Public Domains

Luiz Renato Martins

Translated by Nicholas Brown

Published in the book
Carmela Gross: Quase Circo [Almost a Circus]. São Paulo: Cosac, 2025

[português]

Three invitations, as they unfold

The exhibition Almost a Circus launches simultaneously, with each work, installation, or piece, essentially three types of invitations: to the visual experience, captivated in particular by the luminous constructions and the chromatic intensity of the huge cloths unfurled like banners and curtains (evoking circus, stage, or screen); to the socialized experience of walking while conversing; and to a process of critical totalization combined with the first two activities. Thus, and as the title itself suggests, Almost a Circus acts synaesthetically, multiplying the forms of appeal to perception. But it does so without restricting itself to the sensory domain; that is, it also presents reflective intensity combined with historiographical density. The result lights up the eyes and leads us to admire, beyond the exhibition, the qualities of Lina Bo Bardi’s (1914-1992) project for the architectural restructuring of the former factory complex housing the exhibition, which has been converted into a cultural and community center.

Placement and materials

The point of departure can be traced both to the interactive immediacy associated with a parade of circus attractions, and to the reciprocity between footsteps and thought — in other words, to the so-called peripatetic practices of philosophy’s beginnings in the ancient Greek polis: the combination of dialogue and walking. With no walls between the works, visitors invent their own paths in the large covered plaza known as the living area, coming and going as ideas flow.

In its layout without partitions, the exhibition evokes both the urban environment and a dialogic and reflective disposition: openness to listening. Similarly, in its facture and in its affinities and allusions, Almost a Circus feeds directly on the struggle for life and everyday popular creativity.[1] What is more, all the works exhibited use ready-made, commercially available materials, as is common in architecture and the industrial or technically reproducible arts. The prevailing atmosphere is open and informal, like a workshop. In this way, Almost a Circus avoids exceptional practices — virtuosity and superior materials — to entrust its inventions to acts of montage using basic consumer materials (tubular light bulbs and their electrical wiring, cheap fabrics and cloths, newspaper photos, prefabricated wood paneling, LED information panels, objects collected from junkyards and second-hand stores, etc.) — but without moderating or economizing, assuming a scale that is neither intimate nor domestic, but urban.

Related to the urban ethos of the show, and naturally incorporated into the architectural and collective nature of the works in Almost a Circus, three artists — evoked throughout the various spaces of Sesc Pompeia — are also directly referred to: Lina Bo Bardi, Zé Celso Martinez Corrêa (1937-2023) and Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980). All three embodied the fraternal and metabolic alliance between avant-garde experimentalism and popular languages.

Historicity, systematic unity, and theatricality

That is why the two works (and perhaps a third) that evoke Hélio Oiticica are not accidental, but structural. PIVOT FLAG [BANDEIRA PIVÔ] (2024) recalls Oiticica’s parangolés and the textiles of his penetrable installation Tropicália (1967).[2] Meanwhile, in THE PHOTOGRAPHER [O FOTÓGRAFO] (2001), the disposition of the body alluded to suggests an irruption, convergence, or mnemic duet with the figure of the collapsed body from Oiticica’s Seja Marginal, Seja Herói [Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero, 1968]: the peril of life on the fringes, the lyrical and poignant drama emanating from the red tubular lamps, the slender and fragile metal structures, as wcell as the exposed — and so defenseless — wires and connections, all recall that decisive work and unforgettable tragic moment in Brazilian art. Likewise, the general title Quase Circo [Almost a Circus] alludes to his series Quase Cinema [Quasi-Cinemas] (1971-75).[3]

Also magnetic is RED BANNER [ESTANDARTE VERMELHO] (1999), a homage to Zé Celso — already exhibited at Sesc in 1999. Occupying the same place, today it appears in another constellation, situated at the end of an imaginary diagonal that links together an entire section of the exhibition, leading from PIVOT FLAG to the immense red mantle-parangolé dedicated to the playwright (who exclaimed at the time of the earlier exhibition: “I want to ‘parangolize’ the mantle […]”).[4]

Nor is a cunning and trenchant appeal to the first of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades (1887-1968) accidental.[5] Similarly, passages alluding to critical notions and philosophical constructions are not only structuring, but reveal a didactic function. They suggest tangents between various temporalities and contexts and the current one, and illuminate, like stage lights, options for reading.

