s the “High Priestess of Polka Dots” in her own Church of Self-Obliteration. Kusama was also involved with pioneer queer activist Louis Abolafia. Abolafia ran as a nudist (“Love Party”) candidate for president in 1968, then moved to San Francisco where he produced the annual “Erotic Exotic Ball.”
Kusama’s performance actions flaunted sexuality and celebrated hallucination. Her work was in the forefront of the U.S. sexual revolution – sexual experimentation, the emergence of gay identities. Kusama engaged politics in her selection of locations (sites) for actions, but she was far from a feminist artist. She was, in fact, fabulously mad, and in 1968 she returned to Japan where she lives today – happily and productively – in a mental hospital.
Psychedelic Tropical Shantytown
The psychedelic experience was widely understood as revolutionary, albeit centered on individual consciousness. The drugs which induced it and the culture that sprang from them became a worldwide cultural vogue. It made the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica famous. His 1967 installation Tropicália, a walk-in installation abstractly based on a Rio de Janeiro favella, or shantytown of squatters, gave its name to a cultural movement including musicians and filmmakers. In devising his participatory forms of art, Oiticica, like his compatriot the sculptor Lygia Clark, was strongly influenced by purist abstract art of the kind taught by European exiles who fled Nazi Europe to South America.
Both Oiticica and Clark’s work was made to be interactive. Oiticica began making complex manipulable boxes which the viewer was invited to play with. Clark made masks and body suits which were intended to be worn and stimulate a variety of sensuous experiences. Oiticica’s parangolés are mobile sculptures, layered mantles of fabrics and plastic, designed to be worn through the carnival streets like flags.
Oiticica and Clark’s aesthetic philosophies are dense and complex, and they have both been the subject of extensive recent exhibitions and publications. Both artists were trained in abstract Bauhaus-style methods of working, and had a rigorous sense of pictorial form and color. Still, by the mid-1960s, both had taken the participatory gamble. For Clark, people become the work, while Oiticica was committed to exploring a collective state of invention in his work with the poor residents of Brazil’s shantytowns. For Oiticica, a gay man, art was to become a total experience of life and transgression of all social norms.
The right-wing military junta in Brazil exiled some and jailed other artists involved with the Tropicalismo movement, still their extraordinary artistic innovations suggested lines of resistance to many South American artists during the age of the dictators.
The rising tide of reactionary military dictatorships swept over Latin America with close support from the U.S. government. Artists involved in avant garde activity, and many working in more traditional ways with political themes found themselves enemies of these states. To avoid imprisonment, many turned to subtle ways of questioning the state and its institutions, using the methods of conceptual art and social sculpture. Much the same ferment was brewing in the Eastern European states under authoritarian communist rule.
Stickin’ to the Union
The Argentinians were perhaps the most daring. Bizarrely 1966, the year of the military coup, was already officially declared the “year of the avant-garde.” Artists took full advantage of the ironical opportunity. A group called Arte de los Medios (Art of the Media) made an “anti-happening” – an event that never took place (media makes the event was their point).
At an “Antibienal” held in Córdoba to contest the 1966 3rd Bienal Americana de Arte sponsored by an American corporation, artists produced street interventions, ambient pieces, happenings, conceptual art and contemporary dance works. The most radical action was saved for the end. An audience gathered to see a new Happening, “There’s Room in the World for Everyone/ En el mundo hay sitio para todos.” The door of 