Dialectic of Contact

In this chapter I examine James’s and Oiticica’s entries into the U.S. and their attempts to situate themselves there. Cut off from the contact they had once had with this aesthetic sociality, contact that had radicalized their earlier work, they try to reconstruct the conditions of possibility for something like it in the U.S. They both imagine a kind of communion with the population at large, in communal modes of reception of popular art, but the opportunity for such reception is elusive, already lost or still anticipated, or only temporary, fleeting. In the face of this inconstancy, they work toward the construction of new apparatuses—the Correspondence organization and organ and living and working spaces called “nests”—in and through which they hoped to invite and structure contact, including contact with and between those forces they found most vital in the U.S., the disenfranchised, the marginal, the queer, the ones who precariously inhabit citizenship’s outer edge in modes of aesthetic sociality that were both severely constrained and unprecedentedly open. The new forms of aesthetic sociality James and Oiticica sought would take shape in and through new experimental practices that attempted to reformulate the very idea of work or working as their bases.

Introduction

In Experiments in Exile, I explore and compare projects undertaken by two twentieth-century American intellectuals while they lived in voluntary exiles in the United States: the Trinidadian writer and revolutionary C. L. R. James and the Brazilian visual artist and counterculturalist Hélio Oiticica. James and Oiticica never met. They lived and worked in the United States at different moments. My focus is on James’s stay during the 1940s and on Oiticica’s stay during the 1970s. Given the significant differences between them—not just at the level of nationality but at the level of race (James was black, Oiticica was white), class (James was situated within a precarious middle class, Oiticica was firmly established within an upper middle class), sexuality (James was straight, Oiticica was gay), and disciplinary locations (James is generally situated in the history of radical social theory and practice, and Oiticica is generally situated in the history of avant-garde aesthetic theory and practice)—this is surely an unlikely combination. This study is itself an experiment, one that goes beyond the usual parameters of comparativist or transnational research, to identify, in the surprising resonances between the projects pursued by these two very disparate figures, a common project I believe they, together, bring into relief....

Undocuments

In this chapter I examine what was produced by way of the work or working in the organization/organ and the nests: an effusion of documents, largely proposals for projects that have yet to be carried out. I examine two key texts—not the master works for which James and Oiticica are generally recognized, but ambitious, messy, unresolved, unfinished works that lay, for a long time, unedited in their archives, “Notes on American Civilization” and Newyorkaises, considering they way they are proposed but not (until posthumously published) closed, and examine their resistance to the terminal condition of “work,” which they manifest as documents, or undocuments, that aspire to their own dissolution in a socialization of the intellectual function that would enact the very sociality James and Oiticica desire. I argue that these open documents or undocuments are the site, or at least a site, through which the motley crew or something like it might be reproduced and extended. I explore their reconfigurations of reproduction, as a sexual, but not necessarily heterosexual or even biological process. By ending (or not ending) with their non-endings, I mean to offer not conclusion to the experiment pursued here, but an invitation to begin it anew.

What Happened to the Motley Crew?

In this chapter I examine James’s and Oiticica’s “discovery” of what I conceive of to be the active remains of the motley crew in the aesthetic sociality of blackness. I explore the claim they each make on it, on its modes of composition, arrangement and assembly, and the claim it makes on them, by way of some of their early experiments—James’s Minty Alley, the novel he wrote in Trinidad as an “exercise,” and Oiticica’s Parangolé, the banners, tents and capes whose activation would constitute what he would come to describe, through a phrase he adopts from Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa, as an “experimental exercise of freedom.” Both claim the aesthetic sociality of blackness by “appropriating” elements of the creative practices they encountered, the spectacular performance of cricket and samba and the more quotidian performances connected to them, the forms of assembly that James observed in conversations in the barrack-yards and that Oiticica observed in the architecture of the favelas. I look at the ways their claims take shape in these early works and the way the counterclaim of that sociality opens up those shapes, using it as a vehicle for its own expression, one that can’t quite be contained by the works themselves or the gesture of appropriation.