Jack Smith, Hélio Oiticica, Tropicalism

Abstract

At this point, we have a number of Jack Smiths to choose from or combine. We have the queer Smith, anti-oedipal creature of indefiniteness and ambiguity who crossed genders and sexualities, advocated brassieres as storage devices-much better than pockets, he claimed-and nevertheless moaned, at the end of his life, that he had been taken too literally: What did I foster? An industry of drag queens. I'm ashamed of it.1 We have the socialist Smith, rabid denouncer of a rented world. We have the anarchist Smith, who fulminated against all forms of imposed order. We have the anti-art Smith, who culled his materials from the streets, put on shows in his living quarters, saw his entire life as an endless performance, and shirked the established art world and the state's cultural apparatus. And, in this essay, I turn my attention to a Smith that I don't think we have fully realized yet: a tropicalist Smith, fascinated consumer, deployer, and subverter of Latin exotica. As I do this, I want to cross Smith's tropicalism with that of artist Helio Oiticica, who inadvertently gave the term a new currency in 1967, when his art started incorporating and questioning tropical stereotypes, and whose extraordinary work has numerous points of convergence with Smith's.Part of my point in staging this dialogue is to connect the New York underground cinema with contemporary Latin American art and cultural history. The link has seldom been made yet deserves consideration in light of the currents of influence circulating between the North and South American avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s. During these years-and subsequently-numerous Latin American artists (including Oiticica) converged in New York, where they showed their work and at times entered the orbit of the film underground. Simultaneously, the New York underground-more often read and talked about than directly experienced-influenced various Latin American cinematic vanguards, such as 8-mm filmmaking in Mexico City and the underground of the late 1960s onward. Artists in both hemispheres were coping with similar issues at the time-the role of the photochemical media in the redefinition of art, the pervasiveness of mass culture, and the relation of art to power, hegemony, and marginality. Oiticica and Smith radically redefined their various media and enlisted the energies of popular culture in the process, purveyed provocative conceptions of the nature and use of art, and denounced the oppressiveness of their respective societies while trying to reinvent the modern everyday. The trans-American perspective on their work is further warranted by the inverted symmetry of their engagements. Smith used Latin kitsch-as it was served by the commercial films of the 1940s-to infuse the contemporary American underground with queer affect and ethnic reference in the creation of what Oiticica once called Tropicamp.2 For his part, Oiticica drew on rock, drugs, and American experimental culture to combine localism and internationalism, as well as popular appeal and avant-garde experimentation. Oiticica sustained an intense dialogue with contemporary American experimental and popular culture, which he integrated, especially during his New York residency in the 1970s, into his explorations of Brazilian visual and aural motifs and into his long-standing examination of color, perception, and the objecthood of the artwork. During this period, he developed an extraordinary form of expanded cinema that he called quasi-cinema and was partly influenced by Smith.A more anecdotal lead into my topic is in a letter from Oiticica to his friend, the great artist Lygia Clark, then living in Paris, dated 14 May 1971, seven months after his arrival in New York. He starts out reporting on the excitement of the city, the state of his loft, and, inevitably, on the stream of frightening news from Brazil: his friend Nando (Fernando Romero?) had just been imprisoned for an incriminating Super-8 film whose content Oiticica does not specify; another friend, designer Rogerio Duarte, had a psychotic break, set himself on fire, and was temporarily in an asylum; and many others were under home arrest, in hiding, or in and out of jail at the whim of the police. …