In this way, in addition to the moments of rapture, consistent with the exhibition’s title, that emerge before the luminous works and the unfurled cloths, Almost a Circus exhibits a critical and reflective unity, and therefore essayistic ambition — which, in turn, is inseparable from the simultaneous dialogue with architecture.

Thus, the pieces and installations of Almost a Circus engage with a corpus of precise historical references. As we saw with the exhibition’s artistic interlocutors, the ensemble of citations ranges widely, from historical milestones in the arts, to links to or indications of social issues that transcend the pure domain of the arts — or invade it from the outside. These are dialogical or interactive issues and relationships, from the standpoint of which the works can be distinguished and objectively situated, with a gain in historical clarity. In relation to them, the exhibited works propose syntheses and totalizations. For example, LUZ DEL FUEGO III (2018/2024) highlights, like a magnifying glass, its objective link with reality or with the “totality that exists outside the painting — and from there invades it,” as the painter Antonio Dias (1944-2018) would have said.[6] But this link — Brechtian, one might say, thinking also of his affinity for the circus scene — operates throughout the exhibition.

Urban epic

In short, Almost a Circus proposes in sequences — which can be rearranged by the path of the visitor — pieces and installations illuminated with a scenic sensibility, thus in a theatrical and circus-like rhythm, and according to the democratic layout of Lina Bo Bardi’s architectural spaces. In this way we encounter the porosity of a public square, open but safeguarded as a hospitable environment that is suitable for walking. Combined, these elements lead to a fluid walk nourished by an optimized urban conviviality. In sum, within the framework of a collective urban experience, reconstructed didactically in objective terms and with concretely realizable materials, the visitors are inclined on their own account towards synthesis and totalization. The significance of the impulse remains to be seen.

The markedly urban and collective setting, and the diversity of common and cheap materials, all refer back to the joyful and provocative adventure present in the works of Oiticica’s post-concretist period. Like his parangolés, anti-art, and related proposals, they are extroverted and immersed in collective contexts.[7] They similarly recall the stagings of Zé Celso and the Teatro Oficina.

Decisive from this angle, which is basically that of popular resilience, is the simultaneous perception of the social and historical whole, both for what can be gleaned from the reinvention of the architectural space and from the tour of Almost a Circus. Thus, in addition to the energetic feeling of the whole, the visitor’s initiative is decisive, in line with what neo-concrete art once proposed with its key conception of participation.

Reproducibility and synthesis

On first entering the exhibition, visitors from the street are greeted by the disused and worthless objects of BIG WHEEL [RODA GIGANTE] (2019/2024). The insertion of prefabricated (ready-made) and manufactured objects — without a trace of artistic handling — belongs to the history of modern art. In 1914, Marcel Duchamp exhibited a utensil, singularizing it in poetic terms only by authorizing the choice of object. A similar bottle rack can be found among the objects accumulated in BIG WHEEL.

However, there is no equivalent in BIG WHEEL to the artistic and museographic environment that Duchamp envisaged for the bottle rack. Much more than a quotation, there is here a dialectical leap. Duchamp’s critique of artistic craftsmanship is included; but the new context goes further, leaving behind the typical artistic singularity and uniqueness that persisted in modernism.

Thus, in BIG WHEEL, in addition to the questions of the institutionality of art addressed by Duchamp’s object, the uniqueness and particularity of the bottle rack are diluted in the playful conviviality of a musical or dance circle, in which the Duchampian object is not singled out as a special or illustrious guest.[8] Rather, it appears on a list of around 250 objects collected from junkyards and second-hand stores. The result is not the identification of a singular object, but a totalization of the ensemble. As criticism and reflection, totalization goes beyond sum or accumulation by means of the synthetic activity of the visitor. Through negations and overcoming, leaps and challenges, such a synthesis arrives at a construction.

In this way, the visitor is given the impetus for a critical leap, which may take in the reference to Duchamp, but does not require it. In any case, one’s overview of the piece cannot but take in the ensemble of objects, as well as considering what surrounds them: the situation and its horizon, forging new links and posing problems.

Beyond artistic rebellion

One of these problems — which stands out in works based on standard materials — concerns the issue of technical reproducibility, which is a general condition of all manufactured objects. The question was raised by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility,” twenty years after the readymade became an art object.[9]

In the wake of Benjamin’s question, one is confronted by the problem of criticism and historiography in the face of such objects. This problem is experienced by the viewer of BIG WHEEL: what to say? What is the content of aesthetic pleasure in the face of disparate and ordinary objects?

