![]() ![]() If you’re a museum, you don’t want to suffocate all that people bring of themselves with your institutional insecurities, your righteous interpretations, your ideological noise. But people come to art with their own personalities, their own complicated backgrounds, their own unsettled emotional life. This means trusting in their ability to animate art objects for themselves. But as they fight against becoming high-end boutiques or exclusive mausoleums, they must also ensure that the people they invite in are allowed enough personal agency to try on the art for themselves and make it (if they want to) their own. They need to be more welcoming to a broader cross-section of society. And yet if you tune into the art all around you, it’s also true that few places in the world are packed with more emotional, poetic and oftentimes intensely political life. You don’t see much adversity inside New York’s MoMA, where Oiticica’s cape is attached to a pristine wall several floors up on 53rd Street. Oiticica’s “P16 Parangolé Cape 12” has two semi-concealed objects: a plastic bag in one pocket and, spilling out of the other, a white banner with the words (in Portuguese): “From adversity we live.” In this way, his capes remind me of Van Gogh’s paintings of his own beaten up shoes, and of David Hammons’s abstract paintings draped with cheap plastic garbage bags and industrial tarps. He wanted to draw attention to marginalized people and precarious states of existence. But it was precisely flimsiness, precariousness and fragility that Oiticica wanted to highlight. By this action, which “highlighted the racial and class tensions of a society riddled with social inequality” (as MoMA’s wall label puts it), the capes shifted from poetry to politics.įlimsy politics, you could say. If the capes didn’t look much like art, museum officials evidently didn’t think the people wearing them looked much like people who should enter an art museum. When they got there, they were refused entry. He made a series of capes from cheap and crude materials, and asked some friends from one favela, Mangueira, to wear the capes and come to Rio’s Museum of Modern Art. In 1964, he spent time in the favelas, or shantytowns, in Rio de Janeiro. But Oiticica had some particular people in mind when he concocted his earliest capes. Of course, a fashion designer might say more or less the same thing about a cocktail dress. He saw them as poems and protests, objects with their own agency, urging people to put them on and move about in them, so that their layers of colored fabric would be revealed as they ran and danced. But Oiticica (pronounced “oy-ti-SEE-ka”) didn’t think of his capes - which he called “parangolés” - as static, museum-ready objects. It hangs today, forlorn and apparently lifeless, in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It was made in 1965 by Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), one of Brazil’s great 20th century artists, and was reconstructed (which is common for conceptual art) in 1992. It’s actually a cape, made from jute, fabric, wood shavings and plastic. ![]() If you are already thinking that this work doesn’t look much like art - that it’s yet more proof of the folly of contemporary art, and that while fools applaud, you will gleefully point out that the emperor has no clothes - knock yourself out. ![]() ![]() Please enable JavaScript for the best experience. Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. ![]()
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