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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.

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.

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.

Chapter 2 explores the connections between the artistic avantgarde and the counterculture. A small, but influential group of artists sometimes identified as “marginal” or “underground” coalesced in the aftermath of Tropicália. Cultura marginal may be located at the intersection of two cultural phenomenon: On one hand it had deep affinities with the emergent counterculture. On the other hand, cultura marginal was indebted to the mid-century constructivist avant-garde, especially neo-concretism. The author discusses the work of experimental artist, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, who developed a series of environmental and performative works that demanded the active participation of spectators to create meaning. The author explores Oiticica’s dialogue with experimental writer and songwriter, Waly Salomão, whose work circulated within the rarified field of experimental writing, while also finding a mass audience through popular music, notably in the performances of Gal Costa. The author devotes a section to the journalist and artist Torquato Neto, who promoted cultura marginal and also performed in “Nosferato no Brasil,” a celebrated example of Super 8 film. Finally, the author analyzes the publication Navilouca, a graphic and textual project that brought together key figures of cultura marginal and the avantgarde.

Chapter 2 discusses the 1960s interdisciplinary movement known as neoconcretism. It argues for a relational poetics in which language is plastic and what’s plastic is language. Analysing examples of poetry and art that either calls itself poetry or makes use of the book form – including poet Ferreira Gullar’s ‘Buried Poem’ (an underground poem-room that invites the ‘reader’ to enter), artist Lygia Pape’s Book of Creation (a language without words which the ‘reader’ can order) and artist Hélio Oiticica’s Secret Poetics (a lyric that stills the sensible for the ‘reader’ to perceive) – this chapter shows that language powerfully shapes the history of what neoconcrete artist Lygia Clark calls the ‘relational object’. Not just a score which would guide, from the outside, the co-creation of an object, language, in a relational poetics, joins the creator and participant in becoming the object created. This conclusion also points towards one way in which avant-garde experimentation (often accused of being apolitical) can engage the political sphere – by creating the opportunity for an engagé poetics that takes shape inside sensory engagement itself.