'Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun' at De La Warr Pavilion - review, Art Monthly

5 December 2023

Hélio Oiticica told two stories about what led him to start making immersive environments from 1973 onwards. OIticica’s first story recounts the time he joined his friend Neville D’Almeida at the screening of his film Mangue-Bangue at MoMA, recalling how the film ‘pulses with pictorial sensibility (feel the colour) and fragments into geometrically set episodes’. This sensibility informed Oiticica’s approach to his first constructed environment, Cosmococa 1, but something else happened that month in New York, which became his second origin story: he picked up the album cover of Frank Zappa’s Weasels Ripped My Flesh to cut lines of cocaine on it. Instead of inhaling, Oiticica noticed how ‘the tracks trace the design/pattern upon which they are laid: a demi-sourire as what we know as plagiarism’. Two experiences, one serious in its quest to find a new way of filmmaking – or ‘quasi-cinema’, as Oiticica put it – the other a moment of someone decadently snorting cocaine, covering up and indelible images of 1970s US culture with an illicit substance you buy in the streets. Oiticica recognised in these transmissions the explosion of a new reality.

Read Matthew Cheadle's full review of 'Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the internal sun' at the De La Warr Pavilion in the December 23/January 24 issue of Art Monthly.