Sabotage Art 9781350987906, 9780857727084

Table of contents :
Cover
Author biography
Endorsement
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Images
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I Material Sabotage: Ensnaring, Burning, Trespassing
1 Entrap, Engulf, Overwhelm: From Existentialism to Counterculture in the Work of Marta Minujín
2 Shaman, Thespian, Saboteur: Marcos Kurtycz and the Ritual Poetics of Institutional Profanation
3 Pictorial Eviscerations, Emblems and Self-Immolation in Mexico: Dissensus in the Work of Enrique Guzmán and Nahum B. Zenil
4 Bureaucratic Sabotage: Knocking at the Door of the ‘Big Monster’
Part II Cannons and Canons: Explosive vs. Implosive Postures
5 Cogs and Clogs: Sabotage as Noise in Post-1960s Chilean and Argentine Art and Art History
6 Impossible Objects: Gabriel Orozco’s Empty Shoe Box and Yielding Stone
7 El Museo de la Calle: Art, Economy and the Paradoxes of Bartering
8 Stay at Your Own Risk: Disturbing Ideas of Community in Two Projects by Elkin Calderón
9 ‘The Space of Appearance’: Performativity and Aesthetics in the Politicization of Mexico’s Public Sphere
Afterword
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Sophie Halart and Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra are both specialists in modern and contemporary Latin American art, visual culture, and literature. Sophie Halart a PhD completing in Art History College Halart holds is currently herfrom PhD University on contemporary London. She is Assistant Professor of Art History at Pontificia women artists in the Southern Cone at University College London. Universidad de Chile. She has beenCatólica a graduate teaching assistant at University College London, and a visiting teaching fellow at the Universidad Alberto Mara Polgovsky Hurtado, SantiagoEzcurra de Chile.is a Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Touched Bodies: The Performative in Latin American Mara PolgovskyTurn Ezcurra received her Art. PhD in Latin American Cultural Studies from the University of Cambridge and currently serves as fellow in Queens’ College, Cambridge, where she also teaches courses on Latin American literature and visual culture.

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‘Nelly Richard once commented on the difficulty of reading the politics of Latin American contemporary art abroad without reducing the works to a testimonial function or, alternatively, stripping them of their incisive concreteness. This wonderful collection speaks to the emergence of a critical discourse on Latin American art that manages to hold form and politics not just in the balance but to read one through the other: a truly groundbreaking achievement.’ Jens Andermann, Professor of Latin American Studies, University of Zurich ‘Sabotage Art: Politics and Iconoclasm in Contemporary Latin America provides a welcome shift of emphasis amidst perennial redefinitions of “political art” in Latin America. Framing sabotage as a “positional choice with regard to the institution” allows Halart, Polgovsky Ezcurra and their collaborators to critically interrogate the longstanding association of Latin American art with struggle or “adversity” for both historical case studies and the market delirium over “contemporary art”. This book makes for an excellent teaching resource on overlooked artists such as Paulo Bruscky, Enrique Guzmán, Marcos Kurtycz, and Edgardo Antonio Vigo, offers fresh examinations of canonized avant-gardes in Argentina and Chile, and considers recent participatory projects in Bogotá and Mexico City. Yet it is most valuable in the sum total of its discrete chapters, which together demonstrate a range of new methods for a field now hitting its stride.’ Daniel Quiles, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

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Politics and iconoclasm in contemporary Latin america Edited by

sophiE halart and mara Polgovsky Ezcurra

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published by I.B. Tauris in Great Britain 2016 This paperback edition first published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts 2022 Selection, editorial matter and Introduction © Sophie Halart and Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra 2022 Afterword © Sophie Halart and Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra 2022 Copyright Individual Chapters © 2022 Natasha Adamou, Zanna Gilbert, Robin Adele Greeley, Olga Fernández López, Sophie Halart, Carla Macchiavello, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, Erica Segre and Catherine Spencer Sophie Halart and Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xvii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Simon Levy Associates Cover image © León Ferrari, Licuadora, 2000. Courtesy of Augusto and León Ferrari Foundation All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7845-3225-3 PB: 978-1-3502-7661-1 ePDF: 978-0-8577-2708-4 eBook: 978-0-8577-2913-2 Typeset by Out of House To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents

List of Images Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction

vii xiii xvii 1

Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra and Sophie Halart Part i Material Sabotage: Ensnaring, Burning, Trespassing

1

Entrap, Engulf, Overwhelm: From Existentialism to Counterculture in the Work of Marta Minujín

13

Catherine Spencer 2

Shaman, Thespian, Saboteur: Marcos Kurtycz and the Ritual Poetics of Institutional Profanation

35

Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra 3

Pictorial Eviscerations, Emblems and Self-Immolation in Mexico: Dissensus in the Work of Enrique Guzmán and Nahum B. Zenil

58

Erica Segre 4

Bureaucratic Sabotage: Knocking at the Door of the ‘Big Monster’

84

Zanna Gilbert

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Contents Part ii Cannons and Canons: Explosive vs. Implosive Postures

5

Cogs and Clogs: Sabotage as Noise in Post-1960s Chilean and Argentine Art and Art History

107

Sophie Halart 6

Impossible Objects: Gabriel Orozco’s Empty Shoe Box and Yielding Stone

130

Natasha Adamou 7

El Museo de la Calle: Art, Economy and the Paradoxes of Bartering

151

Olga Fernández López 8

Stay at Your Own Risk: Disturbing Ideas of Community in Two Projects by Elkin Calderón

168

Carla Macchiavello 9

‘The Space of Appearance’: Performativity and Aesthetics in the Politicization of Mexico’s Public Sphere

188

Robin Adele Greeley Afterword Notes Index

214 220 236

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List of Images 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Marta Minujín inside one of her Colchones for the exhibition El hombre antes del hombre, Galería Florida, Buenos Aires, 1962. Mattress material, wood and assemblage. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Marta Minujín.

15

Marta Minujín inside one of her Colchones at her Rue Delambre studio, Paris, c. 1963. Mattress material and wood. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Marta Minujín.

16

Marta Minujín, La destrucción, happening at the Impasse Ronsin, Paris, June 1963. Photo: Shunk-Kender. Courtesy of Marta Minujín and the J. Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. (2014.R.20) Gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender.

22

Marta Minujín with a pair of unidentified Colchones. Photographer unknown, as published in Fanny Polimeni, ‘La Muchacha del Colchón’ in the magazine Para Ti, Buenos Aires, 22 December 1964. Courtesy of Marta Minujín.

