To operate with metaphors, which is in itself another metaphor, distances us from the essential function of speech, that is, to refer, but it allows creativity, the reinvention of the world, fiction, symbolic recreation, and also the destitution of the extant and the pernicious alienation which constructs ideal "worlds" to superimpose them upon the real ones. To the metaphorization of speech we must add the ambiguity of its constitutive elements, words, whose signification depends on and is modified by the hegemonic system of communicational reference and also the possession of those channels by which it is transmitted, with whose totality is assured the predominance of those values which preserve its socio-economic model.

It has become evident that the tongue (and any other representative language) whether in its referential function, its artistic role, or in the exercise of its projective power, fully justifies its existence and equally evident its distortion, the language of "how it's said," or of "the authority of who says it," or "how pretty the way it is said!", elegance of expression to the detriment of truth. This serves only to smother reality under a layer of words or signs, signals which are meaningless or in the majority of cases, in the sense of an interest of whoever is using it, in our specific case the capitalist system seeking to preserve itself. It is against a background of this alienated tongue and the representational, distorted languages that the Latin American poetic avant-garde arose, which by its historical authenticity and coherency has entered into the unceasing development of life and art and which, without confusing ends with means, could not develop in the area of a defiled expression, the semantics of a tongue the function of which has been altered in order to serve ends which are not its own. In its impetus to act upon reality, it first worked upon words as objects (of visual or phonetic nature) and next attempted to codify itself in systems other than those of the known languages with the purpose of avoiding the deviations of the known representational forms.

Between the referential function and the artistic role is situated the projective power of language, not to transform but to induce transformation: between the real situation referred to and the referable situation at a specific time and place is located the baggage of the possibility of its realization, be it in a regressive sense when the referable aims at forms that have been superseded or in a progressive sense when it calls to something distinct and new. It is in this projective instance of language that the ideological battle grows weak: at times the fight for a word's meaning takes on dramatic characteristics.

Latin American art of our time is raised against the ideological use of languages, that which, in many cases, hides the material sense of the artistic activity, which brings nothing to knowledge stupid manipulation of the social repertory and that inverts the essential finality of languages as products of communication. It would not have been sufficient to return to signs their univocal significance, in the manner of the classical poets; it was also necessary to confront semantic meaning itself, intentionally ideologized by the system that makes prisons of languages. Faced with society's incessant evolution and the technical and scientific level reached in its development, Latin American artists, advancing these levels, have extracted from artistic tradition new contributions, new information in the light of which they are contributing towards solving aspects pertinent to that evolution, permitting them to confront other problems and to respond to other questions in a continuous dialectical development.

In 1970 these ideas had already been broached ("The New Poetry II," Ovum 10, number 4, set/70, Montevideo, Uruguay):

The sign substitutes object and action. Information could not be transmitted if we had to have present objects and circumstances of action with which they deal. This condition, irrevocable for verbal communication and transmission of knowledge, has been converted into an instrument of oppression for the deformation of its essential finality: representation has stopped serving humanity to serve as the motor of a society that is moved, in our case the concentration of productive sources in few hands and the brake on coherent development of these sources by translation of its essence . . . Reality is replaced by its linguistic representation, and the same representation, by conceptual habit, assures its predominance over truth and life. . . . Insofar as language espouses and augments the unknowableness of the external world through the deformation of its essential function in benefit of that fixed force, insofar as false information that is spread, not by translation of its truth value exclusively, but by its immutable relation between the individual and the external world, to the same degree it will assure the order that uses it of its benefit.

These currents, which proceed from lettrism and historical concretism, meet and generate a variety of forms that go from the spatialism promoted by the French poet Pierre Garnier to the multi-dimensional poem, or semantic poetry, to the technological, visiva, novisima, etc., each with a greater or lesser emphasis on verbal signification, with or without images, making the organization of the visual-significative elements in space to prevail or not, etc. One might say that there are as many tendencies as there are visual poets. In Latin America these lines of artistic work appear at the middle of the 1960s and spread, above all, through the circuit of the experimental magazines of the time, in particular, Diagonal Cero and Hexágono 71 in Argentina, La Pata de Palo in Venezuela, Ediciones Mimbre in Chile, and Los Huevos del Plata and Ovum 10 in Uruguay.

