D O C U M E N T / I N T R O D U C T I O N

intrODUctiOn tO hÉLiO OiticicA’s
“the senses pOinting tOWArD
A neW trAnsfOrMAtiOn” (1969)

Jo melvin and luke skrebowski

Hélio Oiticica’s article “The Senses Pointing toward a New Trans-
formation” considers the development of the artist’s own work
up to 1969 within the broader context of the evolution of both the
Brazilian and international neo-avant-gardes of the postwar period.
The text was originally written as a talk entitled “The Senses Indicating
a Sense of the Whole” and was produced between June 18 Und 25, 1969,
in London, in the aftermath of Oiticica’s one-man show at the White-
chapel Gallery (February 25–April 6, 1969) and in response to an invi-
tation to participate in the Touch Art symposium at California State
College in Long Beach, held later that year, between July 7 Und 12,
1969.1 After presenting the paper in the United States, Oiticica subse-
quently revised the text in November with the assistance of the English
art critic Guy Brett, retitled it “The Senses Pointing toward a New

1 We are indebted to Paula Braga for informing Luke Skrebowski of the existence of this
Text, at the conference Transnational Latin American Art from 1950 to the Present Day
(1st International Research Forum for Graduate Students and Emerging Scholars),
held in 2009 in Austin, Texas, and for directing his attention to a chapter discussing
Es, excerpted from her 2007 PhD thesis: see Paula Braga, “Conceptualism and Life-
Experience,” in Fios Soltos: A Arte de Hélio Oiticica, Hrsg. Paula Braga (São Paulo:
Perspectiva, 2008), 277–87, and “Conceitualismo e Vivência” “Conceptualism and
Life Experience,” in Hélio Oiticica, Singularidade, Multiplicidade, Hrsg. Paula Braga
(São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2013), 159–232. For a discussion of the broader concept of
creleisure: see Luke Skrebowski, “Revolution in the Aesthetic Revolution: Hélio Oiticica
and the Concept of Creleisure,” Third Text 114 (2012): 65–78.

doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00211

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Transformation,” and prepared a final copy, dated December 22, 1969,
that was marked for submission as an article to the London-based art
magazine Studio International.2 Beyond Oiticica’s immediate engage-
ments in London, the broader sociopolitical backdrop against which
Oiticica’s intervention played out was the intensification of repression
under the military dictatorship in Brazil, and specifically the early
days of the presidency of Emílio Garrastazu Médici, which began on
Oktober 30, 1969.3 This development would shortly lead Oiticica to
leave Brazil for the United States, living under conditions of self-
imposed exile in New York from 1970 Zu 1978, only to return once
the political climate in the country had begun to ameliorate.4

The artist hoped to publish his text in the “Artist’s Pages” section

of Studio International, which had recently played host to the three
parts of Joseph Kosuth’s then controversial, now canonical article “Art
after Philosophy,” across its October, November, and December 1969
issues.5 Oiticica had been encouraged to submit to the magazine by its
then-editor Peter Townsend, who was enthusiastic about the artist’s
work after he had encountered it in London. Oiticica wrote of his hopes
for the text in a letter to Lygia Clark in December 1969: “I think this is
going to be important on the international scene. Peter Townsend asked
me for it, and I’m glad to be able to provide such important material.”6
Noch, for reasons we will consider below, the text was never published in
the magazine (and indeed has not been published anywhere since, until
Jetzt).7 Infolge, Oiticica’s article was denied the international audi-
ence and high-level exposure he had hoped for and legitimately believed

6
7

The Projeto Hélio Oiticica holds a facsimile of the submitted version of the text (ref: PHO
0486/69), from which the version published here derives. Sincere thanks are offered
to the Projeto Hélio Oiticica and César Oiticica for permission to publish the text.
For details about Oiticica’s time in London, see Guy Brett and Luciano Figueiredo,
Hrsg., Oiticica in London (London: Tate Publishing, 2007).
Oiticica wrote a text entitled “Brazil Diarrhea” in 1970, as he prepared to leave Rio de
Janeiro for New York, which offered a scathing and scatological indictment of the artistic
conditions prevailing in the country under the military dictatorship. Hélio Oiticica,
“Brazil Diarrhea,” in Hélio Oiticica, Hrsg. Chris Dercon (Rotterdam: Witte de With,
1992), exhibition catalog, 17.
Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy: Teil I,” Studio International 178, NEIN. 915
(Oktober 1969): 134–37; “Art after Philosophy: Part II,” Studio International 178,
NEIN. 916 (November 1969): 160–61; “Art after Philosophy: Part III,” Studio International
178, NEIN. 917 (Dezember 1969): 212–13.
Cited in Braga, “Conceitualismo e Vivência,” 212.
The text is available in the online archives of the Rio de Janeiro–based Projeto Hélio
Oiticica, www.heliooiticica.org.br/home/home.php.

