Buenos Aires
Herald. Sunday, October 6, 2002
Art and politics in the 1960s
By Alina Tortosa
For the Herald
Arte y política en los 60 (Art and politic in the 60s), the exhibition
at Salas Nacionales, curated by Alberto Giudice and funded by the Banco
Ciudad Foundation, is a historical exhibition of the visual arts of the 1960s
in Argentina, as well as an academic feat due to the research work that went
into putting this show together. It is also a lucid reminder that it is
impossible, in the long run, to deny the realities we do not approve of, or to
ignore them as non relevant circumstances.
Above all, it is a heart wrenching vision into a past that clearly
announced the painful realities of the national and international present.
To some, memories of the noisy and boisterous exhibitions introducing
the new contemporary visual art languages at the Di Tella Institute -technical
innovations as well as performances and installations- and the expressionist
figuration of artists who denied abstraction in painting as a decadent
bourgeois taste, are synonymous of a time when art in Argentina was actually
fun and seemed to take off into a world sphere. To others, it was the time when
the young avant-garde artists, after successfully moving away from traditional
techniques into conceptual work, felt that an art expression that was finally
meant as an exhibition or a cultural performance per se was not enough, and
took it upon themselves to move away from the show room into the street and
into life.
The show covers “a long decade”, as it reads in the catalogue, from
1958 to 1972. Collages by Kenneth Kemble from 1958 and by Antonio Berni from
1962 represent urban material misery that in the case of Berni would develop
into the Juanito Laguna and Ramona series. There was a time when one could
ignore the derelict environments depicted in Berni´s work or the sordid
implications of the relationship between Ramona and her clients by not paying
attention, by pretending one did not know or one did not see. Today one cannot
look away because Juanito Laguna is not conveniently hidden in a villa
miseria or shanty town, we find him every evening looking into our own
litter at our doorstep. As to Ramona, one can understand that she was trying to
make a living beyond a low paid job, but what can one say of women in highly
paid political jobs who wanted so much more and stopped at nothing in their
greediness. Is it necessary to name names? One has seen them in action and in
the glossy pages of magazines in their expensive apparels as if the world
belonged to them.
Under the name of Espartaco (Spartacus), after the Roman enslaved
labourer (d. 71 B.C.) and rebel leader, Ricardo Carpani, Mario Mollari and Juan
Manuel Sánchez in 1957, and Juana Elena Diz, Pascual Di Bianco, Esperilio Bute
and Carlos Sessano in 1958, joined forces to work on art within the labour
movement. They aimed at painting murals,
following the first attempts by Spilimbergo, Berni and Castagnino who had
founded Taller de Arte Mural (Mural Art Workshop) after the visit of Siqueiros
–the Mexican muralist artist- to Buenos Aires in the 1930s. The paintings and
drawings by Carpani and Di Bianco are strong figurative compositions. The rock
solid rounded figures, of men mostly, are robotic in character. They are strong
and redundant, imperative in their movement forward, or in their barricade
attitudes. Or lost in dark despair as huge hands and eyes spread out on the
support and dark open mouths cry out as in Carpani’s poster on the Cordobazo. Julia Elena Diz characters are softer, rural
in nature rather than urban, with strong native features. In Mario Mollari’s Campesino
(Peasant) one may read the anguish and the deadly fatigue in the stretched
muscles of the body and in his distorted features.
Ernesto Deira, Rómulo Macció, Luis Felipe Noé and Jorge de la Vega
showed for the first time as La Neo Figuración in 1961, opening
up a venue of expressionist figurative work, together with Antonio Seguí and Juan
Carlos Castagnino, followed by Carlos Alonso, Carlos Gorriarena, Juan Carlos
Distéfano, Lea Lublin and others. Their
work was visceral and political, immersed in feeling and neurosis, critical of
a prudish society that covered up its innate violence with apparent discipline
and/or circumspect politeness.
Pop art by Marta Minujín, art and mail art by Edgardo Vigo, premonitory
conceptual pieces by Horacio Zabala, political denunciation through drawings
and objects by León Ferrari are some of the names we know and remember. But
there are other names and work we do not know or we have forgotten. To bring
these artists and their pieces, writings and actions into the limelight is also
a major achievement of this show.
Tucumán Arde (Tucumán on fire), Violencia (Violence), Insurrección
(Insurrection), Vietnam, The Cuban Revolution and the murder of the Che
Guevara, the Kennedy murders, May ’68, Nelson Rockefeller’s ill fated visit to
Latin America in 1969, are in the show: a vital, bleeding, political fresco
that announces guerrilla war fare, government repression, the Gulf War, Irak,
the Amia, the rapacious sordid impulses of Menem and his entourage and of the
Bushes, father and son, the Twin Towers, Afghanistan and hunger and desolation
in Argentina.
It is an exhibition rich in images and
ideas, in social and political background.
One is moved, amazed and disturbed by the coherence and insight of those
artists who understood what was happening and the future implications of what
was happening long before others could even admit that something was wrong. One
cannot but admire, celebrate and commune with their thoughts and their deeds,
their courage and their commitment. One knows what it has cost some of them, in
some cases their lives, in others the lives of their children. And yet they
worked on, at home and in exile, acknowledged or ignored. Their artwork has
today a sacramental value; it is the outward sign of inward grace, as read the
Old Catholic catechism.
An artist, a writer, an actor is there to do what nobody has asked him
or her to do because he or she have this urge, this visceral and psychological
need to do so. This vocation, this drive may be painful, difficult to
understand at times by the very people who undergo it, but it is there. It is a
gift not to be thrown away, to be explored and developed against all odds. And
this is what the artists whose work is on show at the Palais de Glace have done.
Accepted their gifts and worked them out to understand and explain what
was happening in their own country and in the world in their own time.
An excellent catalogue was published for this exhibition that reads as
modern History with capital H.
(Arte y política en los ’60, Salas
Nacionales de Exposición, Palais de Glace, Posadas 1725. Until October
27).