One possible way forward is to retrace and unfold investigative steps. Faced with the omnipresence of the commodity as an elementary form of the capitalist economic process, Marx (1818-1883) began to question the mode of production and the premises of circulation. In this light, the questions trigger themselves: why and how did these disparate objects come together, what explains their display and organization?

Collective scale, objective form

The situation of the discarded things collected in BIG WHEEL differs from that of the bottle rack elevated to the distinction of art. Selected from (as Marx had it) the “immense collection of commodities” that opens Capital (1867),[10] the objects on the ground — already worn and depreciated — attest to the ephemeral and perishable nature of the means of work and production. Thrown out of circulation like piles of forgotten objects in blighted areas, those amassed by BIG WHEEL (loose pieces of gear, bricks, bags, old books and newspapers, etc.) remind the observer attentive to the whole of the analogous stream of migrant refugees (unusable surplus labor power), who face the impossible, with the tenacity of despair, in search of stable living conditions.

BIG WHEEL does not hide the precariousness of these objects’ recent situation; but now it reemploys them, connecting them to elevated structures (rigging, trusses, and beams),[11] under new light and in new synthetic relationships (aesthetic, critical, and didactic). Proposed as on stage, these objects acquire the objective form[12] of the truncated circulation inherent in fractured economies where manual labor has almost no value.

Is this the key to BIG WHEEL? Once, in a comparative and critical way, the readymade implicated, in its isolated and unique form, other objects given over to the singularity and exceptionality inherent in the exclusivity of art. Now, in BIG WHEEL, its meaning has changed decisively: it concerns not special objects and peculiarities, but the general condition of intermittency of the means of work and production.

If this is right, then the ensemble here underlines the historical condition of late and accelerated modernization processes, in which economic practices and productive nexuses perish quickly, multiplying disuses and disparities such as those that appear on the scene of BIG WHEEL — ultimately, a synthetic image of general circulation, an invitation to see the whole.

Keep your weather eye open

After a few steps alongside BIG WHEEL, the call to read Marx is introduced à la lettre. Observing the ropes that slice the visual field, suspending any illusion of natural or immediate perception, one soon finds red letters generated from a panel in the background (EXTRAS [FIGURANTES], 2016). “Cooperation, or subjection of the gaze to writing?” some might ask. However, discarding any premise of the purity of the visual domain, Benjamin and Brecht — contrary to Konrad Fiedler’s (1841-1895) doctrine of “pure visibility” — insisted on the indispensable interaction between text and images.

One way or another, if BIG WHEEL presents, as though in a giant maquette, the mental architecture of the first paragraph of Capital, the letters in lights transcribe an excerpt from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), in which Marx describes the ethos of the social base of Louis Bonaparte (1808-1873), pretender to the empire of Napoleon I (1769-1821). The catalog — in itself illustrative of a society already atomized by the capitalist process — points to the components of the political and social riffraff that made up the Bonapartist political machine and supported the coup d’état that restored the imperial regime in France (1852-1870). At the time, the same decomposed social universe was caricatured by Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), from whom Marx borrowed the satirical edge to caricature the prototype of the modernizing state. The similarity of the typology described with that of today’s ultra-right is striking.

In this way, reading the passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire prompts a change of discursive level, inviting passers-by to retrace their steps, with one eye on the works and the other on the course of history. Operations of this kind, the rupture and articulation of different voices and temporalities, have their roots in the critical or negative vocation of the arts. Eisenstein (1898-1948) used montage to interweave different narrative strands; similarly, Godard (1930-2022) introduced clippings from literary texts in his films of the 1960s, as well as deploying ruptures of point of view, in the position of the camera and in the syntax of the montage. On the agenda, then as now, is the strategy of questioning narrative unison or the univocal course of events through discrepant or counter-hegemonic angles, timbres, and tempos.[13] Here, the incorporated text serves as a ladder, helping us to glimpse the whole from above.

This being the case, taking in the whole exhibition allows one to notice that, along the way, there are repeated acts of historical comparison, and of critical overcoming of the entrenched visual tradition. Consider, for example, the ladders, underlined by red tubular lamps, of RED LADDERS [ESCADAS VERMELHAS] (2012/2024). Leaning against beams, rafters, or the wall, or simply supported, open-hinged, on two legs, they parodically allude to the mute and anodyne structures of plastic minimalism, which claim to deal exclusively with internal relations of a linguistic type. But here they suggest a simultaneous ascent: a collective movement upwards, emphasized both by the successive content of the ascending rungs, and by the number of ladders, side by side. An image of a totalizing and collective reflection, the illuminated pieces recall the ancient function of the ladder-form as a war machine (or a machine for critical struggle, as we might say today). Almost always visible in the background, even when looking at other pieces and installations, the red ladders are a reminder that ascending to extend the view — totalizing, in short — is the end and culmination of seeing.

