In May, 1968, at the opening of the "To See and To Value" competition, the artist Eduardo Ruano presented a political work based on the destruction of an image of Kennedy as a simulacrum of the assassinated, causing the police to intervene. In the exhibition "Experience 68" at the Di Tella Institute, the largest official avant-garde event was transformed into the first taking of public and collective position through an open letter sent by the painter Pablo Suareza to the director, Jorge Romero Brest, May 13:
A week ago I wrote you making known the work I was thinking of developing in the Di Tella Institute. Today, only few days later, I already feel myself incapable of doing it because of a moral impossibility. I believe that it was useful, clarifying, and that I would have been able to challenge some of the invited artists, or at least to call into question the concepts upon which their works are based. I no longer believe this is necessary. I ask myself: Is it important to make something within the institution, although you collaborate in its destruction? Things die when others replace them. If we know the end, why insist on going on until the last pirouette? Why not situate ourselves in the limit position? Just yesterday I commented to you, as I recall, the work would go on materially disappearing from the scene and it would go on assuming attitudes and concepts that would open a new epoch and that would have a broader, less corrupted field of action.
It is clear that, to attempt moral situations in works, to utilize the signified as a materiality, gives over the necessity of creating a useful language. A living language and not a code for elites. A weapon has been invented. A recent weapon restores meaning to action. There is no danger in a store display window.
I believe the political and social situation of the country has caused this change. Until this moment I had been able to discuss the action that the Institute has developed, to accept it or judge it. Today I do not accept that the Institute represents cultural centralization, institutionalization, the impossibility of valuing things at the moment in which they coincide with the medium, because the institution only lets in already prestigious products for those that use them, or they have lost urgency or are not discussible given the degree of professionalism which produces them, that is, uses them without running any risk. This centralization impedes the mass diffusion of experiences that artists can bring about. This centralization makes all products feed prestige, not that of their creators, but that of the Institute, which with this slight change justifies as its own the foreign labor and all movement that that implies, without risking a single cent and still benefiting from promotion in periodicals. If I were to create a work in the Institute, this would have a very limited public of people who presume intellectuality by the mere geographic fact of tranquilly stopping in the large hall of the house of art. These people don't have the least preoccupation with these things, so that the legibility of the message that I would have been able to insert into my work would lack all sense. If it occurred to me to write LONG LIVE THE POPULAR REVOLUTION in Castilian, English, or Chinese it would be absolutely the same. All is art. These four walls enclose the secret of transforming all that is within them into art, and art is not dangerous (the fault is ours).
Then? Then, those who want to ornament the Institute work there. I do not promise them that they will go far. The I.T.D.T. has no money to place anything on an international level. Those who want to be understood in some form say it in the street or where they won't be misunderstood. I remind those who want to be well with God and with the devil: "whoever would be saved must be lost." I assure the spectators that what they are shown is already old, second-hand goods. No one can give them fabricated and packaged what is happening now, They are presenting Humanity, the work: to design living forms.
This message is directed at the reduced group of creators, simulators, critics, and promoters, that is, at those who are compromised by their talent, their intelligence, their economic interest, or their prestige, or their stupidity at what is called "avant-garde art." To those who methodically seek to give themselves "the cultural bath" in the Di Tella, to the public in general.
The movement of thought that permanently denies art and permanently affirms history is avant-garde. In this route of simultaneous affirmation and negation, art and life have been confused to the point of becoming inseparable. All the phenomena of social life have been converted into aesthetic material: fashion, industry, and technology, the media of mass communication, etc. "Aesthetic contemplation is finished because aesthetics is dissolved in social life."
The work of art is also finished because life and the earth itself are beginning to be art. For this reason there is everywhere a necessary battle, bloody and beautiful, for the creation of a new world. And the avant-garde must go on affirming history, affirming the just, heroic violence of this fight.
The future of art is not joined to the creation of works, but to the definition of new concepts of life; and the artist is converted into the propagandist of these concepts. "Art" has no importance; life is what counts. It is the history of these coming years. It is the creation of the collective work of art, the most gigantic in history: conquest of the earth, the liberty of man.
