‘Is an experimental avant-garde possible in an underdeveloped country?’ was a provocative question asked by Catherine David, one of the curators of the first large international retrospective of Hélio Oiticica, raising geopolitical questions in art history and criticism. Multiple Brazilian avant-garde artists subverted ‘higher’ aesthetics values by focusing on folk and popular aesthetics and emphasizing the ‘lower’ senses of touch, taste, and smell suggested by digestive and sexual metaphors.”*
“(…) Gregory Ulmer’s Electracy-electronic literacy-for instance, argued for(…)the Brazilian samba as a model for writing hypertexts.(…) Ulmer’s reference to the Samba is a welcome reminder that audience participation has a broad history that could include total participation in church liturgies, processions, and especially festivals such as the very pagan yet very sacred four days of Carnaval in Brazil. Artists such as Hélio Oiticica have fused these oral traditions-such as the Samba-to misread and reinterpret European modernism, thus translating geometric abstraction into kinetic body-centered performances.”
“ The location of art and archives in particular historical contexts and national histories brings to the forefront political dimensions of art in relation to life, technology and difference, and thus, social and political struggles involving class, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and colonialism, often at the center of utopian revolutions leading to various authoritarian and democratic regimes. In this struggle, more than a few twentieth-century Brazilian avant-gardes have enlisted the body centered metaphors of cannibalism, carnival and hunger in order to simultaneously incorporate the foreigner into the familiar and subvert cultural hierarchies that disregarded popular and folk forms of cultural expressions.