In Almost a Circus, the visitor is in fact urged to connect dialectically two domains, apparently heterogeneous and airtight, and to overcome the aesthetic notion of pure form. In this respect, the program written by Oiticica for the New Brazilian Objectivity exhibition (MAM-RJ, 6-30.APR.1967) was a turning point. In fact, beginning with the New Figuration show, Opinião 65 (MAM-RJ, 12.AUG – 12.SEP.1965), various experiments after 1964 were allied to the vast front, originating in the arts and universities, of critical struggle and resistance against the recently established military-corporate dictatorship.[14] But it was the New Brazilian Objectivity program that gave dynamism and scope to the visual struggle.[15]

Class zones

The need to tramp down gangways on one’s commute is itself a sign of poverty and belonging to the masses. For the majority of urban workers, such passageways are the access route to daily transportation. It is therefore a clear sensory choice to propose in Almost a Circus a gangway about 30 m long to get from the first arena (where the BIG WHEEL and Extras are installed) to the second. Each visitor takes at least 60 steps, if not more, within the perceptual regime of those who regularly use mass transportation to commute between home and work. Other elements of the corridor dialectically accentuate the reconstruction of sensations linked to the inequality of rights to the city and uses of it — while at the same time allowing us to glimpse the overcoming of relationships of coercion and subjection.

The plywood sheets that form the gangway walls are brightly colored phenol pink, the characteristic color of the temporary fencing that usually surrounds construction sites.[16]The color is thus, in the Brazilian everyday panorama, also a sign of the precariousness — both of the materials and of the almost rural working relationships adopted — that pertains in the construction industry. Here, linking the two arenas of Almost a Circus, the plywood boards feature outlines of animals silkscreened on galvanized steel GANG [BANDO] (2016/2024). This latter material is widely used in the construction of gutters and service pipes; it therefore belongs, like plywood, to the worker’s daily perception.[17]

For many generations, construction sites have been the gateway to urban life for the peasant workforce migrating to the cities. Expelled from the countryside by the land regime that has concentrated land ownership even more since 1964 — formerly by the latifundia, now by agribusiness — this population has taken refuge on the outskirts of cities. Inhospitable and inconvenient, completely stripped of rural physiognomy, these peripheries (inhabited by the majority of manual laborers) accentuate the deprivation of basic rights in the city: lack of mobility, sanitation, electrification, health, education, greenery, etc.

The audience of Almost a Circus has the opportunity, as in a cinematic and reflective tracking shot along the plywood siding, to get a synthetic taste of life deprived of personal time in the pipelines of mass transportation. But in fact, in the urban pipelines reconstructed in Almost a Circus, the position of subjection and coercion is left behind. Instead of the normative and standardizing command of advertising — which watches over the psyche just as guards and cameras surveil behavior in stations and transfers — the visitor passing through encounters figures of animals, or indefinite forms suggestive of animals. In contrast with the advertising image, those of GANG, in their uncertain appearance, allow for the reversal of disciplinarity into spontaneity. In fact, the animals are figures of the imagination, forms ready for the projection of sundry desires and fears. Coming into view as figures on the galvanized metal sheets affixed to the plywood siding, the animals spark discussions. Certain animals spit — or do they ingest something indistinct? In any case, the oscillation of judgments and affects stimulates in the moment the spontaneous activity of the imagination and self-inquiry.

In short, the pink plywood sheets, while reconstructing the constricted space of mass transportation passageways, inversely allow the imagination, dammed up and regimented by the slowness and intermittency of the vehicles, to find support, and to flow out in catharsis. Faced with the magnetism of the animal images, the excitement of the audience and especially the children reveals that, in Almost a Circus, the mute suffering of the daily coming and going of the masses escapes and is transmuted.

