Hélio Oiticica, Metaesquema No. 348, 1958. (MoMA)
10/23/09
Tragic.
Just read that a fire has burned up much of the oeuvre of the amazing Brazilian conceptual artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980). Looks like some of it is restorable and the digital archive is almost complete, but still. This is beyond words.
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Thanks for posting this. It's terrible. A friend of mine, who worked on a diss about HO for a while, said this:
As much as I am tempted to blame the family, I understand their obstinance to some extent. The artist didn't make his work so it could hang in a museum and the family, from what I can tell, wanted to keep it from ending up that way. Although I don't know the details of the dispute with the prefeitura or with the MFAH, I know the family feared ... Read Morelosing control over the work. And, given the way that many museums have shown (and oddly reconstructed) his work in the past, this fear is not unfounded. My anger is not so much that the family fought for control of the work ... it's that they didn't protect the work properly. That is a true tragedy.
This makes me wonder what she means by "oddly reconstructed"... I guess I'll get a chance to ask her soon enough.
Btw, welcome back to the blogosphere, noble Gote!
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