OITICICA WANTS YOU TO TOUCH HIS ART

Brazilian artist receives a retrospective at Carnegie Museum

Helio Oiticica’s boyhood in Brazil was all about learning.

The eldest of three sons, Oiticica (pronounced Oy-ta-SEE-ka) was born in 1937 and home-schooled by his father, an engineer, entomologist, mathematician and experimental photographer. Another key influence was his grandfather, an expert in written languages and publisher of a wellknown anarchist newspaper.

Perhaps that background inspired the late artist’s inventive names for his works, which included capes he called parangoles, a slang word for an agitated situation.

The painter and sculptor was 17 when he began taking art lessons. He retained a lifelong fascination with the moment of creativity and sensory experience. He believed his participatory art was not complete unless someone touched it, wore it or stepped inside of it.

That’s why there will be so much sensory stimulation at a new exhibition, “Helio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium,” which opens Saturday at Carnegie Museum of Art in Oakland and runs through Jan. 2 in the Heinz Galleries and the Hall of Sculpture.

Visitors can walk barefoot across 5 tons of sand, wade in water, listen to samba music, read pulp fiction, relax in one of 10 hammocks, play pool and admire two Amazon

parrots named Amy and Rica. Taking a nap in a pile of straw is encouraged, too.

Many of these elements make up an architectural work called “Tropicalia,” done in 1967. It is the artist’s satire of tropical paradise cliches but also a political critique of his country, where hillside slums overlook pristine beaches.

In 1964, the child of privilege began visiting a hillside slum or favela in Rio de Janeiro, where he learned how to dance the samba. That same year, a repressive political regime took power in Brazil and the young artist’s father died.

With colleagues and the famous singer Caetano Veloso, Oiticica opposed his country’s conservative political leaders. He created a banner, “Be an outlaw. Be a hero,” that was used in a nightclub performance by Veloso and others. Later, Veloso was tried in a Brazilian court and exiled from the country for displaying the banner.

The exhibition will travel to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art, which co-organized it with Lynn Zelevansky, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Carnegie Museum of Art.

A 1969 exhibition called “Eden,” shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, put Oiticica on the map, Ms. Zelevansky said.

The artist lived in New York City in 1970-78 and was part of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. He relished the freedom of living in Manhattan, its gay underground culture and the music of Jimmy Hendrix. But, Ms. Zelevansky said, he was ambivalent about the commercialism that dominated America’s art market and the work of Pittsburgh artist Andy Warhol.

Oiticica, who was only 42 when he died from a stroke in 1980, was both cerebral and compulsive, she said.

“He wrote constantly and explained his work all the time.”

César and Claudio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida photo Helio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s “CC5 Hendrix-War” (1973) features images of Jimi Hendrix and hammocks. It’s part of the Helio Oiticica show opening Saturday at the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Projeto Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, and Galerie Lelong, New York “Filter Project — For Vergara” (1972) was made from nylon, acrylic, plastic curtains, a natural fiber doormat, a television set, tape recorders, a transistor radio, a buzzer, an orange juice machine, fluorescent lamps and fiberboard.