JL
Jill Lane
New York University
The dance of primitive accumulation
USA
Between the years 60s and 70s the artist Hélio Oiticica [1937-1980] proposed the Environmental Program. This program could be read as utopian search for an art of totality that conjugates language, different spaces and times, disintegration of the image and the object with its recreation. Aligned to this idea there is other: CRELAZER - the synthesis of the state of creation and the leisure, the search for a creative way of life. Art should be a proposal that stimulate a creative behavior and extends itself to the quotidian: a political principle par excellence. In his career, this creation determines an extension to other territories from visual art to works with the concept of dance, cinema, song and theater. The mentor of the work Tropicália – that named the most important artistic vanguard movement in Brazil – believed that plasticity, color, structure and the body of the spectator – called as participator - could be seen as a mechanism to extend the perception of life and that implies that art should have no limits imposed by language. This paper aims to discuss what does the artist proposed in relation of Allan Kaprow’s (Environments) and Richard Schechner’s ideas (Environmental Theater) pointing its difference between Installation art. Analyzing his scenic environments we can find the body and the ambience as a medium that underlines the cultural substrate; its procedure intents not only recognize what is particular to each behavior, but also foresee its transformation. An expressionist strategy of construction can be found by the time Oiticica liberates the elements from its natural order. According to his ideas we can see the scenic ambience that he creates – or, in our words, the scenography - as an open proposal that stimulates the rediscovering of the action and meaning either to performer or to participator.