25

Marta Minujín, Importación-exportación, July 1968. Installation and environment at the Centro de Artes Visuales, Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Marta Minujín and Archivos Universidad Di Tella.

27

Marta Minujín, scheme for Espi-art, installation at the Galería Birger, Buenos Aires, July 1977. Courtesy of Marta Minujín.

31

Marcos Kurtycz, Potlatch, 1979. Photograph of performance at the Forum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City intervened by the artist in 1984. Author unknown. Courtesy of Marcos Kurtycz Archive. vii

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38

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List of Images

8 Marcos Kurtycz with axe, March 1985. Photo by Michael Schnorr. Courtesy of Marcos Kurtycz Archive.

39

9 Marcos Kurtycz, Potlatch, November 1979. Photo: author unknown. Courtesy of Marcos Kurtycz Archive.

40

10 Marcos Kurtycz, Potlatch, November 1979. Photo: author unknown. Courtesy of Marcos Kurtycz Archive.

41

11 Envelope of a letter bomb sent by Marcos Kurtycz to sculptor Helen Escobedo when serving as Director of Mexico’s Museum of Modern Art (MAM) (c. 1982–83). Courtesy of the Estate of Helen Escobedo.

49

12 Letter bomb sent by Marcos Kurtycz to sculptor Helen Escobedo when serving as Director of Mexico’s Museum of Modern Art (MAM) (c. 1982–83). Courtesy of the Estate of Helen Escobedo.

50

13 Marcos Kurtycz, leaflet for Artefacto Kurtycz (1982). Courtesy of Marcos Kurtycz Archive.

51

14 Enrique Guzmán, Sonido de una mano aplaudiendo or marmota herida/Sound of a Hand Clapping or Wounded Marmot, 1973. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Galería Arvil.

64

15 Enrique Guzmán, La patria/Motherland, 1977. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Galería Arvil.

67

16 Enrique Guzmán, ¡Oh Santa Bandera!/Oh Holy Flag!, 1977. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Galería Arvil.

73

17 Nahum B. Zenil, Tiro de dardos/Game of Darts, 1994. Oil on wood. Courtesy of the artist.

74

18 Nahum B. Zenil, ¡Oh Santa Bandera! (a Enrique Guzmán)/Oh Holy Flag! (to Enrique Guzmán), 1996. Mixed media on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

77

19 Ulises Carrión, Mail Art and the Big Monster, 1977. Poster: Private Collection. Courtesy of Sucesión U. Carrión.

88

20 Felipe Ehrenberg, Obra secretamente titulada Arriba y Adelante…y si no pues también/Work Secretly titled Upwards and Onwards...Whether You Like It or Not, 1970. 200 postcards. Courtesy of Felipe Ehrenberg.

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List of Images

21 Paulo Bruscky, Ação Postal – Post Ação, 1975. Photographic register of performance. Courtesy of Paulo Bruscky.

94

22 Paulo Bruscky, Ação Postal – Post Ação, 1975. Photographic register of performance. Courtesy of Paulo Bruscky (detail).

95

23 Edgardo Antonio Vigo, La llave/abrelatas que viajó (junto a 200) La Plata/Buenos Aires/La Plata, el 7 enero ’71 / The Key/Can Opener that Travelled (with 200 others) La Plata/Buenos Aires/La Plata, on 7 January ’71. Courtesy of Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo and MoMA.

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24 Edgardo Antonio Vigo, La llave/abrelatas que viajó (junto a 200) La Plata/Buenos Aires/La Plata, el 7 enero ’71 / The Key/Can Opener that Travelled (with 200 others) La Plata/Buenos Aires/ La Plata, on 7 January ’71. (detail). Courtesy of Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo and MoMA.

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25 Press coverage of Eduardo Costa, Raúl Escari and Roberto Jacoby’s ‘anti-happening’, Participación total o Happening para un jabalí difunto in the newspaper El Mundo (Buenos Aires), 21 August 1966. Courtesy of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

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26 CADA, Inversión de Escena: Acción de arte CADA/Santiago de Chile, 1979. Photographic register of performance. Photo credit: CADA.

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27 CADA, Inversión de Escena: Acción de arte CADA/Santiago de Chile, 1979. Photographic register of performance. Photo credit: CADA.

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28 CADA, Viuda: Prensa Acción CADA/Chile, 1985. Newspaper clip. Photo credit: Paz Errázuriz.

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29 Artist Collective, Tucumán Arde, 1968. Performance.

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30 CADA, NO+: Acción de arte CADA/Santiago de Chile, 1983. Photographic register of performance. Photo credit: Jorge Brantmayer.

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31 Óscar Navarro, No más porque somos más. Día internacional de la mujer, Santiago/No More because We are More. International Women’s Day, Santiago. 1986. Photographic print. Courtesy of Óscar Navarro.

123

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List of Images

32 Political flyer for the 1988 plebiscite in Chile. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

123

33 Gabriel Orozco, Empty Shoe Box, 1993. Silver dye bleach print. 40.6 x 50.8 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

131

34 Gabriel Orozco, Yielding Stone, 1992. Plasticine. Approx. 35.6 x 43.2 x 43.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

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35 Gabriel Orozco, Empty Shoe Box, 1993. Shoe box. 12.4 x 33 x 21.6 cm. Installation view of 45th International Art Exhibition: The Cardinal Points of Art, Venice Biennale, 1993. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

134

36 Gabriel Orozco, Yogurt Caps, 1994. Four yogurt lids. 7.9 cm. Installation view at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

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37 André Breton, Cinderella Ashtray (Cendrier Cendrillon), 1934. Carved wood. Author’s photograph.

140

38 Gabriel Orozco, Working Tables, 2000–2005. Mixed media, including unfired clay, straw, egg container, bottle caps, wire mesh screen, string, stones, shells, plaster, bark, polystyrene foam, painted wood elements and pizza dough. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

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39 El Museo de la Calle. Installation view in Bogotá, 1998–2001. Courtesy of Federico Guzmán / Cambalache Collective.

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40 El Museo de la Calle (Detail: El Veloz), 1998–2001. Courtesy of Federico Guzmán / Cambalache Collective.

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41 El Museo de la Calle (Detail: Technology), 1998–2001. Courtesy of Federico Guzmán / Cambalache Collective.

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42 El Museo de la Calle (Detail: Treasure Box), 1998–2001. Courtesy of Federico Guzmán / Cambalache Collective.

