Name: Secret Poetics
SKU: WE009
Price: 24.00 USD
Availability: InStock

Hélio Oiticica

Secret Poetics

Translated by Rebecca Kosick
with essays by Rebecca Kosick and Pedro Erber

$24.00 | November 2023 | ISBN 978-1-940190-32-7

In stock

The first English-language translation of the “secret” poetry of Hélio Oiticica uncovers a crucial chapter in the development of one of Brazil’s most significant twentieth-century artists.

Between 1964 and 1966, in the first years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, Oiticica wrote a series of lyrical poems, entitled Secret Poetics, and reflected in a private notebook on their significance for his artistic practice. Despite his global fame as a founder of the interdisciplinary movement known as neoconcretismo, his collaborations with major Brazilian artists and writers (Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Ferreira Gullar, etc.), and his influence across a range of disciplines (including painting, film, installation, and participatory art), Oiticica’s “secret” poems are almost unknown and have never been published as a collection. This edition, featuring the original texts in facsimile reproductions along with English translations and accompanying essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and critic Pedro Erber, uncovers the significance of poetry to Oiticica’s thinking on participation, sensation, and memory.

Penned during the crucial years of Oiticica’s artistic and personal coming-of-age, these secret poems reveal a lyrical and intimate counterpoint to the transgressive interventions the artist staged in public during this same period. They attest to Oiticica’s lifelong investment in poetry and the materiality of language, here rendered with the tenderness and limpidity of fleeting diaristic impressions.
—Irene V. Small

SKU: WE009 Genres: Art, Poetry, Translation Tags: art, poetry, translation

Poetry is everywhere in Oiticica’s writings and multisensorial participatory art: from minimal poems on objects in the mazelike Tropicália (1967), to recordings of Haroldo de Campos and Gertrude Stein playing inside the penetrable installation Filter Penetrable (1972), to Oiticica’s own phrases printed on wearable Parangolés and banners. His iconic “seja marginal, seja herói” became the counterculture’s cri de coeur during Brazil’s military dictatorship. As this elegant volume reminds us, the experience of language as an event is key to the not-so-secret poetics Oiticica’s work so staunchly enacts.
—Mónica de la Torre

That Hélio Oiticica had a keen awareness of language was made clear early on in his career when he titled objects after astronomical phenomena (Bólides), or else recycled Brazilian slang into complex art concepts (Parangolés). As this book reveals, Oiticica was interested in language as early as 1964—a discovery that will undoubtedly lead Oiticica scholars to reevaluate established perceptions of his development as an artist.
—Antonio Sergio Bessa

Stumbling upon poetry written by a visual artist can feel akin to reading a beloved story in a new language. In the case of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, Secret Poetics is precisely that portal into another world. With texts by translator Rebecca Kosick and scholar Pedro Erber, this brief collection of hand-written poems and accompanying artworks uses language as an entry point into the late sculptor’s practice and spirit…
— Hyperallergic (November 2023 Art Books Roundup)

As records of the embodied moment, these poems encode the feelings of desire, lust, pain and confusion animating the writing sensorium … These secret poems are documents of a mind and body realising themselves in loving and lustful relation to others at a time of personal and sociopolitical turmoil.
— Greg Thomas, PN Review

This book in two parts provides a critical framework for understanding major themes in Oiticica’s practice—participation, sensory, memory, and language. Add gorgeous images of his “visual” (literary-visual-interactive-process) work, and two great essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and art writer Pedro Erber, and this undersized volume manages to shake a lot of ground. […] The big “secret” in Secret Poetics, written in 1964, is not that Oiticica engaged poetry or explored concepts of figurative language, language as material, intertextuality, and textual fragmentation in his work, or even that he wrote poetry; the secret this volume critically reveals is Oiticica’s thinking on some of the major themes that define his art, including sensation, participation, and memory.
—Elizabeth Zuba, The Brooklyn Rail

The lyrics of Secret Poetics embody the direct, fleeting “apparitions” of the body and its senses. The poems are revealed now to English speakers by Rebecca Kosick’s sensitive and smart translation, interpreted by valuable essays, and enhanced by images from Oiticica’s plastic art. This is a book I will read again and again, to discover nuances of meaning and to inspire my own thought.
—Dana Delibovi, Cable Street

Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) s among twentieth-century Brazil’s most significant artists, with a multifaceted practice that included painting, sculpture, installation, performance, filmmaking, and writing. Oiticica was a leading member of Grupo Frente (an association of concrete artists) and, in 1959, co-founded the neoconcrete movement with artists and poets including Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Ferreira Gullar. Oiticica was a 1970 Guggenheim Fellow, and today his work is held in collections across the world, including at MoMA and the Tate Modern.
Rebecca Kosick is a poet, translator, and co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute at the University of Bristol (UK) where she is also Senior Lecturer in Comparative Poetry and Poetics. Kosick is the author of the monograph Material Poetics in Hemispheric America (Edinburgh Univ. Press) and the poetry collection Labor Day (Golias Books), and her poems and translations have appeared in literary venues such as The Recluse, Fence, and The Iowa Review. She was born in Michigan.
Pedro Erber is Professor of Comparative Literature at Waseda University, Senior Research Associate at Cornell University, and Editor of ARTMargins. He is the author of Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan (UC Press, 2015).