October 13, 2006
Art Review | ‘Tropicália’

When a Burst of Sunshine Swept Over Brazil’s Art World

By HOLLAND COTTER

A lot of the most radical art of the 1960’s and 70’s never made it into museums, or did so only in residue form, like swept-up confetti after a party. This was certainly true of art based on actions and interactions rather than on objects. A thing of beauty may be a joy forever, but a beautiful gesture? Did you see it? No? Too late. It’s gone.

“Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture,” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, is an absorbing if inevitably diffuse attempt to recapture such a fugitive art, one that flourished for a mere five years, from 1967 to 1972. Tropicália, or Tropicalism, wasn’t a style or a movement as much as an atmosphere, a rush of youthful, cosmopolitan, liberationist optimism that broke over Brazil like a sun shower and soaked into everything: art, music, fashion, film, theater, literature.

Almost instantly it gave rise to a crop of startling hybrids: American psychedelic rock cross-pollinating sambas, political resistance with the pleasure principle, Brazilian art with international art. The new growth was dense and enveloping: you looked at it, listened to it, tasted it, breathed in its perfume, lived in it.

Or you didn’t, in which case the whole phenomenon was puzzling at best, and threatening at worst. To the military authorities then in power it was a clear and present danger. They let the party go on for a while, then clamped down hard. By 1972 Tropicália was effectively over, leaving scraps of itself — photographs, films, recordings, manifestoes and fragile pieces of art — behind.

The show, organized by Carlos Basualdo, a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is largely made up of such scraps. In historical exhibitions this could be a serious liability. You would be getting only a fragmented view of a larger whole. But even at its peak Tropicália was a thing of many parts, some of which, like art and pop music, connected only obliquely. It brought global and Brazilian culture together in barely digested combinations. Politically it was oppositional without being ideological, or rather it embraced many ideologies.

The name Tropicália actually derived from art, specifically from a single work by Hélio Oiticica (1937-80), a leading figure of the Brazilian avant-garde. He was born into a family of leftist intellectuals in Rio de Janeiro and went to school there in the 1950’s with a group of remarkable contemporaries, among them Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, who are major presences in the Bronx show.

Although Mr. Oiticica’s main work at the time was utopian, Mondrian-inspired abstract painting, he also experimented with ephemeral materials and tactile forms. In 1964 he started attending a samba school in one of Rio’s favelas, or shantytowns, and his immersion in this performance-based popular art transformed his work.

He turned his attention from making gallery-bound objects to environments for viewer participation, plain and practical in design but with certain “Brazilian” elements added. The result was an exoticized, sensorily stimulating, walk-in version of modernist abstraction. When he exhibited the first of these ramshackle, funky constructions publicly in 1967, he titled it “Tropicália.”

A reproduction of that piece, complete with live plants and parrots, enclosures modeled on favela architecture, and a single television blasting away, is the centerpiece of the Bronx show, where it melds into a second Oiticica piece, “The Eden Plan” (1968-89), equipped with a wading pool, “nests” of dried leaves and a tent with piped-in music.

Mr. Oiticica was explicit about the music to be played: songs by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, two of the country’s hottest young music stars. The dreamboaty Mr. Veloso was especially popular. In 1968, in a bow to Mr. Oiticica, he titled an album “Tropicália,” and in the process he gave the name to an intense moment of Brazilian pop culture.

Many people associate Tropicália exclusively with the music, which combined bossa nova, Euro-American pop and traditional Brazilian material, woven around anti-establishment lyrics. It’s fabulous stuff, and you can get a concentrated dose of it in a series of video clips playing in the Bronx Museum’s handsome new architectural extension.

Among the clips are shots of Mr. Gil and Mr. Veloso singing to enraptured crowds, and tropicalist fellow travelers like the former bossa nova stylist Gal Costa, dressed like Little Richard and sounding like Janis Joplin, and the band Os Mutantes. Nearby is a selection of Flower Powerish album covers and a lavish display of Tropicália fashions. Made of fabrics printed with tropical flowers, birds and vibrant abstract patterns, the clothes perfectly embody the marriage of Op, Pop and Braziliana that Mr. Oiticica envisioned.

These are remnants of a classic 1960’s scene. And as in everything 1960’s, tensions buzzed away under the surface. Despite or because of its popularity, Tropicália drew fire from both ends of the political spectrum. To the left its commercial success was deeply suspect and its espousal of hedonism — “Joy, Joy” was the title of one of Mr. Veloso’s hit songs — as a mode of subversion, regressive. Mr. Oiticica shared these concerns.