157

43 El Museo de la Calle. Installation view. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2001. Photo credit: Federico Guzmán / Cambalache Collective.

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44 Elkin Calderón, Colombia, el riesgo es que te quieras quedar… /Colombia, the Risk is Wanting to Stay…, 2013. Book cover. Photo credit: Francisco Toquica. Courtesy of Elkin Calderón.

169

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List of Images

45 Elkin Calderón, Pola (balinera), 2013. Painted wooden board with wheels. Courtesy of Elkin Calderón.

180

46 Elkin Calderón, Photograph of a balinera race participant, 2013. Participatory action at La Otra Bienal, Bogotá, Colombia. Courtesy of Elkin Calderón.

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47 The artist Elkin Calderón working on the balineras at La Perseverancia, Bogotá, Colombia. Photograph of participatory action at La Otra Bienal, Bogotá, Colombia. Courtesy of Elkin Calderón.

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48 Elkin Calderón, Start of balinera race, 2013. Photograph of participatory action at La Otra Bienal, Bogotá, Colombia. Courtesy of Elkin Calderón.

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49 Elkin Calderón, Balinera race, 2013. Photograph of participatory action at La Otra Bienal, Bogotá, Colombia. Courtesy of Elkin Calderón.

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50 Elkin Calderón, Balinera race, 2013. Photograph of participatory action at La Otra Bienal, Bogotá, Colombia. Courtesy of Elkin Calderón.

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51 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Voz Alta. Relational Architecture #15, Mexico City, 2008. Photograph of performance. Courtesy of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VEGAP, Madrid.

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52 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Voz Alta. Relational Architecture #15, Mexico City, 2008. Photograph of performance. Courtesy of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VEGAP, Madrid.

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53 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Voz Alta. Relational Architecture #15, Mexico City, 2008. Photograph of performance. Courtesy of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VEGAP, Madrid.

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54 Photograph of 2 October 1968 rally in Plaza de las Tres Culturas, reproduced in La Jornada, Mexico City, 2 October 2008. Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Nacional de México.

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55 La Prensa, Mexico City, 2 October 1968. Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Nacional de México.

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56 Monument to the Fallen at Tlatelolco, Mexico City, 1993. Photo credit: Thelma Datter. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 203

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Notes on Contributors Natasha Adamou is a Henry Moore Foundation–British School at Rome fellow in sculpture (2015–16) and a visiting fellow at the School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex. She holds a PhD  in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex, with a doctoral thesis focusing on the legacies of the readymade and the found object in contemporary sculpture. She has taught MA courses on Contemporary Art, Politics and Ethics, and The Bureau for Surrealist Research at Essex. Natasha has worked on the exhibition Monument to Now (Athens, 2004) with works from The Dakis Joannou Collection, Outlook International Exhibition (Athens, 2003) curated by Christos M. Joachimides, and Apexart, New York. During 2006–7, she was Director at The Breeder Gallery, Athens. Zanna Gilbert is senior research specialist at the Getty Research Institute. She holds a PhD from the School of Philosophy and Art History at the University of Essex, which she completed in collaboration with Tate Modern. She was previously Andrew W. Mellon C-MAP postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, where she led research on Latin American art, and was founding co-editor of MoMA’s online publication post. Her research focuses on transnational conceptual art, concrete art and poetry, Xerox art, and the international mail art network, with a particular focus on Latin America. Robin Adele Greeley is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art History at the University of Connecticut. Among her authored, edited or co-edited books are Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War (2006); Mexican Muralism: A Critical History (2012); The Logic of Disorder: The Art and Writing of Abraham Cruzvillegas (2015); La interculturalidad y sus imaginarios. xiii

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Notes on Contributors

Conversaciones con Néstor García Canclini (2018); A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art (2021), and Between Campesino and State: Photography, Rurality and Modernity in 20th–21st Century Mexico (forthcoming). Olga Fernández López is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Theory of Art at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where she teaches contemporary art and curatorial studies. She has published Exposiciones y comisariado. Relatos cruzados (Cátedra, 2020) and curated One Thousand Roaring Beasts. Display Devices for a Critical Modernity (2017, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville). She is a member of several research projects, such as Art, Politics and Counterculture in the Transatlantic Axis from the Cold War to Contemporaneity and The Publics of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture in Spain, where she has contributed articles and papers. From 2001 to 2006 she worked at Museo Patio Herreriano (Valladolid). Her research focuses on the specificities of the exhibition medium and history and its critical possibilities for curatorial practice. Sophie Halart is Assistant Professor of Art History at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where she teaches on Latin American Contemporary Art at both pre- and postgraduate levels. Her current research projects examine the crossovers between feminism and maternity in Chilean contemporary art as well as the critical study of new artistic interventions on the Latin American landscape in the Anthropocene. She has published numerous articles and chapters in both Spanish and English, and has curated collective exhibitions related to gender, embodiment and ecocriticism. Carla Macchiavello Cornejo is an art historian and educator who has published on contemporary Chilean and Latin American art with an emphasis on video art, performance, networks of solidarity and resistance, and artistic practices aimed at social change. She is Associate Professor in Art History at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, NY, and received her PhD from Stony Brook University. She has curated exhibitions on contemporary Latin American art and is co-editor of Más allá del fin/Beyond the End, a publication of the collective research practice Ensayos, which joins artists, scientists, and local agents to reflect on matters connected to the political ecology of Tierra del Fuego. xiv

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Notes on Contributors

Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra is a Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on contemporary Latin American Art, with an emphasis on the politics of aesthetics, the body, experimental art and technoscience, and dimensions of agency and ‘liveness’ in ecological and feminist artistic practice. She’s the recipient of the 2019 Art Journal award and was a Leverhulme Research Fellow between 2020 and 2021. Her publications include Touched Bodies: The Performative Turn in Latin American Art (2019, shortlisted for the 2020 Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Art of the Present) and the edited volumes Eugenio Polgovsky: Poetics of the Real/La poética de lo real (2020) and Re-Public: The New Public Art in Mexico (forthcoming). Erica Segre was a Lecturer in Hispanic and Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge, and a translator of fiction and nonfiction. Her research and teaching interests related to nineteenth-century Latin American literature and thought, and twentieth-century and contemporary visual culture (photography, art and film). Her authored and edited works include Intersected Identities: Strategies of Visualization in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Mexican Culture (2007); Ghosts of the Revolution in Mexican Literature and Visual Culture: Revisitations in Modern and Contemporary Creative Media (2013) and México Noir: Rethinking the Dark in Contemporary Writing and Visual Culture (Art, Film, Photography) (2019). Catherine Spencer is a lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of St Andrews. She completed her PhD ‘Fieldwork: Performing Social Science in North America, 1961–75’ at the University of York, and has also taught at the University of Edinburgh. Her research has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Getty Research Institute, and her writing has been published in Art . in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Catherine Spencer is History a lecturer University of St Andrews. She completed her PhD ‘Fieldwork: Performing Social Science in North America, 1961–75’ at the University of York, and xv has also taught at the University of Edinburgh. Her research has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Getty Research Institute, and her writing has been published in Art History. 9781784532253book_pi-228.indd xv 3/15/2016

