How Did Neo-Concretism End?

Abstract

Abstract In this article, Nicholas Brown analyses the work of Hélio Oiticica from the 50s - when it was firmly related to the research conducted by the Neo-Concrete avant-garde - to the 70s and demonstrates how these works thematize in insistent ways an experiential aspect that is implicit from the beginning in the work’s literal objecthood, permanently mobilizing the dialetics between the idea and the literal support in space. The author also examines the specific configuration of the correlation between political history and the art-historical sequence regarding the Neo-Concretism. Finally, departing from the productive contradiction between thingly substrate and signifying surface in Oiticica´s work, Brown indicates how the dynamic between social-political and intellectual history is presented in the last years of his trajectory as a re-investment of the art object in odds with commodity society.

Keywords

• Hélio Oiticica
• Neo-Concretism
• Brazilian Art
• Historical Materialism