Héliotape with Mario Montez (1971)
- Héliotape with Mario Montez (1971)
We thank the Projeto Hélio Oiticica, the artist’s estate in Rio de Janeiro, for granting us permission and providing us with the opportunity to transcribe and publish this rare material. This first publication of a transcription of the “Héliotape with Mario Montez (1971)” is colored by the tragic coincidence that only two weeks before the festival LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World that was held in Berlin in October 2009 and that marked Montez’s first public appearance in over thirty years, the original tapes were irrecoverably lost during a fire in the Oiticica Archives in Rio de Janeiro. Fortunately, the Projeto had already produced digital audio files of the Héliotape. We had the great pleasure of listening to these files together with Mario Montez himself in Berlin in the summer of 2011. We benefited tremendously from this experience and from the memories Montez shared with us about his work.
The recordings document a discussion that jumped from subject to subject based on the items in Montez’s scrapbook that caught Oiticica’s interest. Pauses in the recordings to change tapes, for instance, add further breaks to the flow of conversation. These tape changes are indicated with asterisks. Although this transcription renders the conversation in the form of a relatively linear dialogue, the actual recordings document both Oiticica and Montez interrupting each other frequently and occasionally speaking over each other. Some grammatical corrections were made to make for a more easily understandable text. However, all attempts were made to retain the specificities of Montez and Oiticica’s spoken English (for example, ellipses indicate pauses by the speaker). Endnotes are used to clarify particular points in the discussion.
—Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz and Marc Siegel [End Page 379]
Alô alô alô. . . alô alô alô. . . Nos estamos aqui na casa de. . . We are in Mario Montez’s house at 70 to 78 Willoughby Street in Brooklyn. This is September 1, 1971 and . . . ah . . . what else? What else should I say? 2:30 in the afternoon. Carlos Vergara is going to take photographs. Mario, we are going to do the interview in English. I understand when we talk in Spanish. But I am afraid that when it is taped I am not going to understand some things you say, so . . .
You are going to need a translation.
[laughs] I prefer to do it in English because we are more careful in English. You know, it is terrible to translate everything afterwards. This interview is going to be made for a friend of mine, Torquato Neto, a Brazilian journalist and lyric writer in the Tropica . . . There was this Tropicália movement in Brazil and he was one of the main lyric writers. Now, he has a magazine and he already advertised the interview for two months. So, we better start because otherwise we’ll never do this thing . . . [laughs]
Yeah.
What I had in mind when I thought about interviewing you was something that I read in an underground-film book. I don’t know if you have it. I forgot the name of the writer. It is called Underground Cinema and it mentions you a lot.1 It has photographs of Flaming Creatures [1963] and other things. When he mentions you in a chapter about superstars, he says something which I thought was very interesting, like that when you chose your name, when you say you are Mario Montez, you are not really trying to represent Maria Montez or to make a copy or anything, you are really an incarnation of Maria Montez.
[MM laughs.]
I thought about the title of this interview, for instance, “Mario Montez’s Incarnation of Maria Montez.” I want to know from you whether this is a kind of faithful idea and all the reasons why you took the name of Maria Montez, besides adoring Maria Montez. Was there any other reason? Because to assume a name, I think, is a kind of big magical act, you know, as if you had incorporated...
