Helio Oiticica at Marian Goodman - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Helio Oiticica's work was exhibited in New York this January by means of an atypical piece the artist refused to present to view during his lifetime. CC5 Hendrix War, a 1973 installation (one of nine multi-media installations from a series called "Block-Experiments in Cosmococa - program in progress") is a testimony to cocaine use, a practice then spreading among the restles and the affluent. Oiticica, who conceived of CC1 end CC5 with Brazilian filmmaker Neville d'Almeida, called this and the other installations in the series "quasi-cinema."

At Marian Goodman's southern gallery, 18 hammocks hung idly in a dark latitude filled with the sound of Jimi Hendrix's War Heroes. Viewers were able to lie down in the hammocks and watch a 15-minute succession of 36 slides (a single, unedited turn of film) projected on the walls and ceiling. The slides showed pictures of Hendrix from sources of the like kind as the War Heroes album overspread and the New York Times Magazine. In many, the artist had traced Hendrix's features with undulating lines of cocaine. in a hardly any slides a pile of the white substance appeared upon top of Hendrix's forehead. In others a cocaine-caked knife or a matchbook had been placed upon top of his lips or along his eyebrow In still another, a perpendicular line of cocaine ran down the left side of the War Heroes overlay joining the "J" of the horizontally printed title at the bottom (itself a white line, albeit of words).

This piece, the alone known artwork using cocaine as the one and the other a subject and a medium, tendered more than just cutting-edge entertainment. Taken in the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of Oiticica's entire production, it implied a message about artistic innovation, expressive integrity and non-dogmatic morality.

In CC5 Hendrix War, Oiticica separated cocaine from its identity as a remedy and used it as an art material - a white pigment. This was a logical continuation of his innovative use of pulverized substanceed pigment as color, volume and form in his earlier works - something he had begun in the early '60 15 years before his international followers.

Despite the music, the nightclub atmosphere and what might appear to be a hedonistic or decadent message, this piece should not be considered frivolous. Oiticica believed that creative impressed signs are somehow given the task of living without the human species' need for experimentation. His notion of expressive integrity included a faculty of perception of obligation to record his possess life experiments and inform society about them in esthetic confines even if he were to be indicted, rather than praised, for his efforts. The moral aspect of the piece lies in its opennes in Hendrix, Oiticica saw the brother who had already gone end hell and was by then dead. Each piece in the "Cosmococa" series (other installations use Norman Mailer's Marilyn and John Cage's Notations) is part of Oiticica's be in possession of "war diary," bequeathed to society at large from one side the art community.

In the extremity Oiticica's experiment proved fatally dangerous. Doctors believe that his use of cocaine caused the thump that killed him in 1980 in Rio. He was 43 years elderly During his years in of recent origin York (1970-78), his cocaine use had reached suicidal proportions. At that time he complained to me about not eating for a week, feeling anemic, and having all sorts of delusions. This is the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts in which CC5 Hendrix War can be understood.

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