DOWN WITH REPRESSION
DOWN WITH CULTURAL POLITICS
WHAT ARE THOSE PEOPLE DOING HERE WHO
HAVE COME FROM THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
IN NEW YORK IF NOT BUYING CONSCIENCES AND
TRYING TO PROSTITUTE ARGENTINE ARTISTS?
LONG LIVE FREEDOM!
This is an aesthetic fact. For those who don't understand things in this way, I grant to them the freedom to call it what they want.
Obviously they try not only to impose their point of view on fashion and taste, with absurd haircuts and arbitrary detentions of artists and youth in general, but also on with the work of these artists. But the artists and intellectuals have not been those principally persecuted: repression is also directed against the workers' and students' movements; once this has been done, they will try to muzzle all free conscience in our country. Argentine artists firmly oppose the establishment of a police state in our country.
THE PARTICIPANTS IN THE "EXPERIENCE 68" EXHIBITION WITHDRAW OUR WORKS AS A SIGN OF PROTEST.
We are here because you have come to hear talk on avant-garde art and aesthetics, and avant-garde art and aesthetics is that which we make. We are here because you have avoided direct contact with our works--as if you were afraid that they would disturb your lives--but you have come here so that they will tell you how to consume the abridged and predigested residue of our work. We are here because the institution--which is this same Romero Brest, in addition to the institution itself which is the conference within these walls, you yourselves, all together--represents the mechanism placed by the bourgeoisie to absorb, falsify, and cause to abort all creative work. To oppose, to demonstrate our attitude of independence and freedom before those who want to transform art into the "sacrificial lamb"--for this we offer to your consciences this simulacrum of transgression, as a collective work of art and also as a point of departure for a new aesthetic (at this moment in the reading the lights in the hall go out). We believe that art is not a peaceful activity nor the decoration of the bourgeois life of anyone. We believe that art implies an active confrontation with reality--active because it aspires to transform it. We believe, in consequence, that art should constantly question the structures of official culture. We declare that the life of Che Guevara and the action of the French students are works of art more important than the greater part of the boludeces hanged in the major museums of the world. We aspire to transform every piece of reality into an artistic work that is shown to the conscience of the world, revealing the intimate contradictions of this class society.
DEATH TO ALL BOURGEOIS INSTITUTIONS
LONG LIVE THE ART OF THE REVOLUTION!
1) its total solidarity with those artists detained for having wanted to express their ideas about the cultural plan;
2) its fundamental adherence to the denunciations of the discriminatory character of the Braque Prize as questioned by the artists;
3) it directs all its opposition against the imperialist, pre-fascist, and anti-popular forms and interests launched into battle by culture. In consequence, FATRAC denounces the means employed by gaullism that try to muffle all expression identified with the interests of the people, and that, on the other hand, expels from its country the works and foreign intellectuals who united themselves with the French people fighting against the regime (the case of our colleagues Julio Le Parc and Hugo Demarco);
4) it fraternally salutes the visual artists of Rosario for the violent rejections which they used to oppose the Braque Prize 68;
5) it calls for immediate freeing of the jailed artists and the withdrawal of police forces from the Museum of Fine Arts.
Buenos Aires,
July 16, 1968
Meanwhile, on the occasion of the anniversary of the death of Commander Ernest (CHE) Guevara in October, different homages were offered: the public fountains and the water that runs in the gutters in Rosario were dyed red; right in the middle of Buenos Aires a giant billboard with Che's image was found. Finally, a campaign on the Tucumán problem was launched, ten artists traveling to the distant province with the goal of making contact with the agricultural workers, sugar workers, union bosses, students, etc. A huge amount of oral and written material was collected, documents of the cruel exploitation of the peasants were filmed, and thousands of photographs were taken of the humble life and denigrating living conditions of the Tucumán people. This first stage finished with a round table at which were discussed the problems caused by the closing of the sugar plantations and other phenomena concerning infra-consumption, the insensitivity of the authorities, etc. Details of these first moments of the "aesthetic-political" action en curso can be read about in the following address:
First stage: Gathering and study of documentary material on the Tucumán problem and the social reality of the province. This stage was completed with a prior fact-finding trip, to measure the essential aspects of the problem and to establish the first contacts.