The second act

The corridor leads beyond, like an initiation, to another platform, as it were, of Almost a Circus. Here, the presuppositions and the macro-scales of the historical processes to which BIG WHEEL and Extras allude gain concrete specification and circumscription. WOOD RIVER [RIO MADEIRA] (1990/2024), drawing attention to the ground, suggests, perhaps, a territory. However, as with the ladders, it escapes the ahistorical molds of both so-called land art and minimalism. Here, the gaze occupies a concrete, finite domain. But how to specify it?

The size of WOOD RIVER, stretching along a large part of Sesc’s interior watercourse as if it itself constituted a mini-arena of Almost a Circus, together with its contiguity with several pieces, suggests crucial perspectives on the other installations. In fact, the ensemble or interweaving of approximately 10,000 wooden square rods or strips of batten operates almost hypnotically. How can you take in with your eyes, and in a single sweep, this torrent of rods subsumed into a large form arranged on the floor, like an enigmatic fabric or text? At the disruptive sight of THE BLACK WOMAN IN RED [A NEGRA VERMELHA] (1997/2024) — whose figure wearing a red veil, in a scenic or dramatic line with the homage to the founder of Teatro Oficina (RED BANNER), and perhaps evoking the volcanic and demiurgic potential of work — a possible answer comes to mind. How can we not think of the energy of work, condensed in each rod, as the theme of WOOD RIVER? Be that as it may, BIG WHEEL and WOOD RIVER share scales and qualities, albeit from different angles and with different materials, composing in a way a counterpoint, like two variations on a common theme.

The interaction, or friction, between the unmeasured and sublime mass of the rods, and the fluid and uncertain configuration coagulated in WOOD RIVER, serves to evoke (like earth furrowed for planting) the hours of work and the collective metabolic force that feed the modern production process. If so, in WOOD RIVER the metabolic force and its constituent labor-hours undergo a radical transmutation: from the abstract state of their distribution in the economy — as one input (suggested by the uniformity of the rods) among others — to the concrete creative spark that ignites the specific aesthetic synthesis. In this, work, as a plastic living force, responsible for the configuration of WOOD RIVER in its extension on the ground, finally exercises its demiurgic power, generating forms, whatever they may be, visible from above and from afar.

In WOOD RIVER, work and metabolic action, when seen at ground level, from a perspective near the floor, regain a concrete dimension. In other words, visitors disposed to attend both to the flow of the River or the whole of the work (WOOD RIVER), on one hand, and to its parts (its rods/drops), on the other, find themselves invited — like the viewer of Cézanne’s paintings, who sees both the whole (mountain, apples, trees, etc.) and the modular and serial brushstrokes — to reflect on the process of artistic production. In the economy, the general process of exchange currently operates under the general law of concealment, whereby concrete work (metabolic energy) is transmuted into abstract value (prices). In WOOD RIVER, this fetish of metamorphosis and abstraction is reversed in the process of making, and of beholding, the work.

“The social nerve of artistic form”

In short: the rods evoke the anonymous flood of abstract working hours that feed the turbines of the current production process. To the suction of hours of work, is added the vampiric consumption of nature. From this angle, the ten thousand rods, taken as graphic signs of inputs (labor and natural resources), can be graphically summed up as a diagram: in red, the state of labor, seen in the abstract; in green, in the crushed territory, the state of vegetation and other natural resources.

The x of the equation lies in exposing the tension between opposites, in this case between the state of abstraction of the parts (uniform rods or strips) and the living dynamics of concrete transformations, mobilized by the aesthetic synthesis, which, going back and forth between the point of view from the ground and the view from above, distributes the parts and constitutes them into a visual whole. This whole, an amphibious and sui generis form, is generated from the uniformity of the rods and the negativity inherent in aesthetic synthesis or totalization, which includes criticism and reflection. In the irreducible heterogeneity of its tense admixture (which alludes to the heterogeneity of the historical and social sphere), the whole constitutes an objective form — “the social nerve of artistic form,” in Roberto Schwarz’s exact definition.[18] Thanks to its inherent negativity, aesthetic form, once glimpsed as objective form, returns as negation to social and historical material, unveiling it in an attentive critical synthesis — and revealing, at the same stroke, the critical and cognitive power of art to expose the gears of domination.

Walking and seeing — syntactically

In short, seriality, discontinuity, and synthesis combine in Almost a Circus with collective scales and forms. They join the alluring and suggestive course of the water, to an architecture conducive to the non-linear track of footsteps, and to paths that can reopen unexpectedly, proposing new syntaxes.