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Acknowledgments This volume is the result of a thoroughly collective and collaborative endeavour. As editors, we would therefore like to thank all of the contributors for their enthusiasm, input and patience throughout the various rounds of revisions that each chapter underwent. We are also grateful to the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Arts at the Department of History of Art, University College London for providing financial and logistic support to this project. We are deeply indebted to all the artists, estates, galleries and institutions that granted us authorization to reproduce the images included in this book, and to the Augusto and León Ferrari Foundation in particular for providing the book with its cover image. Many thanks to the external reviewers for their constructive feedback and to Bloomsbury Publishing for proposing a paperback release. We dedicate this book to the memory of Erica Segre.

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Introduction Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra and Sophie Halart

In 2009, at the Venice Art Biennale Cuban artist Tania Bruguera performed Self-Sabotage, a work that combined the putative risk of her spectacular suicide with a defence of artistic practice as a politics of survival. Sitting at a desk, facing her audience, Bruguera completed three rounds of Russian roulette while reading a text that addressed what she considered to be the political responsibilities of the contemporary artist.1 Responding to growing nervousness among those present in the pavilion, the curators eventually intervened to put an end to the performance, leaving the artist just enough time to conclude with one last – loaded – shot into the air. Playing with risk, exposing her vulnerability and provoking the expectant public, Bruguera’s performance entailed a sense of radical danger in which artist and audience became ethically bound together. The latter might have been compelled to abandon the posture of ‘innocent bystander’ (Ward 2012) and interrupt the artist’s perilous act, yet this invitation was accompanied by coercion. During the act Bruguera also called upon other artists to embrace the joint exploration of risk, politics, art and ethics, challenging them to leave their ‘comfortable positions’ and adopt ‘a place that is not self-nostalgic, […] an insecure place, […] a place where art is not an important concept’ (2009). 1

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Sabotage Art

While Bruguera’s performance constitutes a summons to contemporary artists and audiences, it also evokes some of the complexities and tensions accompanying the deployment of ‘sabotage’ and ‘self-sabotage’ strategies in Latin American art from the 1960s until the present. During these years, the iconoclastic agenda of avant-garde artists revealed the critical possibilities resulting from an understanding of art as sabotage, in which public gestures of institutional and political resistance became entwined with intimate forms of self-undoing. Performed at one of the most canonical events of the contemporary art world, however, Bruguera’s intervention also raises significant questions regarding the institutional recuperation of violence as entertainment and ‘risky’ spectacle. A  critical analysis of the diverse developments of sabotage strategies in recent Latin American art is therefore in order, especially considering that the notions of ‘sabotage’ and ‘Latin America’ invoke a complex web of historical and conceptual debates. This book seeks to engage with these discussions, situating both terms in relation to specific artistic practices. Hailing from the French noun ‘sabot’ (clog or wooden shoe), the early uses of the word sabotage were associated with dissent, connoting the disturbing noises produced by the banging or stomping of sabots during official speeches.2 It was not until the twentieth century, however, that the term was adopted in several languages to refer to the ‘damaging or destruction of an employer’s property by workmen during a strike’ or, more generally, ‘any disabling damage deliberately inflicted, especially that carried out clandestinely in order to disrupt the economic or military resources of an enemy’ (OED online, 2014). Beyond these industrial and military usages, sabotage became associated with gestures seeking to interrupt flows of production via either active participation or concerted inaction, often under conditions of anonymity.3 Indeed, the word saboteur may well describe the quintessential anti-hero posture: away from the well-trodden fields of fame and praise awaiting the return of the revered individual hero, the saboteur remains largely unnamed, operating undercover, within the meshes, wires and tunnels of the system. This anonymity also constitutes the saboteur’s strategic advantage, since his or her actions tend to intervene at the lowest levels of the productive chain, enabled by ‘the discovery that a relatively minor malfunction, mistiming or interruption, introduced at the right place and moment, could […] have widespread effects’ (Mitchell 2

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2011, 22–23). Yet embracing destruction as a strategy of resistance is never entirely risk-free for its instigator, and the violence associated with sabotage also functions as a double-edged sword: as in Bruguera’s performance, sabotage inhabits the antithetical gestures of destruction and production, self-undoing and self-affirmation. In the artistic field, sabotage strategies assault those systems of representation that constitute the canon at a given time and place. This often takes the form of an attack against the very materiality of the image, situating sabotage within a history of iconoclasm. Seen in this light, it is important to underline that while iconoclasts often call forth epithets such as ‘vandals’, ‘obscurantists’ and ‘nihilists’, destruction in art is closely intertwined with processes of construction (of meaning, value and social representations), to the point that iconophilia and iconoclasm are ‘not only inseparable but also sometimes indistinguishable’ (Gamboni 2002, 88). The very history of preservation involves processes of defacement, removal, breaking, substitution and transformation, while the reverse may also be said with regard to the proliferation of images that often follows upon the heels of iconoclastic impulses. In this regard, Fabio Rambelli and Eric Reinders argue that: Destruction is not the end of culture but one of the conditions of its possibility. Destruction is cultural activity, and also, at times, religious activity. The destruction of objects produces new meanings and practices, and damaged things may become more precious. (2007, 17, original emphasis)

Along these lines, art historian Dario Gamboni posits that during the modern period in the West, the prohibition and condemnation of the ‘wilful destruction of art’ were foundational to the emergence of the notion of ‘artistic autonomy’ and its corollary, the ostensibly ‘inherent’ value of art, as well as to the entire web of institutional relations that sustains both concepts (1997, 17). Yet while these developments entailed a drastic removal of art from everyday use, they did not bring the history of iconoclasm to a close. On the contrary, they led to an opening up of the category, and in some contexts to its positive transvaluation. In this sense, iconoclasm became one of the driving forces of art historiography, prompting historians and critics to understand new artistic movements as responding to previous traditions by means of negation, destruction or 3