In the late 1940s, Max Bill (abstract painter who continued the Dutch Neoplastic tradition, especially that of Mondrian and the School of Ulm toward 1946 in Switzerland) primarily emphasized the expressive unities of visual language: line, geometric form, color, space, etc., making possible together with similar projects in the other arts the birth of concretism. After 1951, with the triumph of Max Bill in the First Biennial of Sao Paulo, Brazil, these tendencies began to spread on our continent. Already in 1953 there appeared the first works of the concrete poets. In 1956, in connection with the National Exhibition of Concrete Art presented in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, concrete poetry gave birth to one of the most influential artistic currents in our time.

Already in those times there were three definite tendencies to be seen. The most known, promoted by the Noigandres group of S o Paulo, brought together by Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Dýcio Pignatari and Ronaldo Azeredo, began by considering the word as an object "in and of itself" in relation to its context, structure, the joint implosion of form and meaning, extension and the temporal which cede duration to space, but conserving its "successive instants" (the logico-discursive schema of western languages that stagger and are only sustained thanks to the use of the syntactic-structural system), creating a specific linguistic sphere that brings together verbal expression and the nonverbal in the concrete poem. Its platform is contained in the "Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry," in the magazine Noigandres, No. IV, 1958 (republished in Theory of Concrete Poetry, 1975). This current, also known as that of "structural rigor," generated the poetic tendency developed by the S o Paulo poet Mario Chamie in his book Lavra Lavra (1962) and signified a turn toward linear verse placing emphasis on proximity and resemblance of words. In the middle of the 1960s semiotic poetry was born, driven by Wlademir Dias-Pino and, later, by Décio Pignatari and Luiz Angelo Pinto, the first forces to achieve a poetics without words, establishing codes of conceptual similarity between visual and verbal elements, that is, extracting the poem from its exclusive sphere in language. Another tendency arising from that generous initial matrix of literary concretism was that restored by Ferreira Gullar, giving place to "neoconcretism," whose basic text is "Non-Object Theory" ("Supplement" of the Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 1960). Here the "non-object" is defined as a "special object in which one attempts to realize a synthesis of sensory and mental experiences." However, this synthesis is only made manifest with the participation of the "spectator." "Without this the work exists only as potentiality, awaiting the human gesture to actualize it." Thus is established one of its major contributions, the active participation of the spectator as co-mover and creator of the work of art. Also, privileging the time in which its occurrence generates the meanings of the "non-object" gives way to the so-called arts of action, the happening (for example, its "Buried Poem"), performances, installations, etc., much earlier than many of the relevant practitioners of these lines of work today. Helio Oiticica, Ligia Clark, and Ligia Pape were outstanding figures of this movement which, moreover, decisively influenced the action of the "New Generation" group in Brazil and the "Objectless Poetry" or Action Art of Clemente Padin (towards 1971). Finally there arose the "spatial" or "mathematical" tendency which, much later, toward 1967, would give place to the Process/Poem movement, thanks to the critical reading of works presented by Wlademir Dias-Pino, A Ave (1954) and Solida (1956). "Process/Poem" dynamizes the monolithic structure of the poem, establishing the creative participation of the spectator, involving not its aesthetic information but its character as object of consumption ("logic of consumption"). This current realizes the space-time isomorphism in a continuum that contributes new information foreign to the proposed artwork, according to the version that it provokes in the spectator. The structure is coded by the process, inaugurating new ways of communication: the interchangeable code against the rigidity of immovable structure. The elements of the process/poem influence one another; in the structure they are monolithically integrated. They search out new languages and the possibilities that potentiate non-verbal signs: "the taking of consciousness before new languages, creating or manipulating them dynamically" (Neide and Alvaro de Sá). Pure separation between poetry (problem linked to speech, of an abstract nature) and poem (object, visual or tactile product linked to languages, of a material nature). The liberation of the poem: "the process poem is anti-literature in the sense in which the true mechanics procures movement without friction or electricity seeks the perfect conductor" (Wlademir Dias-Pino). This movement, which included hundreds and hundreds of artists throughout Brazil, deliberately shut down its activities in 1972 with the manifesto "Tactical Stop-Option." This document, a profound self-criticism, left open possibilities for new developments.

