In the early stages avant-garde suggested political and revolutionary activity, but already by the middle of the 19th century it was used to refer to artistic activity. Also the drive of distinct social sectors to appropriate the new concept began to be evident, given that whoever was "in the vanguard" was in the situation of imposing his "ideas" on the others. This interest was due, above all, to the sense that the word "vanguard" took insofar as "showing directions" or "marking ways." Insofar as one sector took up a vanguard phenomenon it was affirming its position of social leader in force in society. Investing itself in the avant-garde strengthened its hegemony as a social sector, and it offered its "way" as an option, at the same time that it affirmed its ability to generate values. Alvaro de Sá, in Vanguarda: Produto de Comunicaça;ao (Ed. Vozes, 1977), says:

Without a precise meaning (vanguard) denoted the most diverse phenomena that occurred in the heart of society, these phenomena subordinated to dominant economic, social, and ideological pressures. The denotative fluctuation was manipulated by the established classes for their own benefit, in order to carefully maintain the definition of the vanguard phenomenon in a nebulous and imprecise terrain. Thus simultaneously distinct and even antagonistic tendencies were connoted as avant-garde: Russian Futurism and Italian Futurism (the first of socialist tendency and the second fascist); Constructivism and Dadaism; the geometric abstraction of Mondrian and the Surrealism of Breton; the cinema of Eisenstein/Pudovkin and the cinema of King Vidor; ultimately, whether progressive or retrograde they were labeled as avant-garde always as they manifested themselves within contemporaneity.

The same confusion is appreciable when diverse fields of human activity are mixed; fashion and automobile design, or family detergents, or technical tendencies in the treatment of heart disease are avant-garde. Even merchandise is transformed, not to improve it but to give it the value that "the new is better." The same with artistic tendencies considered avant-garde even when their informational possibilities have been exhausted. Examples abound: the objective is to banalize the term in order to dodge its precise and univocal connotation permitting the other social faction to gain some ideological advantage such that if it is not possible to be "up to date" or avant-garde, generating new conquests in whatever area, at least it is possible to appear so, valorizing the capacity of the mass media broadcasting information.

The importance of being the "first" goes so far that it even infiltrates unforeseeable zones of human activity. Thus, for example, the fight for scientific advance or for the conquest of the cosmos takes on a notorious ideological character: it no longer has to do with the undeniable scientific achievement of arriving on the Moon but of being the first to do so.

In the area of communication, all information that augments our knowledge in this specific sphere is avant-garde, that is, all that which increases our understanding in the fields of theory and human practice. Theory and practice bring together a conjunction of concepts and techniques of social attitudes and news that, in their turn, constitute the global repertory of all humanity in a given moment in its history. The social repertory or state of knowledge of a given society (or group, individual, etc.) is spoken of in degrees. The interaction among the distinct levels is dialectical and can be worked as much in a positive sense--when information augments the repertory--as in a negative sense when a loss of information occurs. In its turn the interaction among the repertories is reciprocal, influencing itself permanently: for example, the psychic automatism methodically used by the Surrealists is information emerging in the area of psychoanalysis; in turn Surrealist visual expression offers many elements of judgment to possible psychological diagnosis.

Each new piece of information created by the avant-garde obliges us to totally or partially rethink already existing knowledge and, in many cases, to rectify it. This is what happened with Einstein's theory of relativity in relation to classical physics, and also with the discoveries of Karl Marx and �3k�3
 �Friedrich Engels in relation to the sciences and to philosophy. At times, the new information corroborates already given knowledge. In both cases, each contribution brings us closer and closer to the truth in the specific sectors in which they emerge. In their turn, they produce new information, in an endless dialectical unfolding.

Thus there is a simple, inevitable mechanism which enables us to consider non-productive artistic activity as avant-garde (by the fact of opposing itself to the ruling relations of production in this system) or, vice versa, productive activity (in this system) can be considered as production generated in order to preserve it. There are plenty of examples from the recent past: we have only to remember the "degenerate art" of German Nazism in which the ideological function of art (or communication) is decreed by the State, and all that does not favor hegemony of its ideas is unproductive, that is to say, "degenerate" and as such prohibited.