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obliteration. Likewise, within the realm of artistic production, iconoclasm became a tradition in its own right, inaugurated in the early twentieth century with the rejection of artistic convention among the avant-gardes and the ‘anti-modernist “vandalism” ’ acting in the name of art that followed (Gamboni 1997, 286). Given the diversity of intentions, methods and meanings that participate in the dialectic of production and destruction of artworks, some scholars have argued that ‘there can be no useful meta-history of iconoclasm’, and each attempt to understand this seemingly destructive relationship to objects – sacred, aesthetic or everyday – must be historically and culturally situated (Boldrick 2007, 4). In this volume, we locate the practices of sabotage and iconoclasm within the temporal and cultural context of post-1960s Latin America. However, throughout this endeavour, we also understand ‘Latin America’ as a complex and heterogeneous concept that, like sabotage, evades attempts to situate it within any fixed semantic frame. In recent decades, many voices – including those of artists, historians and art critics – have risen against an unproblematic deployment of the concept of Latin America, highlighting the simplification and generalization that this term leads to when applied uncritically to a region composed of profoundly diverse peoples, languages and histories. Gerardo Mosquera is one of many to point out that the very notion of Latin America has always been highly ambiguous, if not arbitrary. It remains unclear, for instance, whether its scope includes ‘the Dutch and Anglo Caribbean’, ‘the 40  million people of Hispanic origin living in the [United] States’ or ‘indigenous peoples who do not speak European languages’ (2010, 18). As a synthesizing notion, linked to a presumed Latinidad, whose meaning remains elusive beyond its relationship to the Latin origins of Spanish and Portuguese (Mignolo 2005, 79), an uncritical use of the term ‘Latin America’ suffers from an insufficient assessment of regional differences, inequalities and conflicts, which may create a false image of cultural homogeneity and social integration. Nevertheless, beyond the need to consider those conflicts and tensions that are inherent to the ‘idea’ of Latin America, it is also important to note how this notion fulfils functions that surpass a simplistic division of the world into cultural regions. The conception of a ‘Latin American self ’ may be seen as a form of ‘strategic essentialism’ – to use Gayatri Spivak’s term (1996 [1985], 4

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204) – closely intertwined with a history of colonialism (Mosquera 2010, 19). These essentialist ‘identities of resistance’ may potentially create space for dialogue and community, where common struggles become platforms for new propositions and forms of enunciation (19). As Puerto Rican curator Mari Carmén Ramírez writes, art practices in Latin American are bred as both strategies of resistance ‘in the face of adversity’ as well as constructive and self-affirming methods following ‘a socioartistic project of emancipation – that is, a project in which the creation of new art forms would go hand in hand with the hypothetical transformations of everyday life and the construction of an alternative society’ (2004, 433).4 The texts that comprise this volume share a concern for the difficult position that results from writing from and about Latin America as a given construct, remaining especially aware of the specious traps lurking behind unproblematic generalization. The decision to focus on specific case studies within national scenes attends to this preoccupation, as does the inclusion of contributions that reflect critically on the ‘question’ of Latin America as a general category – or even a trend – in contemporary art, especially with regard to its application on the global art scene. While the chapters are not organized chronologically, which would lend itself to their linear insertion into a grand narrative, the book’s partition into two sections provides a sense of temporal shift, as it addresses questions that arise from the increasing globalization and financialization of art over the past half-century. The first section, entitled ‘Material Sabotage: Ensnaring, Burning, Trespassing’, examines artworks conceived of as sabotage strategies, each chapter providing a critical insight into specific artists or media. In Chapter One Catherine Spencer offers a provocative re-reading of Argentine artist Marta Minujín (b. 1943), establishing a co-dependency and dialogue between the destructive orientation of her early career and her later embrace of pop and hippie counter-culture. Analysing an ample range of the artist’s installations and performances, Spencer entangles their sabotaging and self-sabotaging dimensions, drawing attention to the relationships between obliteration and subjectivation as processes which are simultaneously destructive, immersive and self-empowering. For Spencer, Minujín’s sculptures, installations and happenings open a carnivalesque space that does not limit itself to the creation of transient escape routes but draws the possibility of carving out new modes of intervention in the social. In 5

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Chapter Two Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra revisits the relationship between ritual, violence and (self-)exposure by examining the Polish-Mexican artist Marcos Kurtycz’s (1934–96) early live performance entitled Potlatch (1979), in which he broke into an art gallery and publicly destroyed one of his own paintings with acid. This practice of tearing a painting apart in public, grounded in Georges Bataille’s notion of ritual ‘expenditure’, opens up questions of aesthetic and material value in a heavily iconophilic context. A forceful attack on the Mexican art institution – with its authoritarian and nationalist leanings – Kurtycz’s use of violence partakes, however, in a mirroring dynamic whereby the attack against the institution unfolds into an assault on his own creations and persona (thus exploring the paradoxical mechanisms through which sabotage and self-destruction, critique and self-affirmation, presence and self-erasure, may become entangled). Linked to Kurtycz’s by its tactile and seemingly sacrificial transgression of boundaries, the work of the Mexican painter Enrique Guzmán (1952–86) is the topic of Chapter Three by Erica Segre. Segre places Guzmán’s ‘ironic and dissective’ figuration in tension with his own epoch, marked by the increased use of non-conventional media in the face of the state’s nationalist control of traditional artistic processes. Guzmán’s abrasive pictorial motifs, turned into emblems of personal ambivalence, would also come to feature years later in the (self-)desecrating paintings and performances of Mexican artist and gay rights activist Nahum B. Zenil (b. 1947). In this regard, Segre understands what she calls Guzmán’s ‘poetics of the razor blade’ as a pictorial disassembly of nationalist iconicity. Also targeting the nation-state’s over-reliance on rigid patriotic referents, in Chapter 4, the last of this section, Zanna Gilbert questions the ways in which the practice of mail art in Latin America might be conceived of as an attempt to sabotage the rigid and ‘stuffy’ logic of authoritarian bureaucracies. Looking into the works of Felipe Ehrenberg (b. 1943, Mexico), Paulo Bruscky (b. 1949, Brazil) and Edgardo Vigo (1928–97, Argentina), Gilbert turns austere readings of sabotage on their heads, arguing that these artists’ interventions often resorted to humour, trickery and stealth as strategies to exploit loopholes in official regulations and resist bureaucratic power’s control over the everyday. Ultimately, Gilbert’s text suggests that, besides constituting an action with a specific target, sabotage might also be conceived of as a shift in scale, a blowing out of dimensions that seeks to undo the monotony of normative guidelines. 6