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Hélio Oiticica. “The Senses Indicating a Sense of the Whole,” 1969. Manuscript written for the

Touch Art symposium. Ink on paper. Image courtesy of the Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

that the article deserved.8 As such, a text that would have offered a con-
trasting position to Kosuth’s on the trajectory of art after objecthood,
outlining equally significant, though fundamentally different, Ideen
about art, did not enter the original international discourse on the
neo-avant-gardes mediated by Studio International.

On nOt AppeAring
Although “The Senses Pointing toward a New Transformation” is
profoundly inflected by Oiticica’s formation within the Lusophone
Brazilian neo-avant-garde, evidence suggests that it was originally
composed and subsequently revised and redrafted entirely in the art-
ist’s distinctive, highly neologistic English, replete with symbols, port-
manteau words (such as “crebehavior”), and nonstandard grammar
(as in his use of the prefix “un-”).9 Oiticica’s inventive treatment of
language has been justly described by Catherine David as “pluri-
linguistic,” characterized by a mixing “of Portuguese, English and
French” as well as “hieroglyphs.”10 One could perhaps describe
Oiticica’s English as a unique, highly theoretical “creolization” of
three European colonial languages. Oiticica’s text also employs a
series of unglossed technical terms (“non-object,” “body-symbolics,”
“probject,” “Apocalypopotesis”), the comprehensibility of which
depends on a detailed knowledge of the Brazilian avant-garde and its
evolution that has only recently become more widely available to
readers working within Anglophone art history and criticism.11
Folglich, we suggest that the text was always already a multi-

Oiticica published an abbreviated version of some of the ideas articulated in the essay in
his contribution to the catalog accompanying Kynaston McShine’s Information (1970)
exhibition at MoMA, but the text was radically truncated as well as superimposed on an
image of his Bed Bolide, which impaired its legibility.
As we note at the start of the Document, Oiticica’s final typescript of the article is repro-
duced here with minimal emendations, in order to preserve its distinctive character.

10 Catherine David, “The Great Labyrinth,” in Dercon, Hélio Oiticica, 251.
11 Guy Brett’s work is the exception to this general rule, since he has supported Oiticica’s

work—and sought to mediate it in Anglophone contexts—since the 1960s. Major recent
examples of scholarship on Oiticica’s work in English include: Sabeth Buchmann and
Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida: Block-Experiments in
Cosmococa—Program in Progress (London: Afterall, 2013); Sérgio B. Martins, Constructing
an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–1979 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); and Irene
V. Small, Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Important contributions are also to be found in the following major exhibition catalogs:
Dercon, Hélio Oiticica; Mari Carmen Ramírez, Hrsg., Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour
(London: Tate Publishing, 2007); and Lynne Zelevansky, Hrsg., Hélio Oiticica: To Organize
Delirium (München: Prestel, 2016).

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directional translation—indeed, Oiticica’s own autotranslation—that
explicated his treatment of core concepts of the Brazilian neo-avant-
garde as elaborated in dialogue with the international neo-avant-
garde. Als solche, it was aimed at a projected international audience of
readers such as Oiticica himself, who spoke English as a koiné lan-
Spur (English as the new lingua franca), as much as at the native
speakers of the Anglosphere.