Cultural production, on reflecting the class relations that give it its origin, goes on ideologically reproducing this reality and not another. Without doubt, transposing a particular vanguard to another social sphere, with different socio-economic conditions, will cause it to gain its own elements in this sphere. Thus it is understandable that a formal movement such as was Dadaism in its beginnings in Zurich would become of a decidedly political character in another setting such as happened in Berlin, or that from Italian Futurism with its fascist leanings Russian Futurism would emerge in the service of the socialist revolution.

A recent and paradigmatic example shows that any analysis can only be valid when inserted in a given social practice. Such is the case with conceptualism, an artistic current born in the overdeveloped western countries in the middle of the 1960s and that was spread throughout the world. The essential characteristic of conceptualism, that is to say, the new information that it proposed, was to leave to the side the emphasis on how reality was represented in works of art, in order to stress the means utilized in this representation, above all, the interest in the actuating mechanisms of aesthetic communication through which it provoked the art work.

More important than the work of art was its ideation, including the confrontation of the different languages which expressed it. Thus, one of its greatest proponents, Joseph Kosuth, exhibited objects together with their representations, whether already photographic or linguistic. To him is owed the most precise definition of Conceptualism: "Art is the definition of art," art as the idea of itself, the intent to rip the object from art availing itself of metalanguages (to treat languages that "comment or represent others"). Not a form of knowledge of reality (with the will to transform it) but a grammatical knowledge (art is art). Thus a metalanguage operates that comments on or describes representation of the object, with which the possibilities of generating information about itself are almost null. For example, the work of Kosuth "Clear, Square, Glass, Leaning" exhibits precisely that which �3��3
 �these words signify: glass, clear, square, and inclined (against the wall). Also we might cite similar works that refer to obvious and intrinsic properties of the object, such as, for example, to write "white" with white paint on a white sheet, or the word "stone" on a stone, etc., which are graphic enough of this attitude.

Nevertheless, when conceptualism arrived in our countries promoted by the Di Tella Institute and the Center of Art and Communication of Buenos Aires, Argentina, it soon took on the particularities of our social sphere, characterized by the acute class struggle that had been assuming dramatic forms. Thus, for example, this was shown in the exhibition that was organized by the Cayc in the Roberto Arlt Plaza in Buenos Aires in 1972, where various works made concrete conceptualist proposals not as mere insubstantial repetition of information but as metalanguage applied to reveal the actuating mechanisms in the structure of the work, demystifying its functioning, destroying the "pathos," the false air of mystery and the "aura" with which it is surrounded.

This conceptualist recourse, which could avail itself of whatever artistic technique or discipline, acquired an evident informational function, refusing to be used only to sum up qualities intrinsic to the object or real phenomenon not recapitulating the banalization of knowledge or information about facts and superficial qualities impeding the really vital neutralization of information, that which would advance humanity to better levels of life. Within the works presented in this exhibition we recall "Subterranean Reality" by Luis Pazos, Leonetti and Duarte Laferr&ere, which taking advantage of some existing holes in the Plaza drew 16 white crosses in memory of the political prisoners gunned down in the Trelew jail, or the funeral ribbon with which Horacio Zabala draped the district in homage to the victims of Argentine military repression. This metalanguage creatively applied shows the expressive medium employed in the work in terms of demystification, that is to say, not of reproducing the myth of the "unique and genius" work before which it is necessary to go into ecstasies but that which expresses information to be discovered.

Also we should locate mail art in this category, a modality that for its non-commercial tendency and for its characteristic of privileging personal communication over any considerations of technique, fashion, style, or artistic discipline employed, participates in that conceptualist preoccupation against consumerism, mercantilism, or aestheticism, themselves, in general, concretized in the art of the object and its deformation, artistic merchandise. The proposals of Liliana Porter and Luis Camnitzer in the Di Tella Institute and the publication of creative stamps by Clemente Padin in the magazine Ovum 10 in 1969 can be considered as inaugural, although in fact they had already been practicing since some time earlier, through exchange of publications and works among those cited and Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Dámaso Ogaz, Guillermo Deisler, Pedro Lyra, and others. The new information that conceptualism and �3��3
 �mail art contributed to the aesthetic-social repertory of our countries, in contact with our peculiar reality, was modified substantially and even generated new information that, in turn, reverted to the original matrix, underwriting the continuous and mutually influencing process among the vanguards.