Hélio Oiticica e Neville D´Almeida - CC4 NOCAGIONS/Block-experiments in Cosmococa - programa in progress
Paula Braga - 2006
Between 1973 and 1974, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D´Almeida developed the series Cosmococas program in progress, an experiment in cinema built through a fortunate encounter between two artistic investigations. Neville D´Almeida had already experimented with fragmented and non-representative narratives in films such as Mangue-Bangue (1971). In the early 1970s, Hélio Oiticica was carrying forward his program of reinventing art through the expansion of Constructivist ideas. When the fragmentation of cineticism proposed by the former encountered the latter’s research on altered states of consciousness (the “suprasensorial”) and behavioural deconditioning, a new art cosmos exploded in works so radical that thirty years would pass before they were first shown in public.
A prolific writer, Hélio Oiticica registered in essays and notebooks the genealogy of the Cosmococas, a quasi-cinema made of “the slide carrousel, the sound track, the instructions and the time”, as he described it for his friend Augusto de Campos. The cocaine is included here in what Oiticica named “time”.
The colour white had appeared in Hélio Oiticica´s works and writings in relation to the Bergsonian notion of time since the late 1950s. The work, he would then write, should not be developed in space only, but also in time (“Colour, Time, Structure”, 1960). Oiticica considered white to be a “colour-time” that “favours the silent duration” since the silence emanated by white makes duration more perceptible. White is also, for Oiticica, the colour of reunion, a synthesis of other colours and durations.
Cosmococa CC4 Nocagions is the whitest of the five CCs that Oiticica and D´Almeida planned together. John Cage – whose Silence Oiticica had read – appears in both the white cover of his book Notations and on the prepared piano pieces Oiticica and D ´Almeida selected for the sound track. CC4 Nocagions also pays homage to Malevich, whose white on white paintings recur in Oiticica´s writing as synonyms of invention, the perpetual search for the new.
In CC4 Nocagions the participant is incited to enter a swimming pool surrounded by blue lights. On the bottom of the swimming pool a triangle made of green lights defines the “green area”. The vertex of the triangle and the knives shown on the slides, used to draw the cocaine tracks, reminds one of the acute angles of the Secos, gouaches Oiticica painted in the late 1950s, when colour had not yet escaped the plane. In some of the slides Neville D´Almeida made for CC4, the cocaine fills the whole cover of Cage´s book and creates a texture similar to the effect Oiticica´s brushstrokes produced on monochromatic paintings from the early 1960s named Inventions.
One sees the cutting ends of the knives while also feeling the piercing cold of the water on skin. Cage´s prepared piano pieces also suggest a sense of “piercing sounds”, demanding an effort from the listener to construct a musical continuum.
The fragmentation of cineticism and the illusion of “live action” are at the core of Oiticica and D´Almeida´s investigation into cinema. Cutting cinema into a discrete sequence of slides breaks the illusion created by the 24 frames per second projection. The “live action” during the quasi-cinema depends on the participant’s movement, real action, or duration, as Bergson articulated. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D´Almeida´s quasi-cinema is a reinvention of cinema made on the concreteness of the body.
Click here to download the ELI archive with the full text
Paula Braga - 2006
Between 1973 and 1974, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D´Almeida developed the series Cosmococas program in progress, an experiment in cinema built through a fortunate encounter between two artistic investigations. Neville D´Almeida had already experimented with fragmented and non-representative narratives in films such as Mangue-Bangue (1971). In the early 1970s, Hélio Oiticica was carrying forward his program of reinventing art through the expansion of Constructivist ideas. When the fragmentation of cineticism proposed by the former encountered the latter’s research on altered states of consciousness (the “suprasensorial”) and behavioural deconditioning, a new art cosmos exploded in works so radical that thirty years would pass before they were first shown in public.
A prolific writer, Hélio Oiticica registered in essays and notebooks the genealogy of the Cosmococas, a quasi-cinema made of “the slide carrousel, the sound track, the instructions and the time”, as he described it for his friend Augusto de Campos. The cocaine is included here in what Oiticica named “time”.
The colour white had appeared in Hélio Oiticica´s works and writings in relation to the Bergsonian notion of time since the late 1950s. The work, he would then write, should not be developed in space only, but also in time (“Colour, Time, Structure”, 1960). Oiticica considered white to be a “colour-time” that “favours the silent duration” since the silence emanated by white makes duration more perceptible. White is also, for Oiticica, the colour of reunion, a synthesis of other colours and durations.
Cosmococa CC4 Nocagions is the whitest of the five CCs that Oiticica and D´Almeida planned together. John Cage – whose Silence Oiticica had read – appears in both the white cover of his book Notations and on the prepared piano pieces Oiticica and D ´Almeida selected for the sound track. CC4 Nocagions also pays homage to Malevich, whose white on white paintings recur in Oiticica´s writing as synonyms of invention, the perpetual search for the new.
In CC4 Nocagions the participant is incited to enter a swimming pool surrounded by blue lights. On the bottom of the swimming pool a triangle made of green lights defines the “green area”. The vertex of the triangle and the knives shown on the slides, used to draw the cocaine tracks, reminds one of the acute angles of the Secos, gouaches Oiticica painted in the late 1950s, when colour had not yet escaped the plane. In some of the slides Neville D´Almeida made for CC4, the cocaine fills the whole cover of Cage´s book and creates a texture similar to the effect Oiticica´s brushstrokes produced on monochromatic paintings from the early 1960s named Inventions.
One sees the cutting ends of the knives while also feeling the piercing cold of the water on skin. Cage´s prepared piano pieces also suggest a sense of “piercing sounds”, demanding an effort from the listener to construct a musical continuum.
The fragmentation of cineticism and the illusion of “live action” are at the core of Oiticica and D´Almeida´s investigation into cinema. Cutting cinema into a discrete sequence of slides breaks the illusion created by the 24 frames per second projection. The “live action” during the quasi-cinema depends on the participant’s movement, real action, or duration, as Bergson articulated. Hélio Oiticica and Neville D´Almeida´s quasi-cinema is a reinvention of cinema made on the concreteness of the body.
Click here to download the ELI archive with the full text
