Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium at the Whitney Museum of American Art (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)
“I didn’t really realize the implications of it when I was a teenager,” said Arto Lindsay in a recent interview with Hyperallergic about his time living in Brazil. The American experimental musician came of age during the rise of Brazil’s anarchist cultural movement, Tropicália, which is now considered to be one of the country’s greatest periods in art and music. It produced the likes of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil — both inspirations and collaborators in Lindsay’s music — and seminal artists like Hélio Oiticica, who is currently having a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Lindsay has organized a series of events titled Myth Astray that will highlight crossovers between visual art and music in Tropicália, as well as the movement’s enduring impacts, political and otherwise. Among the movies that will screen is Júlio Bressane’s O Anjo Nasceu (1969), which was censored by Brazil’s military regime at the time. A poetic black-and-white film, it tells the story of two bandits encountering an angel amidst violent crimes in the city. In addition to putting on a full-on concert of his music, Lindsay will also do a performance with Alexander Calder’s “noisemakers” — including both traditional and improvised instruments — that he devised after visiting Brazil in the 1940s.
Finally, I am especially curious to hear the cultural critic and novelist Barbara Browning reflect on Oiticica’s eight-year period in New York, which, until very recently, had been essentially ignored.
When: Thursday, September 7–Sunday, September 10
Where: Whitney Museum of American Art, 3rd Floor, Susan and John Hess Family Theater (99 Gansevoort St, Meatpacking District, Manhattan)
More info here.
