On March 31, 1964, the Brazilian Armed Forces staged a coup d’etat that ousted the left-wing president, João Goulart, and founded a repressive military dictatorship that would dominate Brazilian life and politics for the next twenty-one years. That same year, in a note dated July 21, Hélio Oiticica, a Brazilian plastic artist who was part of the neo-concrete movement of the early 1960s, began a new project called “secret poetics” which represented his first serious foray into the writing of poetry. In a notebook that he would fill with brief but meditative and visceral poems for the next two years, Oiticica describes his secret poetics as essentially an exercise in lyric, defining lyric poetry as an art of “immediacy that becomes eternal.” He views it as “exactly the polar opposite of [his] plastic work, which is all oriented toward expression that excludes fleeting, inconsequential accidents, despite embracing them” (35).
Oiticica’s sudden turn to lyric poetry is compelling. Up to this point, Oiticica was more known for his public-facing art practice, starting with his involvement in the Grupo Frente avant-garde group (based in Rio de Janeiro), and for his founding of the neo-concrete movement alongside artists Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, and the poet Ferreira Gullar. Indeed, the artwork that Oiticica is most known for, the architecturally scaled installation Tropicália, premiered a few years later, in 1967, and its preliminary conceptualization and construction were simultaneous with the compositions he wrote for the secret poetics notebook.
Tropicália was massively important for modern Brazilian culture. Its conceptual tenets initiated a pop cultural movement in the 1960s that synthesized the avant-garde conceptualism of the Brazilian neo-concretists with Brazil’s historic musical legacy, from samba and bossa nova to the burgeoning música popular brasileira (MPB). One of the architects of the Tropicalismo movement, the musician Caetano Veloso, released a debut album in 1968 that featured the song “Tropicália”, a composition which not only borrowed Oiticica’s title concept, but also built on it by expressing, in Oiticica’s own words, “the ‘myth’ of miscegenation” that subtends the complex racial and cultural hybridity of Brazilian culture.[1] Veloso and Oiticica were collaborators as well as left-wing radicals in the public eye, and due to the cultural restrictions and censorship employed by the right-wing military regime in Brazil, they were forced into a temporary exile in places like New York and London in the late 1960s. Perhaps the titular secrecy of Secret Poetics was a result of the anxiety caused by the burden of working under a newly founded repressive dictatorship, which targeted queer intellectuals and artists like Oiticica whose work (like Tropicália) critiqued Brazil’s neoliberal push toward free market modernization at the expense of a large segment of Brazilians who suffered in the poverty of the favelas.
For this reason, Winter Editions and Soberscove Press’s co-publication of Secret Poetics, the journal Oiticica kept during the years 1964-1966, is an important event, particularly for those who are interested in Oiticica’s work beyond the visual arts or in exploring the poetic sources that fed into Tropicália and the Tropicalismo movement. I claim, however, that it is impossible to read Secret Poetics without recourse or reference to Oiticica’s primary fame as a plastic artist, and the poems serve to shed more light on Oiticica’s interdisciplinary practice as an artist, rather than as stand-alone lyric poems that withstand close reading. With this in mind, it is important to note a few facts about the journal that provide a contrast to the publicness of Oiticica’s artworks. First, there is no indication that Oiticica finished Secret Poetics, nor is there any evidence that he had planned, during his lifetime, to publish the journal and the poems contained therein. In her introduction, Rebecca Kosick, the editor and translator, notes that “Secret Poetics seems to have been largely a private undertaking for Oiticica, and this may be one reason for the use of ‘secret’ in the title” (9). As such, Secret Poetics is a small book comprising twelve brief poems (many of which are not longer than a page), a short introduction by Oiticica, a lengthier introduction by Kosick, and an afterword by Pedro Erber. It speaks to the momentariness of the journal that the respective introduction and afterword by Kosick and Erber, in sum, are longer than the actual body of the journal. Moreover, the Winter Editions/Soberscove Press edition is not only the first English translation of the work, but it is also the first time Oiticica’s journal, in its original format and language, has ever been published at all. Kosick explains that a fire in 2009 tragically burned a great deal of the holdings at the Projeto Hélio Oiticica, an archive founded by Oiticica’s family and dedicated to his work; among those holdings was the original handwritten edition of Secret Poetics, which Kosick was able to retrieve and access via its digital facsimile. In this respect, the Winter Editions/Soberscove Press edition is invaluable for providing photographic images of the corresponding pages in the notebook, providing an image of Oiticica’s original handwritten poem on the left and Kosick’s English translation on the right.