Against any narrow nationalism, Oiticica, along with other
Brazilian artists, used his own “missed encounters abroad—mainly
with conceptual art,” as Sérgio Bruno Martins has observed, to displace
“linguistic, cultural and geographic certainties.”12 Our proposal here is
to consider precisely the missed encounter at stake in the nonpublica-
tion of “The Senses Pointing toward a New Transformation,” in order
to challenge “canonical provincialism”—Michael Asbury’s term for the
narrow purview of the mainstream historiography of the Anglophone
avant-garde, but one that also offers a challenge to the historiography
of the global(isiert) neo-avant-gardes.13 At the time of its writing in
1969, Oiticica’s text apparently proved a displacement too far for the
editors of Studio International, resulting in its nonpublication. Our aim
is to stimulate a more widespread reception and appreciation of “The
Senses Pointing toward a New Transformation” today, by way of a
reparative reading that is sensitively attuned to the essay’s particular
historical stakes and temporality. In this way we hope to position
Oiticica’s text within wider debates about the neo-avant-garde that its
original nonappearance had foreclosed but that can now be effected
as part of the ongoing revisionist rereading of this period.

Some additional contextualization can help inform this point. In

Oktober 1965, Peter Townsend was appointed editor of Studio Inter-
national by its new owners (the publishing firm Cory Adams Mackay),
who tasked him with reviving the magazine’s declining reputation.14

12 Martins, Constructing an Avant-Garde, 13.
13 Michael Asbury, “Neoconcretism and Minimalism: Cosmopolitanism at a Local Level
and a Canonical Provincialism,” in Cosmopolitan Modernisms, Hrsg. Kobena Mercer
(London: InIVA and MIT Press, 2005), 168–89.
In light of scant textual evidence in the extant Studio International archive, the account
of the nonappearance of Oiticica’s essay narrated here relies on oral histories conducted
with its editor and assistant editor of the period (Peter Townsend and Charles Harrison,
jeweils). Melvin worked with Townsend to create box lists of the archive’s contents
prior to its acquisition by the Tate in 2002. The discussions with Townsend were
recorded or noted from 1996 Zu 2002. The discussions with Harrison were recorded
on March 28, 2007; Oktober 31, 2007; Juni 10, 2008; and July 14, 2008.

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Um dies zu tun, he introduced a series of reforms, including making
significant changes to the magazine’s format. Wanting to include
younger writers, he asked the art historian Alan Bowness, WHO
taught at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, to recommend lively
research students to write for the magazine (one of whom was Charles
Harrison, who went on to take up the formal position of assistant editor
in September 1967). Townsend introduced an approach—unusual for
the mainstream art press in the UK at the time—that involved bypass-
ing art critics and art historians and going directly to artists, giving
them magazine space to present their work in a relatively unmediated
Weg. The most high-profile manifestation of this wider commitment
was Townsend’s institution of a new subsection of each issue of the
magazine handed over to commissioned artists to do with as they
wished: to make art for publication, Zum Beispiel, or to write an open-
ended statement.15 Townsend also made it a policy to surround himself
with young artists and writers in order to hear what was currently pre-
occupying them, in this way keeping abreast of current and emerging
ideas in the field. It was through one such young writer—Guy Brett—
that Townsend was introduced to Oiticica’s work, initially at the
Signals Gallery in London, and subsequently (and more extensively)
at Oiticica’s 1969 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition curated by Brett.16

15 Notable commissions for these “artist’s pages” in the second half of the 1960s included

Barry Flanagan, “Biennale des Jeunes,” Studio International 174, NEIN. 892 (September
1967): 98–99; John Latham with Charles Harrison, “Where Does the Collision Happen?,”
Studio International 175, NEIN. 900 (Mai 1968): 258–61; and Sol LeWitt, “Drawing Series
1968 (Fours),” Studio International 177, NEIN. 910 (April 1969): 189. Townsend also insti-
tuted artist-designed covers, welche, although honorific, some artists considered to be as
significant as a solo exhibition (according to Liliane Lijn in an interview with Jo Melvin,
Juni 26, 2007; Lijn designed the cover for the May 1969 issue of Studio International).
In den 1960ern, Brett was involved with the exhibition space and art bulletin Signals, welche
promoted the work of many international artists. Signals was initially run out of an apart-
ment in London’s Cornwall Gardens by Brett, Paul Keeler (the apartment’s owner), Und
the artists David Medalla, Gustav Metzger, and Marcello Salvadori. It subsequently moved
to a dedicated gallery space in Wigmore Street, London, in November 1964. Townsend’s
elder brother William, then Professor of Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, intro-
duced him to the Signals Gallery and its bulletin, and it was on a visit to the gallery in
September 1965 that Brett showed Townsend Oiticica’s work for the first time, during a
group exhibition called Soundings 2 held between July 22 and September 22, 1965.
(William Townsend refers to the visit in his journal, Bd. xxxvi [August 1965–March 1966],
September 8, 1965, entry, viewable at the UCL Special Collections department.) Brett also
informed Townsend of plans for a solo exhibition of Oiticica’s work at Signals. The Signals
Gallery closed at the end of 1966, Jedoch, after losing its financial backing (from Paul
Keeler’s father), ending Brett’s plans of holding a solo show for Oiticica there. For a
detailed account of this entire period, see Brett and Figueiredo, Oiticica in London.