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The second section of the book offers a series of discussions examining artistic practices in relation to the discourses that have been produced around them by art institutions, the state and the art market. Coming together under the heading ‘Cannons and Canons: Explosive vs. Implosive Postures’, these contributions explore the tensions and ambivalences framing the relationship between artworks, their institutional display and the place they have come to occupy in the historiographic canon. This second axis of reflection also investigates the persistence of sabotage in the afterlife of a work’s immediate contemporaneity. The so-called ‘boom’ of international interest in Latin American art over the past decade is visible in the exhibition programmes of established metropolitan museums as well as in the increase in academic research on this topic in Europe and the United States. However, while this new status opens artworks and artists to new audiences, a discussion addressing the institutionalization and mystification of Latin American art by academic and curatorial discourses is also in order. Understanding sabotage as a form of noise-making, in Chapter Five, Sophie Halart offers an interpretation of neo-avant-garde practices in Argentina and Chile as actions that sought to destabilize the transmission and intelligibility of official discourses. Through a study of selected works by the 1960s Argentine group Arte de los Medios and the 1970s Chilean collective Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), Halart argues that their strength lay in conceiving of sabotage as a form of acoustic interference that could open the way for a return to more dialogic forms of social exchange. Halart also questions the legacy  – and ongoing subversive potential  – of these strategies in the face of their insertion into conceptualist categories and the turn to the ‘global’ in contemporary art. Along similar lines, in Chapter Six Natasha Adamou addresses the participation of Mexican contemporary artist Gabriel Orozco in the 1993 edition of the Venice Biennale with the works Empty Shoe Box (1993) and Yielding Stone (1992). In their status as everyday, almost unperceivable objects, these works were conceived to undermine this spectacular art event but ended up being rapidly consecrated and incorporated into the logic of the institution. Adamou’s chapter interrogates the tensions that arise when an artwork’s material conditions make it resistant to traditional modes of display. Her reading situates Orozco’s work in relation to Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ and André Breton’s ‘found object’, questioning in light of these concepts Orozco’s investigation 7

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of the tensions between object and sculpture, reality and representation. Also dealing with the relationship between local artistic practices and global art institutions, in Chapter Seven Olga Fernández López discusses the collaborative project El Museo de la Calle that took place in Bogotá in the late 1990s. Replicating the constant flows of bartering that used to characterize the now demolished working-class neighbourhood of El Cartucho, Fernández López interprets the project as an anthropological investigation into the ‘transvaluation’ effect that art might have on everyday objects. This in-depth case study suggests that El Museo de la Calle effectively constituted a sabotage of both ‘the circulation of commodities and the stability of the museum institution’. Nevertheless, Fernández López also questions the legacy of this critical agenda once the project entered the circuit of international exhibitions. Ultimately, she evaluates the challenges associated with the decontextualized presentation of a site-specific project in the global art scene and dwells on whether there might be a right way to portray economic precariousness without rendering misery as a spectacle. Also addressing the Colombian contemporary scene, Carla Macchiavello’s chapter analyses the multifarious senses in which the notion of ‘risk’ might be advanced in relation to Colombia’s tourist economy, trapped by its attempts to veil violence. Macchiavello contrasts governmental campaigns promising foreign visitors an experience of raw authenticity with the work of contemporary artist Elkin Calderón, who re-situates risk in an everyday context of violence and social marginality. Macchiavello also revisits Calderón’s participation in the 2013 Bogotá-based edition of La Otra Bienal, questioning the potential and limitations of artistic activism, understood as a strategy that endorses antagonism and conflict as productive forms of exchange. The last chapter concludes our exploration of sabotage in contemporary Latin American art with a timely reflection on shifting forms of collective mobilization that intertwine art and politics in a search to resignify and materially appropriate public space. Starting with a discussion of Mexico’s recent mass protests in the aftermath of the disappearance and suspected murder of a group of 43 students from a rural teacher-training school in Ayotzinapa on 26 September 2014, Robin Greeley suggests that the ‘synergetic relationship’ between the use of digital media and the corporeal presence of people in the streets during public protests could be read as a ‘sabotage riposte’ 8

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that  sheds light onto new ways of understanding public space. Greeley builds up from this movement to reflect on the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre and the role that the physicality of public space has played as both architectural stage for political mobilization and symbolic locus of memory. Examining the light and sound public intervention Voz Alta by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer that took place in 2008 on the site where the massacre occurred, Greeley discusses the significance of performative aesthetics in the incipient development of new forms of collectivity, which point towards a more inclusive practice of politics and citizenship. Substantial intersections and crossovers between chapters allow this volume to advance a perspective on Latin America as a deeply interconnected sociogeographic locality in which the relationship between contemporary art and the political has followed a truly complex historical course. Indeed, these contributions underline the significant space for dialogue that exists among post-1960s artists and artistic practices from across the region, particularly with respect to their strategies for critiquing and sabotaging iconicity. Acts of obliteration, attack, interruption and their unfolding into forms of humour, critique and (self-) undoing have not only been prolific during this period, but have often started by questioning identitarian and nationalist narratives, prompting us to develop strategies to understand art history beyond narrow national configurations. This volume therefore not only juxtaposes distinct artistic scenes, but also analyses common problems and affinities, as artists respond to canons that are constituted both nationally and internationally. While a critique of the art institution connects these practices to their historical avant-garde precedents, the different chapters demonstrate that contemporary forms of sabotage in art participate in reflexive processes that shift away from the crude allure of violence associated with earlier avant-gardes. Rather, sabotage comes to be seen as a positional choice with regard to the institution, which involves a complex choreography of inclusion and (self-)marginalization. This change in focus entails, conceptually, an attempt to reflect on artistic resistance beyond the top-down, frontline, militaristic avant-garde model, finding significant affinities across various post-1960s practices of artistic sabotage in Latin America. 9