Second, Secret Poetics isn’t the only literary text Oiticica produced in his lifetime. It is dwarfed in size, scope, and ambition by the Newyorkaises project, a series of notebooks and assorted texts that Oiticica worked on between 1971 and 1977. As Frederico Coelho notes, the Newyorkaises project was also unfinished and unpublished, and “what exists of the Newyorkaises book is a space occupied by folders, photos, notes, and typed manuscripts” that Oiticica came to call a Conglomerado (“conglomerate”).[2] In calling the project a conglomerate of other objects and texts on their way to becoming a hypothetical book, Oiticica proposed a “nonbook” that was also an “infinite” book, in a Mallarméan sense, a text that became less possible to publish the larger and more diverse it grew. Coelho explains that “Oiticica’s Conglomerado represents a culmination in the process of rejecting a final product and ‘finished work,’ and a proposal of the only book that would be possible: the nonbook.”[3] The Newyorkaises, eventually, became its own art performance whose conceptual nature grew more abstract and unwieldy with each text and image that Oiticica added to it. Thus, in each case of literary production, Oiticica seemed to write with a view toward conceptualizing, theorizing, blueprinting, and lyricizing his artworks and installation projects, and the fact that he did not primarily seek to publish (or ended up abandoning) Secret Poetics and the Newyorkaises Conglomerado indicates that Oiticica saw writing—and by extension, lyric poetry—as a framing device or supplementation to his plastic art practice. Their value as published works in the marketplace had little appeal to an artist who found the traditional boundaries of the book a restrictive one that he sought to overcome either through the secrecy of private lyric emotion (in Secret Poetics) or through a continuous growth and dissemination that exploded the material conventions of publication (in the Newyorkaises).
Thus, it’s important to contextualize the significance of Secret Poetics in three ways: it serves as an appendix to the Tropicália period; it offers an aperture or point of accessibility to the massive, unpublished Newyorkaises Conglomerado; and it offers a rare look into Oiticica’s relationship to poetry and the purely textual. It is the latter with which this essay is concerned. As we’ve seen, lyric poetry represents for Oiticica a pact with secrecy that can be interpreted as an antithesis to the publicness of his plastic artworks, paintings, and installations. This understanding of lyric squares with traditional notions of lyric that were popularized in the 19th century, starting with John Stuart Mill’s classic definition of poetry as “overheard speech” and “feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude” (where the reader is placed in the role of an eavesdropper). Secrecy is signaled in Oticicia’s understanding of lyric as an intimate mode, an intimacy that emerges from the autopoietic force of the physical sensations that seed and fertilize one’s sense of self as a body in the world. For example, in one of Oiticica’s poems we read:
dark,
vision of the tactile,
contact.
velvet,
caress of the touch,
the always in the always,
embrace;
the arm,
body and I interlace,
lip;
feel of the body,
hands,
crossing hands,
the drift-off
the dream. (57)
What we read here is no one in particular, but each sense particularly heightened, a dark scene in which a body (or bodies) “interlace” and a “vision of the tactile” performs vision and sight as a kind of deepened sensuousness that can only “see” in and through touching (in the dark). There is also, perhaps, the frisson of homosexual love in private, since Oiticica began exploring his sexuality during this period, when queer identity was still being censured and criminalized by the right-wing government (26). The last line that drifts off into “dream” is possibly the clarity of a post-orgasmic experience, but it might also be expressing a sublimated desire of bringing out such an intimacy from its enforced shroud of secrecy to the publicness of Oiticica’s art practice. Seen this way, the lyric poem allows him to explore his sexuality and record his erotic experience as a monumentalized moment (“the always in the always”) that risks great pleasure at the margins of his (otherwise very public) aesthetic practice. The lowercase stylization of the poem emphasizes the exploration of intimacy in a minor, hushed, secretive mode.