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Townsend was impressed by Oiticica’s work, both on initial viewing
and after the Whitechapel show, which he recounted as finding
“extraordinary,” although he admitted he did not know how to
“make sense of it.”17

Even though he did not write regularly for Studio International,
Brett was a respected interlocutor of Townsend’s and, together with
Paul Keeler of the Signals Gallery, a frequent visitor to the editor in his
office. Charles Harrison, by then assistant editor of the magazine, went
so far as to describe the tone of these meetings (to which he was not
invited) as “conspiratorial.”18 Townsend also enjoyed associating with
other artists involved with Signals, including Marcello Salvadori,
David Medalla, and Gustav Metzger, Und, unlike Harrison, valued
their diverse experimental approaches, giving each of them space
in the magazine under the rubric of its “Artist’s Pages.”19

It is highly likely, daher, that Townsend invited Oiticica to con-

tribute “The Senses Pointing toward a New Transformation” to the
magazine after his Whitechapel show in 1969, and that this invited
Artikel, given its December 22 submission date by Oiticica, würde
have been published at the earliest in the March 1970 issue of Studio
International (the magazine operated with at least a two-month advance
commissioning schedule, and sometimes much longer).20

Im Dezember 1969, Jedoch, Townsend took an extended leave of

absence from the editorship, and Harrison was put in the position of
overseeing the magazine’s production for the January, Februar, Und
March issues. Several mistakes are known to have occurred during
Townsend’s absence, including the fact that nothing was done with

“Interview with Guy Brett,” Viva Voices, University of the Arts London, www.vivavoices.
org/website.asp?page=Interviews.
Jo Melvin, interview with Harrison, Marsch 28, 2007.

18
19 Sehen, Zum Beispiel, Marcello Salvadori, Erica Marx, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Julio Le Parc, Frank
Malina, Kenneth Martin, David Medalla, Lev Nusberg, Jesús Rafael Soto, Jeffrey Steele,
Takis, and Stephen Willats, “Statements on Kinetic Art,” Studio International 173, NEIN. 886
(Februar 1967): 60–64. Harrison did not support the Signals artists and was irritated
by what he regarded as Townsend’s “timewasting” when the magazine had pressing
deadlines.

20 At Studio International, commissions from artists more frequently germinated via undoc-
umented discussion, rather than formally by letter. Although there is no documentation
demonstrating a specific Oiticica commission for the Artist’s Pages in the extant Studio
International archive, this commission was recalled by Townsend in conversation with
Melvin (Mai 17, 2000) and corroborated by Oiticica’s correspondence with the artist Jill
Drower (TGA 201418/3).

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Hélio Oiticica.

“The Senses Pointing toward

a New Transformation,” 1969.

Manuscript addressed to

Studio International magazine.

Typescript on paper.

Image courtesy of the

Projeto Hélio Oiticica.

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Oiticica’s article.21 In contrast to Townsend’s enthusiastic noncompre-
hension of Oiticica’s work, Harrison was openly dismissive of this art-
ist’s practice, finding it uninteresting and “not art,” and disparaging
about the Signals Gallery artists more generally.22

