Abstract
Hélio Oiticica's “The Senses Pointing Towards a New Transformation” was written between June 18 and June 25, 1969, in London and submitted to the British art magazine Studio International, but never appeared in print. The essay negotiates art after objecthood and contextualises Oiticica's project to effect a definitive radicalization of anti-art, one that the artist held to be necessary in light of the impasse reached by the longstanding conflict between formalist art and its various neo-avant-garde negations (both within the Brazilian and the international neo-avant-gardes). For Oiticica, after both Neoconcretism and Minimalism, it was now the process of art making itself that had to be rethought. Oiticica did so by developing what he called “crebehavior,” a practice that revealed the routinized character of everyday life and proposed an immanent transformation of the same via a change in everyday behavioral patterns. Such a transformation opened up the possibility of bringing about “creleisure,” a condition that Oiticica understood to involve both the realization and the dissolution of art.
Note
Hélio Oiticica's final manuscript (ref: PHO 0486/69) is reproduced here with minimal alterations. Grammar, punctuation, and spelling have been corrected and regularized following ARTMargins' house style (employing US English spelling conventions and double-quotation marks as the standard). Occasional ellipses in the text have been completed with the relevant omitted terms in square brackets. Care has been taken, however, to retain Oiticica's distinctive, neologistic, and often rule-bending English prose style (the original draft of which had been corrected by Guy Brett, a native English speaker, in 1969, as Oiticica notes at the end of the Document). Terms underlined for emphasis have been left as is rather than set in italics. A series of individually commented terms (“significative,” “objectal,” “unsufficiency,” etc.) are retained throughout, despite their not necessarily being current usage or strictly grammatically “correct.”