Rebecca Kosick suggests that Oiticica’s poetry, like his neo-concrete artworks, was deeply “participatory” and concerned with “physical [forces], at the level of the animal urge.” Kosick claims that “the participatory developments of neoconcretism not only dissolved the distance between spectator and art object but collapsed the very binaries structuring the differentiation of subject and object, inviting viewers into the work of art and activating the art object by way of its relation with sensing human bodies” (13). Kosick references the following poem as an example of the participatory qualities of Oiticica’s lyric mode:
Water,
glassy surface,
plunge. (51)
Invoking one of the most translated and famous of Basho’s poems, the frog haiku, Oiticica’s poem also references one of his own artworks, B47 Bólide Caixa (Fireball Box) 22 “Mergulho do corpo”, a small water tank whose dimensions are too small for an actual person to dive into, but which seems to edge toward participation through its playful command to “plunge” in. The relationship between Oiticica’s haiku and the artwork seems to circumvent their respective medium specificity through a shared address to the reader/spectator and the impossibility of physical participation. How does one jump into a water tank (two feet square, and only two feet deep) too small to dive into? How does one plunge inside the space of a poem? In both situations, the participant is tasked with a contemplation that must substitute for physical engagement; actually diving in is not the purpose, in the same sense that actually touching (in the previous poem) is not the goal. Rather, like Oiticica’s description of a “vision of the tactile” glossed earlier, here what is proposed is the desire to dive that neither cancels out diving as a hypothetical event, nor replaces diving in all its physical, instantaneous actuality. Lyric emotion (oneself in oneself) allows for the mind to plunge into the poem, into the artwork, without getting wet, or burdened by what Oiticica calls the “dead time” that occurs between lived experience and memory. Against dead time then, Oiticica proposes the “transformability of memory”:
The time of memory, the present-past, possesses its own tense experience: what is wanted, what happened and remains in memory, comes to be completed within itself: pain brings pain, lost pleasure brings new pleasure, what we call ‘saudade’ isn’t pain, but pleasure that replenishes itself in the transformability of memory. (39)
Drawing on the ideas of Krishnamurti (and, obliquely, Proust), Oiticica theorizes that lived experience isn’t complete until it is remembered again, and that the body recovers its animal place in the world through the mind’s ability to remember (re-piece) the imprint time makes on the body after experience. Memory transforms past experience into new experience (to remember a sexual experience, for example, is to relive it), and perhaps this is also another way of describing the value lyric has for Oiticica: it translates sensuous experience into a desire for more sensuousness.
For Oiticica, the physical and emotional situatedness of the human participant is what the artwork (and the poem) calls forth and responds to. Quoting Oiticica directly, Kosick sees the correspondence between his plastic works and his “secret” poetry as evidencing what Oiticica calls “‘the fury of the participatory relation,’” a kind of relational aesthetics that foregrounds the affective and physical role of the human participant as a centralizing force for the art-object or art-environment in question (22-23). Of course, this raises a secondary question concerning the paradoxical concern for participatory relationality and the insistence on secrecy in Oiticica’s poetical system: how does the participatory function of Oiticica’s public-facing works square with the secrecy Oiticica practiced in his notebook poems? Oiticica’s artworks are deeply participatory and physical: one walks through, sits in, interacts with Tropicália, and Oiticia’s Parangolés (which often took the shape of garments or materials that Oiticica designed for people to put on) are worn directly on the participant’s body. Can poetry written in secret activate participation in the same sense?
The straightforward answer is that the very agency of the poem after its inscription is grounded in a coterminous appraisal of a concealed, yet infinite, horizon of future readers. Ultimately, the act of writing is itself an act of readership on the part of the poet, and whether the poem is published or not is irrelevant when the poem serves to monumentalize the specific emotion or image that the poet—its first (and sometimes last) reader—expresses in the formal mnemonics of rhythmic language. Poems, and lyric poetry in particular, Oiticica writes, serve to render “‘fleeting’” experience into an “eternalized” expression in language (35). If lyric is eternalized immediacy for Oiticica, then perhaps its participatory qualities might be discerned in the quasi-universal nature of physical sensation, idealized here in an Epicurean way as a knowledge-building circuit through complexes of pain/pleasure. One of Oiticica’s longer poems (untitled, as all of them are) goes:
The bitter taste of what’s sweet
I felt,
I feel,
the lash that lavishes; –
doubt;
the bitterness of the caress,
the time,
pass the time,
wait,
wait for her;
oh,
love (61)
Kosick translates “o chicote que acaricia” into “lash that lavishes,” an alliterative semblance that neatly reflects the highly charged sadomasochistic image Oiticica plays on. The “transformability of memory” can sometimes also produce sensations that might not be pleasurable: time wounds the body, but can memory heal what is wounded? (39) The knife’s edge of pain and pleasure can sometimes confuse one for the other in terms of intensity: at peak’s edge, the shock of sensation, before pain or pleasure kicks in, reaches a sublime incoherence. However, Oiticica also remarks on memory’s ability to clarify or derange one’s perception of whether an experience which had felt sweet becomes bitter after reflection, and vice versa. The verb tenses used by Oiticica, including the meaningfully placed commas, perform durational magic in the line breaks which question where the emphasis on the lash hurts or excites: “I felt, / I feel, / the lash that lavishes…” can be parsed into “I felt the lash” and “I feel [now] that [it] lavishes.” What I felt as pleasure (in the past), I now feel differently (as loss or pain, in the present). The speaker feels the lash again, remembering its strike, and experiences, in the time elapsed, a “doubt” about what happened: was it pleasure or was it pain after all? Memory, for Oiticica, decides on the (secretly) erogenous subjectivity of the pain/pleasure complex, and his poems seem to ask its readers to step inside these spaces internal to the body (as they would into one of his installations) and “wait for her”—one imagines this “her” as a sensation, an epiphany, or “love” itself, a knowledge transcending the pain/pleasure complex. In each case, and in the distinction of each body inhabiting such spaces, the transformability of memory changes the texture and meaning that sensation produces in the body.