It would be unjust not to cite here the Swiss-Bolivian artist Eugen Gomringer, who since 1953 had been publishing poetry similar to that of the Noigandres group. He published Constellations and the manifesto "From Verse to Constellation" (1955) in Switzerland (together with Décio Pignatari they decided upon the name of the movement). Similarly we should cite the poetic work of the Uruguayan artist Ernesto Cristiani, who published Structures in 1960 (which had been gestating since 1954), a series of concrete poems of a symbolic-metaphysical character and, also, the most balanced work of Mathías Goeritz, a German artist living in Mexico who, apart from his diverse publications, organized the first exhibition of concrete poetry outside of Brazil, held in Mexico in 1966.

Tucumán Arde is, without doubt, the best paradigm of the Latin American aesthetic-political action. Around 1968, a group of Argentine artists got together in Rosario and Buenos Aires to try to find ways toward an art of "subversion," totally upsetting to the acquisition of goods for the most dispossessed segments of Argentine society insofar as they were conforming with the social force of revolution. The participants in Tucumán Arde chose for their purpose the completely miserable situation of the agrarian workers of the northern province of Tucumán, despicably exploited by the sugar refineries. Onganía's fascist government had launched "Operation Tucumán" with the unstated proposal of liquidating the Tucumán agrarian unions which were impeding the influx of transnational capital into the area. Against this backdrop the Tucumán Arde group contrived their artistic tactics, creating a circuit of information of special characteristics. First they called a press conference in which they gave false information about the activities of the group at the same time that artists and technicians had traveled to Tucumán to directly gather testimony about the miserable life which the people of that region suffered. The parasitization of the mass media terminated with a second press conference in which the group clearly expressed its goals: the public denunciation of an obsolete system of production based on exploitation and hunger of its workers. Taking advantage of the innocent air of the First Biennial of Avant-Garde Art, falsely announced, they put up announcements with the word "Tucumán" (to which they later added "Arde" [burns, tr. note], completing the information), and in Rosario and Buenos Aires they first presented all the material gathered in that province: films, photos, documents, recordings, statistics, graphic propaganda of the unions, audio-visuals, etc., with an unusual degree of popular participation. Needless to say, the next day the military closed down the exhibition.

The experience ended with the compilation, analysis, and publication of the documents and theoretical foundations of the new aesthetics: "We want to relocate words, dramatic actions, images to put them in a position where they can play a revolutionary role, be of real use, to become weapons for the struggle." But this desire to "relocate" representational expression, whether linguistic or iconographic, together with its primary function as an intermediary that helps people both to know and to transform the outside world, is in direct opposition to the accepted place of art in systems that transform words and images into forces of suppression that help maintain intolerable living conditions.