The final reason for the nonappearance of Oiticica’s prepared
article is, Jedoch, obscure, since it remained unpublished even after
Townsend’s return to the editorship.23 The most likely reason for its
nonpublication was simply that it did not register as comprehensible
to editors discursively habituated within the Anglophone neo-avant-
gardes, for whom it proved literally untranslatable (despite being
authored in English). The essay was consequently excluded from the
magazine, despite the fact that it had been specially invited, without
any explanation ever being provided to its author.24

the UnsUfficiency Of the Art Object
Wie, Dann, should we read “The Senses Pointing toward a New
Transformation” today? Oiticica’s text sets out a proposal for the “defini-
tive radicalization” of anti-art that he held to be necessary, in light of the
impasse reached by the longstanding conflict between object-based, für-
malist art and its various neo-avant-garde negations (within both the
Brazilian and international neo-avant-gardes). Oiticica encapsulates this
situation with the notable formula “the unsufficiency of the art-object as
such.”25 For the artist writing in the late 60s, after both Neoconcretism

21 Another notable error was the way in which Lucy Lippard’s magazine exhibition project
“Groups” was presented in the March 1970 issue: in order to save space, the images and
accompanying texts were compressed and became illegible, and Robert Barry’s text was
left out.
Jo Melvin, interview with Harrison, Marsch 28, 2007. Harrison’s position reflected his
growing commitment to the specific position taken by analytic Conceptual art, welche
came to preclude endorsing any practices outside of its ambit (an issue over which he
subsequently felt compelled to resign his assistant editorship of Studio International in
1971).

23 Given the lack of a copy of Oiticica’s work in the Studio International archive, we cannot

definitely establish that the article was posted by Jill Drower and made it to the magazine,
as Oiticica had instructed in his correspondence with Drower.

24 Braga records that Oiticica continued chasing the text well into 1970. Braga,

“Conceitualismo e Vivência,” 212

25 While the locution “unsufficiency” could be considered an error of English usage (seit

nouns of Latin origin conventionally take the prefix “in-”), we claim that, eher, it should
be read as registering Oiticica’s profound linguistic and conceptual inventiveness by way
of its distortion of “correct” English. This is because “un-” also carries the sense of “the
reverse of” (as well as the sense of “the absence of”), which “in-” lacks, and thus more
accurately registers the emphatic, ethically and politically invested overturning of object-
hood at stake in the period.

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and Minimalism, it was now the process of art-making itself that had to
be rethought, and he did so by encouraging a form of what he called
“crebehavior.” Through this neologism, Oiticica attempted to push
beyond the investment in process over end product at stake in Robert
Morris’s “Anti-form” work of the period (which remained invested in
what Morris describes as the “particularization” of form by aleatory
means), as well as Allan Kaprow’s extension of the participatory stakes
of the “happening” (which retained a residual relation to the notion of
the score, derived from its roots in Fluxus instruction pieces).

Crebehavior is a complex notion. As Oiticica is at pains to point
out, it does not imply a simplistic project for the dissolution of art into
a generalized creativity and a harmonious fusion of art and life, solch
that it could be dismissed as misguidedly “utopian.” Rather, Oiticica’s
notion of crebehavior seeks to reveal the routinized character of every-
day life (“conditioned behavior”) and to propose an immanent transfor-
mation of the same via a change in everyday behavioral patterns,
shifting them into crebehavior. This transformation of conditioned
behavior into crebehavior is envisaged as potentially capable of spark-
ing a broader sociopolitical transformation and is thus not limited to
an immediate, localized overcoming of alienated social conditions.

Oiticica’s term for the practice and the experience of time opened
up by crebehavior is “creleisure,” and the artist offers one of the fullest
explorations of this concept in “The Senses Pointing toward a New
Transformation.” Combining the senses of creativity, faith, leisure, Und
pleasure, this concept and its associated practice aim to move beyond
the repressive opposition of work and leisure that characterizes indus-
trial and “postindustrial” modernity, in order to overcome social alien-
ation. This was to be effected via the “absorption of art-processes into
life-processes,” as a “way to battle oppressive systematic ways of life”
through a practice engaging all of the senses (as opposed to analytic
Conceptual art’s anti-aesthetic asceticism). As Oiticica explains it,
creleisure is characterized by “taking hold of a process, a sympathetic
creative process, where sense-apprehension is body-apprehension
which generates behavior-action, in a total organic process.”