For the right the matter was simpler. Tropicália was part of an international revolutionary impulse, and it had to go. In 1969 Mr. Gil and Mr. Veloso played some gigs at a nightclub where there was a banner, designed by Mr. Oiticica, with the words “Be an outlaw; Be a hero.” Soon after, they were jailed and then went into exile. Mr. Oiticica also left. Tropicália was over.

Or at least it was subdued. Mr. Oiticica, who moved to New York, continued to think and write about it. He was, and remains, its real theoretician. Mr. Veloso, an international celebrity, has tended to smooth over Tropicália’s sharper edges while keeping its spirit alive. Mr. Gil, the current minister of culture in Brazil, periodically invokes it as a political model while remaining ambiguous about how its politics were defined.

They were defined of course by ambiguity, a refusal of dogmatism that, ideally, opened the path for a carnivalesque collective activism, one that has parallels in certain “interventionist” political art today. The show addresses the question of Tropicália’s continuing influence by including work by several young artists made in response to it.

A stick-on mural of classic tropicalist images orchestrated by the Brazilian-born artist Assume Vivid Astro Focus generates a celebratory energy. But pieces by two young artists based in Brazil, Rodrigo Araujo and Marcos Reis Peixoto, who goes by the name Marepe, allude to continuing social inequities that Tropicalism never addressed.

In the end it is Mr. Oiticica’s work that seems, particularly in a museum context, most radical and most alive. For one thing, it is there but not there: almost everything under his name in the show is a reproduction of an original either fragile beyond use or gone. For another, his is truly an art of gestures, not frozen in time, but repeated and translated differently by each visitor who walks into his “Tropicália” environment and makes it his or her own. If we engage with his art, it is something; if we do not, it is nothing. Its creation is our responsibility.

Giant nests perplex experts

By Garry Mitchell
The Associated Press
October 12, 2006

MOBILE — To the bafflement of insect experts, gigantic yellow jacket nests have started turning up in old barns, unoccupied houses, cars and underground cavities across the southern two-thirds of Alabama.

Specialists say it could be the result of a mild winter and drought conditions, or multiple queens forcing worker yellow jackets to enlarge their quarters so the queens will be in separate areas. But experts haven’t determined exactly what’s behind the surprisingly large nests.

Auburn University entomologists, who say they’ve never seen the nests so large, have been fielding calls about the huge nests from property owners from Dothan up to Sylacauga and over into west-central Alabama’s Black Belt.

At one site in Barbour County, the nest was as large as a Volkswagen Beetle, said Andy McLean, an Orkin pesticide service manager in Dothan who helped remove it from an abandoned barn about a month ago.

“It was one of the largest ones we’ve seen,” McLean said.

Attached to two walls and under the slab, the nest had to be removed in sections, McLean said.

Entomologist Dr. Charles Ray at the Alabama Cooperative Extension System in Auburn said he’s aware of about 16 of what he described as “super-sized” nests in south Alabama.

Ray said he’s seen 10 of them and cautioned people about going near them because of the yellow jacket’s painful sting.

The largest nest Ray has inspected this year filled the interior of a weathered 1955 Chevrolet parked in a rural Elmore County barn. That nest was about the size of a tire in the rear floor seven weeks ago, but quickly spread to fill the entire vehicle, the property owner, Harry Coker, said. Four satellite nests around it have gotten into the eaves of the barn, about 300 yards from his home.

“I’m kind of afraid for the grandkids. I had to sneak down there at dark and get my tractor out of the barn,” Coker said. “It’s been a disruption.”

Coker said he may wait until a winter freeze to try to remove the nest.

In previous years, a yellow jacket nest was no larger than a basketball, Ray said. It would contain about 3,000 workers and one queen. These gigantic nests may have as many as 100,000 workers and multiple queens.

Without a cold winter to kill them this year, the yellow jackets continued feeding in January and February — and layering their nests made of paper, not wax. They typically are built in shallow underground cavities.

Yellow jackets, often confused with bees, may visit flowers for sugar, but unlike bees, yellow jackets are carnivorous, eating insects, carrion and picnic food, according to scientists.
“They were able to find food to colony through the winter,” Ray said in a telephone interview.

He investigated a nest near Pineapple, measuring about 5 feet by 4 feet, that was coming out of the ground on a roadside. A southwest Pike County house in Goshen had a giant nest spreading into its roof.

Goshen Mayor G. Malon Johnson said he consulted Ray in removing it because he was concerned that children playing nearby could be attacked.

A colony has a maximum size in early July and August. The hot, dry conditions could force the yellow jackets out of ground nests.

“Normally it starts declining in the fall,” Ray said.

He said the “super colonies” appear to have many queens.

