Hélio Oiticica e Lygia Clark: the aesthetic regime in Brazilian art

• Grant number: 24/02655-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: September 01, 2024
• End date: November 01, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Paula Priscila Braga
• Grantee: Paula Priscila Braga
• Host Investigator: Michael Asbury
• Host Institution: Centro de Ciências Naturais e Humanas (CCNH). Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC). Ministério da Educação (Brasil). Santo André , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of the Arts London (UAL), England

Abstract

In February 1969, the artist Hélio Oiticica opened an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, where he presented "Éden," a multisensory environment designed for the enjoyment of a specific aesthetic experience, which Oiticica named "Crelazer." When understood as a philosophical concept, Crelazer reestablishes the connection between the work of art and existence, freeing art from the Hegelian diagnosis that it could no longer satisfy the spiritual (or, today, existential) needs that ancient times and peoples found in it. Crelazer invests itself with the power to decondition behaviors and establish in the participant a subjectivity that, from what Oiticica termed "auto-theater," would lead to self-foundation. Five decades later, in October 2024, the Whitechapel Gallery will host a major exhibition of Lygia Clark, an important interlocutor of Hélio Oiticica, featuring works that focus on the participatory aspects of the artist's career and the hybridization between art and psychotherapy proposed by Clark. The 8-week research period in London will facilitate the development of a new analysis of Clark and Oiticica's works based on Jacques Rancière's conceptualization of the "aesthetic regime of art" and on the proposals of Giorgio Agamben in "The Man Without Content." Direct engagement with Lygia Clark's propositions in the exhibition curated by Professor Michael Asbury from September to November 2024, as well as research in the archive of English art critic Guy Brett, currently located in the Tate Gallery library, will result in academic articles and provide the foundation for, in the next 24 months, the writing of a book on Contemporary Art Philosophy based on the Brazilian case.