Another interesting artistic current is the modification of the customary creative mechanism: from the individual to the collective, the consumer now creates not only actively on the basis of the proposed project, but also he does so collectively instead of individually as a solitary act of consumption would merit, from the passive expectation of concrete and visual poetry by way of creative participation in the "Process/Poem" to the "creative construction" (Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Argentina, 1970) of the "poem-to-be-realized," which implies a profound modification of the created product, of its consumption and place, in this case the streets. From 1971 there is art that has done away with the "object," the "art-work," replaced by action, understanding that art is what a person does in direct relation with his or her environment and not what a person does in relation with a system of representations of this environment. With the object eliminated, art returns to the point it should never have left: art = life. The language of acts is the most eloquent and powerful, not the blind and impulsive act but that projected and imagined for a defined communicative purpose (being language) and looking for a productive and effective transformation of reality (being action). The true artwork is act that transforms. Art is an act transforming reality, not only its representation (Clemente Padin, De la representation a l'action, France: Editions Polaires, 1975). This current was called "Objectless Poetry" by its author (or "action works"), and his most representative works were the performance "The artist is at the service of the community" (1975 and 1981 at the XVI Biennial of Sao Paulo, Brazil) and "For Peace and Art" (1984, Berlin, West Germany).

Conceptual Art emerged in the United States of North America in the mid-1960s. It was a radical reaction to the excessive commercialization of art, above all to a clumsy objectification which would convert every work into a commodity and every artist into a salaried employee in the service of the big corporations predestined for this branch of human activity. Conceptualism's exclusively reactionary character, with too much emphasis on the "idea," would play a decisive role in the following years, underscoring the development of the art of our times.

Art, now directed to the project and ideation more than to the art object in itself, bared its means in a communicative, self-referential practice. Now the means are not at the service of the representation of reality but of the representation of themselves, losing all reference to models or to codes more or less similar to how languages operate. Thus, many and at times opposed modalities of artistic work such as, for example, "Land Art," "Ecological Art," "Body Art," "Arte Povera," "Mail Art, "Situational Art," "Intermedia," "Proposal Art," etc. are conceptual because they put emphasis more on the exhibition of their media than on the results of their application, regardless of whatever their inclination or genre.

In the Southern Cone, Conceptualism was driven forward by the Di Tella Institute, directed by Jorge Romero Brest, and by Jorge Glusberg's Center of Art and Communication in Argentina. Very quickly, however, because of the acute social crisis, it cast off the merely eidetic aspect of its origins in order to join arms with the fight that vast popular sectors were carrying on to improve their fortunes. The social contract, the permanent search for new forms of communication, the formal plan integrally united to the experiences that day by day were generating the Latin American historical process are all salient characteristics of art produced by artists such as Luiz Pazos, Horacio Zabala, Juan Carlos Romero, Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Roberto Duarte, Jorge Gamarra, Eduardo Leonetti, Víctor Grippo, Héctor Puppo, Juan Bercetche, Alfredo Portillos, and many others.

Mail art must be located in Conceptualism, a genre that for its uncommercial disposition and its characteristic of favoring personal communication above all other considerations of technique, currency, or artistic discipline participates in that conceptualist preoccupation against consumerism, the commodification and the merely aestheticizing or formalizing of "object" art. The proposals of Liliana Porter and Luis Camnitzer in the Di Tella Institute of Buenos Aires and the publication in 1969 of the creative mailings of Clemente Padin can be taken as ground-breaking although in fact postal interchanges had already been practiced especially on the level of exchanges of publications and works among E. A. Vigo, Dámaso Ogaz, Guillermo Deisler, Pedro Lyra, and others. Of late, mail art practiced throughout Latin America has tended towards political and social statement: "The Political 'Missing' of Our America," "Nicaragua: Native Country or Dead," "El Salvador: Testimonial Graphics," "Chilean Art in Exile," "Against Apartheid, Save Mandela," "No to the International Monetary Fund," "Change Paraguay," etc.

Finally this movement forward participates in the avant-garde which obviously is not fully aware of itself and which will arise not through an innovative fruition as such but through the ineluctable necessity of any development which does not halt before accomplishing its goals, and through the driving need to reject the cultural order and conformity, which subject people to an unjust system (Che Guevara's "invisible cage"). We preferred to pursue our goals outside the frame of existing cultural institutions since these derive their value from those who control them. The Latin American avant-garde of the last 30 years has irreversibly marked the social mechanisms which underlie art in ways that the entire repressive apparatus, police and all, can do nothing to change.