“We’re not really sure how this multiple queen thing works,” Ray said. “It could be that the daughters of the original queen don’t leave the nest or that the queens have developed some way to cooperate.”

Ray examined a collected nest from Macon County to count the queens in it.

“We found 12 queens so far, so that’s definitely a factor,” Ray said Thursday.

Dr. Michael D. Goodisman, a biologist at Georgia Tech who has studied large nests in Australia, said he’s heard of some large ones in Georgia and Florida, but not as big as those in Alabama.A 6-foot by 3-foot nest on a pond stump in Bulloch County, Ga., was featured July 12 on CNN.

“I’m not sure people know what triggers it,” he said.

U.S. Department of Agriculture entomologist James H. Cane said he’s familiar with a nest in Florida 10 or 15 years ago that engulfed a big easy chair. Cane said the monster nests reported in Alabama are intriguing and agreed with Ray that they could be the product of multiple queens in a single nest.

The nest usually dies out each year. “All that overwinters is the future queen,” he said.

Given a queen’s egg-laying rate, he said, there’s no way a nest with a single queen could get that big in a growing season.

But in a multiple-queen colony, Cane said, there must be space where queens can’t get at each other.

Link courtesy Dave Tompkins!

Psychedelia: Paying homage to its origins

In 1966, a riotous extravaganza at the Roundhouse brought together the cream of British counterculture – and gave birth to psychedelia. Daniel Spicer looks back

Published: 11 October 2006, The Independent

It sounds like an impossible Sixties dream. Psychedelic oil-projections ooze over the walls and the faces of London’s movers and shakers, crammed into a semi-derelict Victorian building. Paul McCartney is here, disguised in shades and Arab burnous. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull swagger in with a more brazen cool. Pink Floyd, fronted by Syd Barrett, and the original Soft Machine pump out experimental rock’n’roll in the marijuana-scented night. Girls in miniskirts hand out sugar cubes. A 6ft-tall jelly slithers and slides all over the floor as the less inhibited guests strip off and dive into the slippery mess.

It’s not a set piece from some heavy-handed pastiche; this scene unfolded at London’s Roundhouse 40 years ago this weekend – on 15 October 1966 – at the launch party of England’s first underground newspaper, The International Times. This “All-Night Rave Pop Op Costume Masque Ball” has subsequently entered countercultural myth as one of the great parties of the Sixties but, according to some, this was much more than a mere late-night revel. Daevid Allen, guitarist with Soft Machine at the time and later founder of cosmic-proggers Gong, has described the IT launch as “one of the most revolutionary events in the history of English alternative music and thinking”. As the socio-cultural upheavals of the Sixties are subjected to ever more scrutiny, this event is becoming regarded as one of the defining moments of the UK underground. Certainly, it was probably the first time the capital’s burgeoning crowd of mid-Sixties proto-hippie “freaks” had massed on their own turf to put their new imperatives into such bold – and visible – action.

As an organiser of the event, author Barry Miles offers a perspective on where he and other countercultural architects such as John “Hoppy” Hopkins got their inspiration. “We knew a lot about [Andy] Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable because Hoppy’s girlfriend, Kate Heliczer, had been part of that scene. Also Gerard Malanga was around in late 1965 – he was the whip dancer with The Velvet Underground, so we knew about it through him.”

As much as Warhol’s bacchanalias can be credited as a direct influence, the IT launch was clearly the logical culmination of a growing indigenous scene. In June 1965, Miles, Hoppy and others had staged The International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall, putting Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg onstage for what was billed as Britain’s first “happening”. The Marquee Club on Wardour Street had started Sunday afternoon sessions called Spontaneous Underground in January 1966, featuring live music from Pink Floyd, Donovan, AMM and others. Later the same year, Pink Floyd had played a number of free gigs under the banner of the London Free School – a Portobello Road-based coalition of housing activists and hipsters.

Yet none of this detracts from the fact that the IT launch was a massive boost for the underground – not least because of the newspaper. Author and former International Times contributor Mick Farren remembers the immediate effect of the paper’s launch. “There were a lot of things happening all over the city but they weren’t hooked together. The IT thing was a launch party for a fortnightly tabloid, which provided a network for a lot of people who had previously been working in isolation.”

At a time when this counterculture had yet to acquire the “hippie” label, to a lot of young scene-makers it seemed the party marked the beginning of something entirely new – and unknown. Farren again: “Nobody could quite define it. There were a lot of mods there who immediately went out and dyed their suits funny colours, metaphorically speaking. Everyone was thinking, ‘Yeah, this is it’, if we could just figure out what ‘it’ was.”