Crucially, creleisure also has to be understood as the culmina-

tion—at the time he wrote the article—of the evolution of Oiticica’s
practice to date, work that was self-avowedly understood to be structur-
ally intertwined with the evolution of the Brazilian neo-avant-garde but
that also constitutively responded to developments in the international

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neo-avant-gardes. The crucial move at stake in creleisure was twofold.
It marked a shift away from the spatialization and associated “behavior-
alization” of art that had been at stake in his earlier articulation of the
non-object and parangolé concepts and works (“total structures condi-
tioning behavior total-structures,” as Oiticica notes in the text26), Aber
also what he calls “the reverse of that,” involving the prioritization of
(cre)behavior and a demotion of its inevitable, enabling spatial forms.
These forms are now largely conceived as ancillary, non-art, and to a
large degree even epiphenomenal (“behavior set as a total-structure,
generating the elements which are not art total structures”). In seinem
emphasis on behavior as a “total-structure” that is “not art,” Oiticica’s
conception can be distinguished from the cybernetics-influenced pro-
posals for elaborating an interactive, behavioral art outlined by his con-
temporaries (including Roy Ascott’s “The Construction of Change”
aus 1964, and Stephen Willats’s “The Artist as a Structurist of
Behaviour” from 1969).27

Letzten Endes, Oiticica summarizes creleisure in terms of “the flow-

ing alive experience of human destiny”—that is, as a practice that
involves the potential instantiation of art’s aesthetic promise (eins
opposed to a facile aestheticism). Rather than to produce objects that
occasioned aesthetic response, Oiticica sought, in a Neo-Schillerian
sense, to realize the freedom suggested by the free play of the faculties
of the individual’s mind in aesthetic response, prefiguring (as they did
for Schiller in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man) the possibility of
social relations that were not characterized by domination. This is not
to be understood as an aestheticization of everyday life, but rather as
a realization and dissolution of art that responds to what Guy Debord
took to be the challenge for art after the failures of the Dada and
Surrealist avant-gardes. In Society of the Spectacle, Debord announces
that “Dadaism wanted to suppress art without realizing it; surrealism
wanted to realize art without suppressing it”; for Debord, Jedoch, what
was necessary was both suppression and realization, as “inseparable
aspects of a single supersession of art.”28 This dual realization and

26 All of the underlining in Oiticica’s article are original emphases that have been preserved

Hier.

27 Roy Ascott, “The Construction of Change,” Cambridge Opinion 41 (“Modern Art in

Britain” special issue, 1964): 37–42. Stephen Willats, “The Artist as
a Structurist of Behaviour,” Control, NEIN. 5 (1969): unpaginated.

28 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman and John Supak (Detroit: Black

& Red, 1977), §191.

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dissolution of art in its “supersession” was in turn exactly what Oiticica
proposed in creleisure.29

Having gained some insight into the challenging conceptual char-
acter of creleisure, it is essential to emphasize that the concept was real-
ized only in and through particular contexts of practice. Oiticica’s work
moved through a number of discrete, though related, phases that were
at once conceptual and practical, some of which he acknowledged had
been originated by others (most particularly Ferreira Gullar’s theory of
the non-object and Rogerio Duarte’s probject). Each concept had its own
distinctive articulation, and each was realized in and through one or
more series of works. For Oiticica the concept was elaborated via the
process of making, rather than conceived as ontologically prior to this
Verfahren. In der Tat, from his commitment to Gullar’s notion of the non-
object onward, Oiticica insisted that the individual art objects that he
produced should not be understood as the work (for this would reify his
Kunst); eher, Oiticica’s “works” after 1959 should be understood as par-
ticular manifestations of conceptually articulated practices. In the cata-
log for his Whitechapel Gallery exhibition, produced earlier in 1969,
Oiticica explicitly set out the conceptual development of his work from
1959 Zu 1969 in a diagram: concepts were dated, with specific series
of works located under them. The successive conceptual phases of
Oiticica’s work developed out of his attempt to resolve the conceptual
challenges raised by the preceding phases. His work represented a phil-
osophical unfurling of conceptual categories and was quite explicitly
dialectical in this sense—each concept sublated one or more previous
ones—and thus has to be understood in its conceptual movement.30

Jedoch, the Whitechapel schema itself lists no specific works
or series under the concept of creleisure, despite the fact that Oiticica

It is likely that Oiticica had read Society of the Spectacle (1967) at the time he wrote “The
Senses Pointing toward a New Transformation,” in the wake of the events of 1968 für
which Debord’s text was instrumental. Oiticica’s first explicit citation of Debord does not
occur until 1971, Jedoch. On this issue, see Braga, “Conceitualismo e Vivência,” 216.