In counterpoint to the steps one takes around the watercourse, one encounters works arranged around it that interact with WOOD RIVER. On the agenda: the Brazilian popular habitat, to use the architect’s terms.[19] Thus, in sequence or constellation with WOOD RIVER and GANG, these emerge in turn: the pink color of a skewed house A HOUSE [UMA CASA] (2007) — a dream about to roll down a hill, like favela dwellings in a mudslide?; or objects from popular trade: a popcorn cart slathered with lipstick (ROUGE, 2018), as if selling desires on the sidewalk; or colorful hanging printed cloths, such palpable signs of the internal spaces, lacking partitions and doors, of favela housing; or, in counterpoint, LUZ DEL FUEGO III, an oracular canvas or a kind of ephemeral mural, a torrent or volcanic mouth of images collected from press photos, in which the open-air infernos of the un-cities populated by the great masses of the Third World are given tragic expression in scenes of fires, disruptive like cyclical crises.

The Chorus, the parangolé, and the drawing board

Combining traces of works as steeped in theater as those by Zé Celso and Lina Bo Bardi, without forgetting Oiticica’s relationship with choreography, how could Almost a Circus do without the stage figure of a Chorus? In a crescendo against the sky, and condensing many of the elements used in the show (panels, colored lights and letters, collective scale, porosity to the surroundings, etc.), the scenic role of the Chorus will be played out onstage by the installation CAT [GATO] (2024), which bursts into view scenographically. Then, in a sort of circus-like grand finale, the Chorus might, as Zé Celso demanded, parangolize the national colors.

In fact, the CAT installation was created using words taken from one of the initial sketches for the Sesc Pompeia project. It borrows original notes from the architect, spelled in Italian (giallo, rosso, blu, verde). If the title designates an animal, “gato” also evokes, with greater emphasis in popular speech, the hijacking and appropriation of electrical or signal cables (internet, TV, etc.). The architect’s design on the drawing board, in making the dialectical leap — from the handwritten notations on a rough sketch to the (surprisingly pleasing) form appropriate to the scale of urban illuminated signage — conducts the visitor into the trance of an oscillatory state: from the scale of the real to that of the sketch and from there to the real scale of commercial signage. In this process, the panels of luminous letters, affixed to concrete catwalks (and counterposed to the real profiles and figures of the urban landscape in the background), underline the meaning attributed, thanks to the boldness of the architect, to the dialectical inversion of the factory environment into its opposite, and into a historical paradigm for becoming. Red — rosso in Italian — re-qualifies and dialecticizes — with its vibrancy and in its role as the show’s keynote color — the liberation of the other three colors, today reduced, condemned to serving in their habitual reception as an official symbol or national heritage.

Thus a second kind of plaza or square is constituted along the way, and also within each visitor, timed to their own steps. This one is linear and outdoors, but always, like the other arenas of Almost a Circus, a place of discovery and conviviality. From square to square, we arrive at what Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) envisioned when he imagined what republican festivals would be, as opposed to those of the court:

*

Comments by M. L. Cacciola and S. Trefaut; revisions by G. Motta and R. Araki.

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[1] An example of preservation and rigor in this area was the rescue process carried out by the architect Lina Bo Bardi, faced with the otherness of the popular art object, taken as an act of resistance and creativity. See Aurelio Michiles and Isa Grispum Ferraz, Lina Bo Bardi, São Paulo, Instituto Bardi, 1993, film, 50 min; available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_Q9_U9vw8&gt;. Accessed 19 April 2024.

[2] The term derives from an improvised, popular word for an improvised, popular solution. Oiticica’s series of “Parangolés” involved garments that could be manipulated expressively by the wearer. [Trans.]

[3] For a detailed compilation, see Carlos BASUALDO, Hélio Oiticica: Quasi-Cinemas, Columbus (Ohio), Wexner Center for the Arts/ Köln, Kölnischer Kunstverein/ New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art/ Berlin, Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2001. Exhibition catalog.

[4] “I love it, it’s a wonderful shamanic cloak (…) Red is my favorite color, I think red is missing from the Brazilian flag, the color of passion, of fire, the color of Cacilda [Becker],” said Zé Celso, at the first exhibition of this work in his honor, associated with the presentation of the Estadão Multicultural Award (Sesc Pompeia, 1999), adding that he was going to wear it to dance at the award ceremony: “I want to ‘parangolize’ the cloak (…)” (my italics). Apud Beth NÉSPOLI, “Zé Celso, o infatigável desbravador da arte”, in O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, 01.05.1999, p. D 6.

