Dialectic of Contact

Abstract

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.