Second stage: a) Confrontation and verification of the Tucumán reality, for which the artists traveled to Tucumán accompanied by a technical team and journalists, where inquests, interviews, reports, recordings, filmings, etc. were done in order to use them in the denunciation-exhibition which will give evidence of the contradiction of the contents of official information and the reality of fact, as part of the denunciation-operation. b) In agreement with the work plan of the artists, on their arrival in Tucumán a press conference was held in the Museum of Fine Arts with the consent of its director, Mrs. Maria Eugenia Aybar, at which were brought together representatives of the media, local artists, and state functionaries in charge of culture in the province. This procedure has as its goal to uncover the motives of political denunciation of the work while facilitating the task of the artists and avoiding repression. The activity of the same was communicated through false information to all the media and the authorities of the Tucumán capital, presenting a camouflaged version of the work. To establish evidence in the true sense of the word and to achieve the implicit political repercussion of its ideological formulation, a second press conference was held on their last day in the city, to which representatives of officialdom were invited. There they violently denounced in order to unmask the profound contradictions caused by an economic-political system based on hunger and unemployment and the creation of a false and gratuitous cultural superstructure.
Third stage: The denunciation-exhibition was held in collaboration with the Argentine General Confederation of Labor, in the respective regions of Rosario (November 3-9) and in central Buenos Aires. All the documentary material gathered in Tucumán was used in a montage of audio-visual media, including oral information to the public on the part of the artists, intellectuals, and specialists who participated in the investigation.
Fourth stage: The fourth and last stage consisted of the closing of the information circuit on the Tucumán problem and comprised a) gathering and analysis of the documentation; b) publication of the results of the analysis; c) publication of bibliographic and audio-visual materials; and d) founding of a new aesthetic and evaluation.
Granted that an important aspect of the work was realized by means of direct publicity, in accord with a plan elaborated in three stages:
a) one week before the artists traveled to Tucumán, they put up announcements on official billboards and on walls of Rosario and Santa Fe, with the sole word "Tucumán" (to do this they took out permits from the municipalities of both cities). Slides with the same words were projected at the same time in the all-night functions of independent filmmaker groups. The word "Tucumán" was printed in the entrances to these same places. In this way a real expectation was created.
b) When they artists, technicians, and intellectuals for Tucumán left, the local group initiated a clandestine "Tucumán Arde" campaign. Façades and mud walls of Rosario were painted, and thousands of posters were put up in public places with the inscription "Tucumán Arde." Also flyers were painted and distributed during this week at commercial and art cinemas where slides with the same legend were projected, imprinting themselves as well on the entrances.
c) Days before the exhibition in Rosario was opened, announcements also were put upon officially authorized billboards with the following text: "First Biennial of Avant-Garde Art." An announcement was prepared for Buenos Aires with another text, and it was put up in the streets adjacent to the union halls. The first announcement (stage a), the posters (stage b), and the second announcement (stage c) were exhibited next to the C.G.T. hall, Rosario, closing off the informational circuit.