In another poem, Oiticica juxtaposes three registers of sensation (sensation as image, sensation as memory, sensation as tactility) and openly inquires about the impossible breach between them:
Oh!
Why the impossible?
The image,
memory,
the tactile,
contact with the body. (49)
Interestingly, “contact with the body” is distinguished from “the tactile,” although they seemingly share a likeness in modality. This separation reveals the impossibility of equating the concept of “the tactile” with actual “contact with the body.” Equally, one might read the proximity of “the image” to “memory” as a split between the representation of sensations as images (in plastic or sculptural art) and the personal, subjective experience of having a memory that only has a visual feeling. Hence, Oiticica’s theory of the senses (and art’s role in generating and framing them) repeats the mnemonic qualities of the pain/pleasure complex in openly questioning how images (like those of pain) durationally become memories, and how ideas of tactility (like pleasure) never quite equate to the actual sensation of feeling the pleasure of another body.
Oiticica’s poems are intent on memorializing physical sensation not as a unique, solipsistic experience shared only by the poet/poem, but as a public, immediate framing of archetypally capitalized emotions that transcend the specificities of person or place. In this sense, the poems share a correspondence to his public artworks, which were not only hybrid in medium and modality, but also incorporated the poetry of his fellow neo-concretists. Tropicália, for instance, included “poemobjetos” (poem-objects) by Roberta Camila Salgado, poems etched into or transcribed on objects and materials from which the poems cannot be separated or read outside of. As critics like Guilherme Wisnik and Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz have noted, Tropicália was a watershed moment in Brazilian art for critiquing the capitalist fabrication of Brazilian culture and resources as a mythic paradisiacal region existing purely for Unitedstatesian and European consumption.[4] Not only did Tropicália perform an inverse exoticization of the Brazilian mythos that commented on the labor exploitation and extractive capitalism that preyed on the Brazilian economy, but it also destabilized and deconstructed this mythos through the multimodal extensions within the environmental frame it generated, incorporating poems, objects, and poem-objects within its spatial framework and offering, in Oswald de Andrade’s famous modernist axiom, “routes routes routes routes…” beyond the impasse of eurocentric stagnation.
Surviving the fire after all, Secret Poetics is a book whose initial, but now justifiably broken, code of secrecy might just be Oiticica’s humble way of disavowing his professional interest in the “career” of poetry or in openly publicizing himself as a poet in the avant-garde circles of Brazil of his day. Oiticica himself writes that “‘[s]ecret’ is what I want because I am not a poet, although an urgent necessity leads me to verbal expression” (35). What this “urgent necessity”? On the one hand, as Erber writes, Oiticica might have been invested in a mental and spiritual preparation that would reground his plastic art practice in the primacy of the phenomenological, un-intellectualized body: “Oiticica enlists poetry to rescue visual practice from intellectualization” (87). In other words, Secret Poetics is a durational “waiting” in secret for a new aesthetic system to announce itself, as Oiticica bided his time at a moment of tremendous political crisis and uncertainty. Rather than drift into a hermetic intellectualization, however, Oiticica excludes what he doesn’t want to appear in his artworks and directs them into the filtering, clarifying space of poetry. Working in poetry is a cleansing agent for the plastic artist. It lets him renew his practice through another, secret path. His lyric poems do not feel like “overheard speech” in which “feeling [is] confessing itself to itself”; rather, Oiticica’s poetry establishes the general schemata from which his plastic works would emerge. One might read Secret Poetics then as a blueprint for what would come ahead. Ultimately, though, secrecy is also a strategy for survival, and perhaps the book worked as a response to the shock of dictatorship that overtook Brazilian life in 1964. However short-lived the enterprise, we can hardly ignore the historical coincidence of Oiticica beginning a hermetic enterprise in lyric practice at a time when the threat of censorship and fascist violence loomed on the horizon. He felt an “urgent necessity” to gather himself in this secret form we now have access to, both as a response to his plastic work and to the political struggles of his time.
Notes:
[1]Hélio Oiticica. “Tropicália.” In Tropicália: uma revolução na cultura brasileira (1967-1972), 239-241. Exh. cat., São Paulo, Brazil: Cosac Naify, 2007. International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA), https://icaa.mfah.org/s/en/item/1074985.
[2]Frederico Coelho, “Subterranean Tropicália Projects—Newyorkaises—Conglomerado: The Infinite Book of Hélio Oiticica,” in Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2016), 208.
[3]Coelho, 208.
[4]See Guilherme Wisnik, “Tropicália / Tropicalismo: The Power of Multiplicity” in Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2016), 57-68 and Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, “Tropicamp: Pre- and Post- Tropicália at Once: Some Contextual Notes on Hélio Oiticica’s 1971 Text” in Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2016), 163-174.