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References Boldrick, Stacy. 2007. “Introduction. Iconoclasm.” In Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms, edited by Stacy Boldrick and Richard Clay, 1–5. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bruguera, Tania. 2009. Culture as a Strategy to Survive. http://www.taniabruguera .com/cms/187-0-Culture+as+a+strategy+to+survive.htm. Accessed:  5 April 2014. Gamboni, Dario. 1997. The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution. London: Reaktion Books. ——— 2002. “Image to Destroy. Indestructible Image.” In Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 88–135. Karlsruhe, Cambridge, MA and London: ZKM-MIT Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2005. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy. Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso Books. Mosquera, Gerardo. 2010. “Against Latin American Art.” In Contemporary Art in Latin America, edited by Gerardo Mosquera, 12–23. London: Black Dog. Rambelli, Fabio, and Eric Reinders. 2007. “What Does Iconoclasm Create? What Does Preservation Destroy? Reflections on Iconoclasm in East Asia.” In Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms, edited by Stacy Boldrick and Richard Clay, 15–33. Aldershot: Ashgate. Spivak, Gayatri. 1996. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” In The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayati Chakravorty Spivak, edited by Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, 203–235. Oxon: Routledge. Veblen, Thorstein. 2006. The Engineers and the Price System. New York: Cosimo Books. Ward, Frazer. 2012. No Innocent Bystanders:  Performance Art and Audience. Lebanon: University Press of New England.

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Part I

Material Sabotage: Ensnaring, Burning, Trespassing

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1 Entrap, Engulf, Overwhelm From Existentialism to Counterculture in the Work of Marta Minujín Catherine Spencer In the words of her friend, the critic and curator Jorge Romero Brest, the Argentine artist Marta Minujín launched herself into a transnational network of avant-garde activity with ‘a true auto-da-fé’ (2000, 4), committed in Paris during June 1963. La destrucción [The Destruction], which has subsequently become one of her best-known happenings, saw Minujín gather together a series of assemblages made from old mattresses, cardboard, and sutured textile sections, all of which she had fabricated while living in the city during the preceding year, and drag them into an empty lot on the Impasse Ronsin.1 Minujín then invited a group of artists she had met in the French capital to alter her constructions with their own stylistic flourishes – to, as she put it, ‘delete, erase, modify my works’ (2004, 61) – before setting fire to the sculptural conglomerates in a spectacular pyre of metaphorical and tangible self-immolation. If La destrucción signals the centrality of sabotage to Minujín’s practice during the 1960s and 1970s, then the work also reveals its complex operation. At its most overt level, sabotage functions in Minujín’s oeuvre as an act of wilful destruction, through which artworks, participants, audiences and the artist herself all come under 13

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attack at various points. While this attack is often explicitly physical, it is also implicitly psychological. More specifically, by constantly endangering her work through erasure and ephemerality, and as a result questioning artistic authority and agency, Minujín employs a form of self-sabotage that often verges on nihilism, as the processes she sets in train seem actively to engineer her work’s un-doing.2 Minujín’s sculptures, installations and performances frequently test the seductive appeal that obliteration might have for the individual subject, through immersion as much as destruction. Yet Minujín’s work also continues to embrace the paradoxically enabling qualities of sabotage – in La destrucción, for example, the display of self-sabotage also provided a passport into established communities of artistic exchange, such as the French Nouveaux Réalistes. Romero Brest’s intriguing characterization of La destrucción as an ‘auto-da-fe’, in which Minujín simultaneously appears as instigator and victim while the mattress-assemblages accrue heretical implications, alerts us to the subversive connotations of her artistic approach. While sabotage in Minujín’s work might appear connected with self-destruction, there is often a clandestine agenda at play that seeks to redefine subjectivity, rather than accepting its dissolution. In the 1960s and 1970s, Minujín travelled between the different cultural and political contexts of Argentina, France and North America, creating installations, environments and performances in Buenos Aires, Paris, New York, Montreal and Washington DC. The diverse body of work Minujín created in this period encompasses her Colchones (sculptures using mattresses) (see Figures  1 & 2), participation in collective exhibitions such as La feria de las ferias [The Fair of the Fairs] (1964), happenings like Suceso plástico [Plastic Event] (1965), and environmental installations including Importación-exportación [Import-Export] (1968) and Espi-art [Spy-Art] (1977). This chapter argues that, through these works, Minujín explored the roles played by aggression and self-obliteration in social interaction. Initially, this exploration was informed by an existentialist worldview, but as the 1960s progressed it became linked to an increasing alignment with the carnivalesque irreverence of international counterculture. While existentialism and counterculture might initially seem poles apart, this chapter proposes that the nihilism of the former prepared the ground for Minujín’s affinity with the collective disaffection evidenced in 14

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Figure 1. Marta Minujín inside one of her Colchones for the exhibition El hombre antes del hombre, Galería Florida, Buenos Aires, 1962. Mattress material, wood and assemblage. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Marta Minujín.

the latter. Her responses to both influences were underpinned by a consistent attentiveness to the experiences of alienation and the loss of a clear concept of self, and to the processes by which a subject might be reduced to an object. Many of Minujín’s performances and environments have been concerned with either intervening in established cultural groupings, both within the art world and in wider communities, or delineating alternative ones. Even her particular take on the happening as a form, and the extremity with which she imbued it, can be seen as a manifestation of this approach. While La destrucción was Minujín’s self-proclaimed ‘first 15

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Figure 2. Marta Minujín inside one of her Colchones at her Rue Delambre studio, Paris, c. 1963. Mattress material and wood. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Marta Minujín.

happening’ (2000, 61), critics such as Alicia Paez noted that the concept of the ‘happening’ was an awkward imposition on the Argentine avant-garde by critics and artists from the US, ‘where the true history of this genre has developed and where the word which defines it emerged’ (1967, 21).3 Within this context, sabotage emerges as both an effect of everyday interaction, and a tool that can be deployed to negotiate the cultural field, and carve out unconventional artistic and social spaces. While Minujín’s shifting forms of sabotage have never been explicitly political, they are not without a politics, intimately linked as they are with the simultaneously terrifying and elating instability of the subject’s being in the world, and with a consistently anti-conservative investment in the fraught possibilities of individual freedom. By situating sabotage and self-destruction, particularly the strategies of ensnaring subjects and bombarding them with sensory phenomena, 16

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as integral to Minujín’s artistic productions of the 1960s and early 1970s, we can begin to account critically for her work’s deliberately provocative aspects, and regain a sense of its potential to challenge normative social constructs. The Argentine and international press feted Minujín in this period, while her embrace of celebrity and an unashamedly populist approach has fostered the view that her work is a fashionable confection.4 Even Minujín’s defenders have been cautious in their appraisals: for example, in his 1967 book El ‘pop art’ Oscar Masotta observed that Minujín’s artistic approach manifested ‘a strange mix of absolute rejection and a total acceptance of the effective structures of real society’ (1967a, 28). More recent commentators such as Christian Ferrer, while celebrating the experimental nature of Minujín’s enthusiasm for technology, have highlighted the danger that ‘with hindsight, what seemed like a rupture, novelty or even scandal now reveals itself as something short-lived, a bit fruitless, or not as radical as it promised to be’ (2010, 72). By contrast, this chapter argues that Minujín strategically deployed apparent self-sabotage as a means of infiltration, subversion and even entrapment, while establishing a place for herself within international avant-garde networks and creating a role for the woman artist as director and orchestrator, rather than model or muse.