Thus far we have offered a summary of the extensive account of the material that was finally mounted in the Tucumán Arde exhibition open in the C.G.T. Hall in Rosario, and later in same organization's main hall in Buenos Aires, with Raimundo Ongaro, Secretary General, in charge of the presentation. The following day they received a government ultimatum shutting down the exhibition on threat of police intervention. At the same time the group of participating artists made public the following declaration:
The regime's violence is cruel and clear when it is directed against the working class. It is subtler when it is directed at artists and intellectuals. On the one hand repression manifests itself in the censorship of books and films, on the other hand in the closing of exhibitions and theaters, and surrounding everything, more insidious even, permanent repression. It is necessary to look into the interior of the form that art currently comprises: an article of elegant consumption for a certain class. Artists can make themselves illusions creating apparently violent works: they will be received with indifference and even with pleasure. They will be sold and bought; their virulence will be another additive to the market of buying and selling of prestige value. Why can the system appropriate and absorb works of art, even the most audacious and innovative? It can do this because these works are inscribed in the cultural frame of a society that works in such a manner that the only messages that get to the people are those that cement their oppression (principally by radio, television, newspapers, and magazines). It can do this because artists live isolated from the revolutionary fight in our country. Their works do not say what it is necessary to say; they don't find the means appropriate to do so and do not direct themselves at those who need our message. What shall we artists do not to go on being servants of the bourgeoisie? In the contact and participation together with the most combative and honorable activists, putting our creative militance and our militant creativity at the service of the people, at the service of the organization of the people for the struggle. We artists must contribute to the creation of a true network of information and communication from the grassroots that opposes the broadcast network of the system. In this process we will discover and decide for the most efficient means: the clandestine film, billboards, flyers, pamphlets, records and recorded tapes, songs and countersigns, the theater of agitation, new forms of action and propaganda. These will be the works that the regime will not be able to repress because they will stem from the people. These will be the beautiful and useful works. They will show the true enemy; they will inspire the people with hatred and energy for the struggle. We artists will no longer place our talent at the service of our enemies. It will be said that what we propose is not art. But what is art? The forms investigated by pure experimentation? Or better the forms that are called corrosive but that in reality satisfy the bourgeoisie that consumes them? Is art perhaps the words in their books in libraries? Dramatic actions and scenes on film in the cinemas and theaters? Images in paintings in art galleries? All quiet, all in order, in a bourgeois, conformist system. All useless.
We want to restore words, dramatic actions, images to the places where they can fulfill a revolutionary role, where they are useful, where they can be converted into weapons for the struggle. Art is all that mobilizes and agitates. Art radically denies this way of life and says: let's do something to change it.
The recognition of this new conception lead a group of artists to postulate aesthetic creation as a collective and violent action, destroying the bourgeois myth of the individuality of the artist and of passive creation traditionally attributed to art. Aggression became the form of the new art. To violate was to possess and to destroy the old forms of a sedentary art based on private property and the personal pleasure of the unique work. Now violence was creative action with new contents: destroy the system of official culture, opposing to it a subversive culture that integrates the modifying process, creating a truly revolutionary art. Revolutionary art was born of a coming to consciousness of present reality of the artist as an individual within the political and social context. Revolutionary art proposed the artistic fact as nucleus where all the elements that make up human reality are integrated and unified: economic, social, political--an integration of the contributions of the distinct disciplines, eliminating the separation between artists, intellectuals, and technicians. A unifying of all of them was directed at modifying the totality of the social structure, that is, a total art.
Revolutionary art acted on reality through a process of capturing the elements that make it up, through a lucid ideological conception based on the principles of materialist rationality. Revolutionary art, in this way, was presented as a partial form of reality that was integrated within the total reality, destroying the idealist separation between the work and the world, to the degree that it fulfilled a true transformation of social structures, that is, a transforming art. Revolutionary art was the manifestation of those political contents that fight to destroy the decrepit cultural and aesthetic schemes of bourgeois society, integrating them with the revolutionary forces that fought the forms of economic dependence and class oppression; thus, it was a social art.
The work done by the Group of Avant-Garde Artists was the continuation of a series of acts of aggression directed at the institutions and representatives of bourgeois culture, such as, for example, the non-participation in and boycott of the Braque Prize instituted by the Cultural Service of the French embassy, which culminated with the detention of various artists who had resorted to violence in their rejection. The collective work was based on the then current Argentine situation, set in one of the poorest provinces, Tucumán, which had been subjected to a long tradition of underdevelopment and economic oppression. The Argentine government, engaged in an ugly colonizing politics, had proceeded to the closing of the majority of the Tucumán sugar mills, vital economic resource of the province, spreading hunger and unemployment with all the social consequences which these carry.