[5] Porte-bouteilles [Bottle Rack, 1914].

[6] In an interview in Cologne (Köln), Germany, in June 1994, when asked why he used geometric shapes combined with words, Dias replied: “(…) to show this “totality that exists outside the painting — and from there invades it.” Cf. Antonio Dias and Nadja von Tilinsky, “In Conversation”, in Vv. Aa., Antonio Dias: Trabalhos/ Arbeiten/ Works 1967-1994, Darmstadt/ São Paulo, Cantz Verlag/ Paço das Artes, 1994, pp. 54-55.

[7] For Oiticica’s career after the neoconcrete movement, see Mário Pedrosa, “Arte Ambiental, Arte Pós-Moderna, Hélio Oiticica” (1966), in Otília Arantes (org.), Acadêmicos e Modernos: Textos Escolhidos, vol. III, São Paulo, Edusp, 1995, p. 355; English trans.: M. Pedrosa, “Environmental Art, Postmodern Art, Hélio Oiticica” [1966], in idem, Primary Documents, edited by Gloria Ferreira and Paulo Herkenhoff, translated by Stephen Berg, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 2015, pp. 314-17.

[8] The phrase “musical or dance circle” translates “roda ou ciranda,” which refers to egalitarian Brazilian social forms that centrally involve music and dance, respectively. The word “roda” is also the “wheel” part of the title “BIG WHEEL,” “RODA GIGANTE” — which also denotes a Ferris wheel. The Portuguese and English words for “circus” descend from the Latin word for “circle.” [Trans.]

[9] Initially written between October and December 1935, this text went through several versions. For a translation of the final version (1939), see Walter BENJAMIN, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2003.

[10] “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities”; the singular commodity appears as its elementary form.” Cf. Karl MARX, “Chapter 1: The Commodity”, in idem, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes, New York, Vintage, 1977, p. 125.

[11] On the impact of BIG WHEEL in a different architectural and social context (Porto Alegre, Farol Santander, 2019), see L.R. MARTINS, “Roda Gigante: Ensaio sobre o colapso” in C. Gross and L.R. Martins, Roda Gigante, São Paulo, WMF Martins Fontes/ Circuito, 2021, pp. 51-62; Eng. trans., “Big Wheel: an Essay on the Collapse”, by Renato Rezende, pp. 80-90.

[12] For the notion of objective form, as a “practical-historical substance” that condenses the general rhythms of society, and operates as the “social nerve” and dialectic of aesthetic form, see Roberto Schwarz, “Adequação nacional e originalidade crítica”, in idem, Seqüências Brasileiras: Ensaios, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1999, pp. 30-31. See also L.R. MARTINS, op. cit., p. 62.

[13] A similar procedure was used in the project for the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture and Ecology (MuBE, 1986) by Paulo Mendes da Rocha (1928-2021): flights of stairs or ramps merge with the walkway along the esplanade, unfolding it in different levels and perspectives, creating a variety of counterpoints, dissonances, and visual dialogues.

[14] On this front, see R. SCHWARZ, “Cultura e política: 1964-1969/ Alguns esquemas”, in idem, O Pai de Família e Outros Estudos, São Paulo, Paz e Terra, 1992, pp. 61-92.

[15] See H. Oiticica, “Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade” [1967], in Hélio Oiticica/ Museu é o Mundo, ed. César Oiticica, catalog, Rio de Janeiro, Beco do Azougue, 2011, pp. 86-101. For an emblematic synthesis between class perspectives and aesthetic forms, see the work Tropicália presented at the time, which incorporated elements of favela architecture and environment into the modern lexicon through montage.

[16] On the proliferation of plywood sheets in Brazil’s urban spaces, see the article by Miguel del Castillo, available at <https://migueldelcastillo.org/post/55275093542/a-vida-privada-dos-tapumes&gt;. Accessed 28 March 2024.

[17] “Galvanized shack / My country’s tradition,” sang Elizeth Cardoso (1920-1990).

[18] Cf. R. Schwarz, Duas Meninas, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1997, p. 62.

[19] Lina Bo Bardi founded the magazine Habitat/ Revista Brasileira de Artes, which published 84 issues from 1950 to 1965.

[20] Cf. J.-J. Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert, Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1967, pp. 233-4, cf. translation by Allan BLOOM in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alambert on the Theater, Ithaca, Cornell, 1968, p. 126.