Introduction to Hélio Oiticica’s “Héliotape with Mario Montez (1971)”

Abstract

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937, Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica lived in New York City in 1971-78. As did many political exiles and other fellow artists abroad during the years of military dictatorship in Brazil, Oiticica would help himself through difficult times with a bit of cocaine dealing here and there. This enterprise provided him with a remarkable social mobility. Oiticica soon had friends on Street and in rock-star circles, highbrow bohemia, and the queer underground. At the same time, he became a sort of chronicler of life in Lower Manhattan-MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) artist and occasional St. Marks Place pusher at once-and provided his friends and various clandestine countercultural magazines back in Brazil with a ceaseless stream of letters, articles, photos, films, and tape recordings. In these, he would mix such heterogeneous elements as anecdotes of his life in the queer underground, detailed drug and cruising experiences, metropolitan gossip, philosophical reading advice, and comments on film, music, and art scenes. (I don't know what is going on here, there is such a bourgeois art scene, conformity and reactionarism going on, unbelievable!1)The name Heliotapes describes a series of tape recordings that Oiticica made in this fashion between 1971 and 1975. The following is a transcription of one particular Heliotape that Oiticica recorded in conversation with Montez in 1971. By then, Oiticica had reached the conclusion that the sellout of New York's queer underground had long begun, a fact that was confirmed by the success of Andy Warhol-Paul Morrissey film Trash (1970) in what he regarded as neoconservative circles that voyeuristically feed on marginal activity. Against this logic of spectacle and consumption, Oiticica maintained a particularly strong affinity to Montez and Jack Smith, whom he considered to be different. Thus, one year after their recorded conversation, Montez would appear in the most famous of Oiticica's Super 8 films, Agripina e Roma Manhattan {Agrippina Is Rome-Manhattan, 1972), in which he and Brazilian artist Antonio Dias throw dice, evoking what Oiticica called a Wall Street Oracle or OraCULO.Already in 1971 Oiticica had used the Heliotape conversation as the basis for his article Mario Montez, Tropicamp that he published in Rio de Janeiro's Presenca magazine.2 In this text, Oiticica envisioned a sort of internationalist underground solidarity between what once had been the notorious Tropicalia movement in Brazil-but now was scattered and fragmented over South America, Europe, and the United States-and Smith and Montez, representing the element resistant to both commercialization and the distinctive chic of New York's post-1968 bohemia. …