Introduction to Hélio Oiticica’s “Héliotape with Mario Montez (1971)”

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937, Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica lived in New York City in 1971–78. As did many political exiles and other fellow artists abroad during the years of military dictatorship in Brazil, Oiticica would help himself through difficult times with a bit of cocaine dealing here and there. This enterprise provided him with a remarkable social mobility. Oiticica soon had friends on Wall Street and in rock-star circles, highbrow bohemia, and the queer underground. At the same time, he became a sort of chronicler of life in Lower Manhattan—MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) artist and occasional St. Marks Place pusher at once—and provided his friends and various clandestine countercultural magazines back in Brazil with a ceaseless stream of letters, articles, photos, films, and tape recordings. In these, he would mix such heterogeneous elements as anecdotes of his life in the queer underground, detailed drug and cruising experiences, metropolitan gossip, philosophical reading advice, and comments on film, music, and art scenes. (“I don’t know what is going on here, there is such a bourgeois art scene, conformity and reactionarism going on, unbelievable!”¹)

The name Héliotapes describes a series of tape recordings that Oiticica made in this fashion between 1971 and 1975. The following is a transcription of one particular Héliotape that Oiticica recorded in conversation with Mario Montez in 1971. By then, Oiticica had reached the conclusion that the sellout of New York’s queer underground had long begun, a fact that was confirmed by the success of Andy Warhol–Paul Morrissey film Trash (1970) in what he regarded as “neoconservative” circles that voyeuristically feed on “marginal activity.” Against this logic of spectacle and consumption, Oiticica maintained a particularly strong affinity to Mario Montez and Jack Smith, whom he considered to be “different.” Thus, one year after their recorded conversation, Montez would appear in the most famous of Oiticica’s Super 8 films, Agripina é Roma Manhattan (Agrippina Is Rome-Manhattan, 1972), in which he and Brazilian artist Antonio Dias throw dice, evoking what Oiticica called a “Wall Street Oracle” or “OráCULO.”

Already in 1971 Oiticica had used the Héliotape conversation as the basis for his article “Mario Montez, Tropicamp” that he published in Rio de Janeiro’s Presença magazine.² In this text, Oiticica envisioned a sort of internationalist underground solidarity between what once had been the notorious Tropicália movement in Brazil—but now was scattered and fragmented over South America, Europe, and the United States—and Smith and Montez, representing the element resistant to both commercialization and the distinctive chic of New York’s post-1968 bohemia. This solidarity would be based on the principle of “critical tropical things” and a shared “tropicamp” attitude. Oiticica writes,

[T]he work of SMITH, his use of music, and tropical-cliché images in general, [is] a sort of PRE-TROPICÁLIA—as a matter of fact, from what I saw and know, I consider JACK SMITH both PRE- and POST-TROPICÁLIA at the same time, an impressive fusion of tropihollywood and camp clichés . . . the importance and interest for us, in the incarnation-personality MARIO MONTEZ, is precisely that he is the materialisation of the cliché of LATIN AMERICA-as-a-whole, this makes me think of what SOY LOCO POR TÍ AMÉRICA by GIL-CAPINAM was for TROPICÁLIA-music in brazil . . . without a doubt everything emerged under the tutelage of JACK SMITH: MARIA MONTEZ and CARMEN MIRANDA, two precursors of what I will call here TROPICAMP.³

The full interview transcribed in this issue of Criticism, however, gives us a different insight into their encounter. Rich in details and memories of Montez’s work, it provides a rare contemporary account of the constellations in the queer underground scene at the time and transports a rather personal, almost intimate feeling shared by both of the conversation partners.