, Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland And yet-I cannot forget how much more I wanted. With our mortal powers we struggle to create the beautiful, and yet it grows, uncared for, beside us! Isn’t that so, Alabanda? Men are made to care for their needs, the rest gives itself.
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