Others take a less romantic view of the launch’s cultural significance – including Miles: “We were just having a party. I mean, it was a good one, a really good one, but I don’t think anyone thought it was going to change the world.” Even so, it would be hard to deny that the scene that coalesced around the IT launch had many lasting effects on British culture.

Pink Floyd and Soft Machine were both still unsigned at the time but both went on to become hugely influential outfits. “It was a dance so you had to have live music,” deadpans Miles. “Pink Floyd received £15 because they had a light show, Soft Machine got £12, though they did have a miked-up motorbike.” Robert Wyatt – Soft Machine’s drummer at the time – explains: “In those days there was no seating in the Roundhouse so there was lots of space. A friend of the organist was a motorcyclist and, as another member of the group, his contribution was to ride round the room to add a bit of enjoyable sound. He was very sensitive in the way he drove his motorbike and it fitted in with the tunes perfectly, as I remember.”

At the time of the launch, the Roundhouse was a crumbling husk that had once housed winding gear used to haul Victorian trains up the hill from Euston station. In 1964, it was bought by an organisation called Centre 42, led by the playwright Arnold Wesker and named after the trade union movement Article 42, which states that arts should be for everyone. Centre 42 planned to turn the building into a workers’ arts centre but, due to cost, these plans were shelved and it remained unused.

That it ended up in the hands of the IT crowd is due to the efforts of Jim Haynes – an American who helped to found the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and soon became a leading figure in the London underground. “Arnold Wesker had a large sign up on the outside saying they needed £250,000. We thought that was a little bit crazy. The best thing to do is to start using the facility to generate money and get things happening there. That’s what we did. I knew Arnold, so I called him up and asked if we could borrow the Roundhouse – I told a bit of a lie – I said for a small party.”

This was the first time the Roundhouse was used for live entertainment but it soon became the counterculture’s venue of choice, hosting The Doors, Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane, and providing an artistic focal point for the scene. The Roundhouse has continued to operate as a venue, off and on, and reopened in June after a £29.7m redevelopment. Miles reckons the Roundhouse had an even bigger impact on London: “The whole wonder that is Camden Market developed. That area was just bleak and dead before the Roundhouse became a venue.”

And, of course, there’s The International Times. Haynes recalls: “We were all aware that the paper was going to be a success and that it was going to speak for a lot of people. The event proved just how big an audience there was.” Miles, too, could sense the importance of what the paper represented: “I certainly felt something new was happening when I held the first copy in my hands, because only Fleet Street was supposed to publish newspapers.” Notwithstanding competition from papers such as OZ and Frendz, IT remained the UK underground’s bible and bulletin-board throughout the Sixties, Seventies and into the Eighties, running a mix of political comment, cultural criticism and underground art that had a massive influence on the mainstream press. When rock writers such as Farren and Charles Shaar Murray moved out of the underground and onto titles like NME in the Seventies, they took with them their irreverent, gun-slinging approach and helped to transform the face of journalism in this country forever.

Forty years on, it’s easy to conclude that the counterculture failed in its attempt to construct a viable alternative to mainstream society, yet its influence can still be felt. If you’re at a gig, a nightclub or a rave this weekend, ask yourself just how much of it you’d be enjoying if it weren’t for that one night 40 years ago that Haynes calls “a modest little launch that went totally over the top”

“UbuWeb is pleased to announce the relaunch of the AVI’s, RealVideo and MP3s of Robert Ashley’s Music with Roots in the Aether, a seminal series of interviews and performances conceived and realized by Robert Ashley in 1976, consisting of 14 hours worth of video and audio. Subjects and performers include: David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and Robert Ashley. Robert Ashley says: ‘Music with Roots in the Aether is a series of interviews with seven composers who seemed to me when I conceived the piece-and who still seem to me twenty-five years later-to be among the most important, influential and active members of the so-called avant-garde movement in American music, a movement that had its origins in the work of and in the stories about composers who started hearing things in a new way at least fifty years ago.'”

“Well in the last update I claimed this was done, but as you can see it isn’t still. It’s like the classic adage that it takes 90% of the time to do the last 10% of the work. Anyway the Natural Synth has three noise generators and two triple low-frequency filters. It also has a Serge negative slew module, a diode ladder filter (like the VCS3 that Yamazaki Maso aka Masonna is obsessed with), and an APSI parametric eq. It’s really good for doing fluttery and swishy sounds, like water and leaves, and other times it does squiggly squeals and labored chuffing. I built it ‘wrong’ on purpose, and it really paid off, it feeds back internally! So when you patch it above the face plate, you also have to respect the way it patches itself internally.

“I played this synth on half of LTR, and also on the forthcoming Kites/Can’t cd.”