30 Oiticica read deeply in the continental philosophical tradition from an early age, and phil-
osophical aesthetics informed his artistic studies from the beginning. “Oiticica,” as Mari-
Carmen Ramírez has observed, “was a master dialectician: the specific problems posed
by each proposal or series were eventually negated and resolved into an ephemeral syn-
thesis.” Mari-Carmen Ramírez, “Hélio’s Double-Edged Challenge,” in Hélio Oiticica: Der
Body of Colour, 18. While Ramírez is correct to insist on Oiticica as a “master dialecti-
cian,” her own description of dialectics as “synthesis” fails to emphasize the sense of
Auf hebung (sublation) integral to the movement of the dialectic and inherent to Oiticica’s
üben.

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acknowledges that it was first formulated as he prepared the Eden
project for the Whitechapel show: “The idea of creleisure (crelazer in
Portuguese) arises slowly with the Eden concept, in fact it is its pro-
found sense.”31 Consequently, the works that instantiated the concept
of creleisure have to be ascertained in another way. The Eden project
consisted of an immersive, sand-delimited spatial environment featur-
ing distinct clusters of small inhabitable box structures separated from
each other by translucent curtains. The project inaugurated a distinc-
tive cellular behavioral-spatial typology that Oiticica generically termed
“nests.” These “nests” subsequently characterized the basic organiza-
tional unit of many of the works that he made to instantiate and explore
the concept and practice—or, eher, the conflated concept/practice—
of creleisure.

The practice of creleisure that he elaborated at the Whitechapel
would shortly inspire a break with the art institution and gallery sys-
tem altogether and accelerate his hopes for widespread emancipation
through an aesthetically inspired “social uprising.” As he would subse-
quently make clear in “The Senses Pointing toward a New Trans-
Formation,” “[T]he impossibility of ‘exhibiting’ objects . . . , in galleries
or museums, has become evident. . . . We are in the beginning of a new
Sprache, a new world of experiences in communication and proposing
a complete revolution toward an individual-social uprising.” With cre-
leisure, Oiticica modeled nothing less than a radical rethinking of the
concept of aesthetic revolution: just as in the revolutionary foco strategy,
where small cells of revolutionaries create a focus for more widespread
popular uprisings, the individual cells or “nests” of creleisure were to
multiply and propagate, building strength and sparking overthrow of
the repressive regime of alienated everyday life.32

* * *

The fact that Oiticica’s document was not published in Studio
International in 1970—apparently on grounds relating to the text’s
opacity, despite having been welcomed and almost certainly directly
commissioned by an interested editor—resulted in the suppression
of a text that Oiticica was justly convinced held real significance for the
international art scene at the time. The nonappearance of Oiticica’s text

31 Hélio Oiticica, Hélio Oiticica (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1969), exhibition catalog,

unpaginated. Reproduced in Brett and Figueiredo, Oiticica in London.

32 For a fuller discussion of this issue, see Skrebowski, “Revolution in the Aesthetic

Revolution.”

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reveals a fundamental inability to situate the artist’s distinctive mode
of thinking and making within the Anglophone neo-avant-garde dis-
course of the period. Jedoch, the particular untimely timeliness of
Oiticica’s article is, we suggest, precisely due to its delayed public
appearance. Rather than conceiving of its publication as a way of
reclaiming the past, as if the passage of time had not occurred, oder
entertaining facile speculation about possible counterhistories, Wir
publish “The Senses Pointing toward a New Transformation” here as
something that returns to us from the present, as something that inter-
venes in contemporary debates about the character of the global neo-
avant-gardes. The clearer view of the radicality of Oiticica’s category
of creleisure that it affords us challenges the assimilation of Oiticica’s
own practice within expanded histories of the neo-avant-garde that
nonetheless continue to privilege canonical frames (Pop, Minimalism,
Conceptualism). Here the distinctive creolization of languages and the-
oretical traditions at play in Oiticica’s writing—its refusal to translate
itself into hegemonic categories—renders it highly material as a meth-
odological exemplar for the ongoing project of revision that is at stake
in global art history.