A "Tucumán Operative" elaborated by government economists tried to mask over this naked aggression against the working class with a false economic development based on the creation of new and hypothetic industries financed by North American capital. The truth that was hidden behind this operative was the following: they tried to destroy a real and explosive unionism found in the Argentine northwest by means of the dissolution of the workers' groups, atomized in tiny industrial exploitations and obliged to emigrate to other zones in search of poorly paid, unstable, temporary work. One of the grave consequences that this brought was the dissolution of the workers' nuclear families, delivered over to the unexpected and to hazard in order to be able to subsist. The political economy guided by the provincial Tucumán government had the character of a pilot experience, by which is meant it verified the degree of the working population's resistance so that, subsequent to a neutralization of the union opposition, the model could be taken to other provinces that had similar economic and social characteristics.
This "Tucumán Operative" was reinforced by "operation silence," organized by government institutions to confuse, distort, and silence the serious Tucumán situation before which the so-called "free press" had collapsed for reasons of common class interest. Assuming their responsibility as artists committed to the social reality that included them, the avant-garde artists responded to this "operation silence" with the creation of TUCUMAN ARDE.
The work consisted of the creation of an over-information circuit to underscore the cunning deformation that the facts in Tucumán suffered through the mass media controlled by official power and the bourgeois class. The mass media are powerful mediating elements, susceptible of being charged with diverse contents; the positive influence that these media produce in society depends on the reality and truthfulness of their contents. Information on Tucumán facts divulged by the government and the official media tended to cover over in silence the serious social problem unleashed by the closing of the mills and to give a false image of economic recuperation of the province, which the real facts scandalously revealed. To recover these facts and place in evidence the fallacious contradiction of the government and of the class that sustained it, the avant-garde artists traveled to Tucumán, accompanied by technicians and specialists, and proceeded to a verification of the social reality that the province was experiencing.
The position adopted by the avant-garde artists required them not to incorporate their works into the official institutions of bourgeois culture, and established the necessity of transferring them into another context; this exhibition was then put on in the Argentine C.G.T., as this was the entity that constellated the class that was in the vanguard of a struggle whose final objectives were shared by the authors of this work.
The following participated in the work: Ma. Elvira de Arechaval, Beatriz Balbá, Graciela Borthwick, Aldo Bertollotti, Graciela Garnevale, Jorge Cohen, Rodolfo Elizalde, Noemí Escandell, Eduardo Favario, Leén Ferrari, Emilio Ghilioni, Edmundo Giura, Ma. Teresa Gramuglio, Martha Greiner, Roberto Jacoby, José Ma. Lavarello, Sara Lopez Dupuy, Rubén Naranjo, David de Nully Braun, Raul Pérez Cantén, Oscar Pidustwa, Estela Pomerantz, Norberto Puzzulo, Juan Pablo Renzi, Jaime Rippa, Nicolás Rosa, Carlos Schork, Nora de Schork, Domingo J. A. Sapia, Roberto Zara.
In general these experiences are not repeatable; neither are the historical circumstances that caused them, although not mechanically so. Nevertheless, there are common elements to this stage of historic development. First, artists are not entelechies but material beings subject to whatever vicissitudes of social life, and their works are addressed to a certain sector of society that they make up or which they have chosen to serve (marginalization, the magic place in which the artist is stripped of all earthly responsibility, is utopian and ideologically meaningful). Second, the work of art, apart from being itself a social product of communication, is also a help to this same production and is offered as revolutionary insofar as it adequately expresses (that is, in accord with the advances achieved by society at this moment) the social forces that fight for a radical change in the social-economic structures. Conversely the art work may be reactionary, insofar as it reaffirms or reproduces the ideological sophistries of those sectors that want to eternalize the social structure that benefits them.
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Copyright © 1997 by Clemente Padin.
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