‘Laying Traps and Dangling Baits’ Minujín has cast her movement into non-traditional media during the early 1960s, specifically the use of mattresses as a material that she would paint in vibrant colours, as an act of determined self-sabotage. ‘When I was 18 or 19’, the artist recalls, ‘I was a very good painter, so good that I was bored with it. So one day I punched a hole in the middle of my painting, took the mattress off my bed and said “I’m going to work with mattresses” [… and] made a kind of plastic house’ (2000, 230). While many Argentine artists, notably those associated with Kenneth Kemble’s Arte Destructivo initiative, started to use non-traditional materials in their work during the 1950s and early 1960s (see Giunta 2007, 119–162), Minujín seems to have chosen mattresses specifically for their overblown, even histrionic associations with erotic and terminal dramas.5 By using mattresses, Minujín wanted ‘to symbolise how people spend 17

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half their life in bed: they are born, they love, they die’ (cited in Romero Brest 2000, 1). As if literalizing these connections, during the 1962 exhibition El hombre antes del hombre [Man Before Man] at the Galería Florida in Buenos Aires Minujín arranged for a photographer to capture her perched gingerly inside one of the resulting Colchones [Mattresses], gazing out from its frame-like armature (see Figure  1). The formal rupture enacted by Minujín’s use of assembled found objects, which here includes sections of cardboard boxes as well as mattress material, becomes transposed into an evocation of psychic threat and entrapment. The pliant, yielding material of the mattress supports her body but also contains it: there is a sense that the construction might snap shut at any moment, devouring its occupant. Between 1961 and 1963, as she moved back and forth between Buenos Aires and Paris for two extended stays in the French capital, Minujín actively pursued the threat of potential equivalence between embodied subject and object posed by the three-dimensional mattress constructions. While in Paris, Minujín began to construct what she describes as ‘invented mattresses’ (2004, 61), recounting how: ‘I bought fabric and a glue pen and managed to borrow a sewing machine and the first one I made was my first environment […] a kind of mattress-house […] that construction I hung in the centre of the studio and people could enter and leave it as they wished’ (61). Minujín’s architectural conceptualization of these three-dimensional sculpture-installations is borne out by their immersive, enveloping qualities, revealed in surviving photographs of destroyed or lost works. A picture taken circa 1963 at Minujín’s Rue Delambre studio in Paris again shows the artist occupying a Colchón (see Figure 2). Her body is subsumed within its swelling protuberances so that only her head, with its distinctive mop of blond hair, and an arm poke out of a window-like aperture at the top. The Colchón is covered in a repeating pattern of green and red bands, their slightly slapdash application revealing how Minujín painted the stripes directly onto the fabric. The arrangement of its bulbous sections, apparently affixed to a rectangular supporting frame, is distinctly haphazard, as if deliberately resisting coherent organization or recognizable form. When combined with the stripe-pattern, which jumps and stutters across the stuffed shapes of different sizes, the overall visual effect is, for all the Colchón’s festive air, one of slight queasiness. Although the construction 18

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in the Paris photograph could be interpreted as a mobile home, a ‘kind of mattress-house’ (Minujín 2004, 61) intended to provide comfort for a peripatetic artist, it also displays distinctly constricting and even imprisoning qualities. Indeed, the Colchones seem to infer that the transnational relocations requiring such a protective cocoon – what Nikos Papastergiadis has influentially theorized as migration’s ‘turbulence’ (2000, 4) – might be as disorientating as they are exciting. These performative photographs indicate that Minujín envisaged the Colchones as engulfing, even overpowering, viewers and inhabitants alike. In the Rue Delambre photograph, Minujín averts her gaze from the camera while her head rests on her arm, communicating an impression of deep and studied ennui. The inference here is that the Colchón simultaneously stands for, and occasions, the snares of self-absorption and mental confinement, while moreover constituting an analogy for the disconcerting collapse of subject into objecthood, by encircling the flesh of the occupant with sacs of wadded material. Just prior to La destrucción, Minujín held an exhibition of the Colchones she had made in Paris at her Rue Delambre studio:  in the pamphlet produced to accompany the display, José-Augusto França describes them as ‘monstrous organisms’, linking them to the blasted landscape of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play Waiting for Godot (França 1963, n.p). In a 1966 article for the publication Arts Magazine, Jacqueline Barnitz asserted that Minujín ‘tries to liberate people from what they are not by steering them into experiences that free them to be what they really are. She does this by laying traps and dangling baits’ (1966, 38). Barnitz highlights the paradoxes and tensions that result from the simultaneous dynamics of liberation and entrapment that structure Minujín’s work across multiple media. The hybrid mattress-works, then, threaten to sabotage the viewer who approaches and enters them not just by acting as a physical snare, their bright colours luring the viewer in, but also because the correlation they establish between sacking and skin – Romero Brest evocatively referred to the mattresses as ‘carcasses’ (2000, 4) – presents a reductive vision of the subject as object, one which implicitly references mortification. In a statement from the mid-1960s, during which she reflects on works such as her 1965 installation El batacazo [The Long Shot], Minujín relays her desire to create situations in which ‘people will be subject and object 19

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at the same time’ (c.1966, n.p.).6 Minujín’s interest in this dynamic can be seen to develop out of her involvement with mattresses, and their particular material effects. While the viewer could presumably choose whether or not to enter one of Minujín’s mattress-houses, the performative photographs imply that once inside, there was a danger that audiences would discover that they were not only surrounded and embroiled but, as Masotta put it in his essay ‘Three Argentines in New  York’, cast in the role of ‘a thing among things’ (1967b, 109). For all their tactile and visually appealing qualities, the early Colchones represented a concerted attempt to initiate disorienting breakdowns of subjectivity in their viewers and occupants, which as Masotta’s essay testifies, would be continued in Minujín’s subsequent installations and environments.

Subjects into Objects In accounts of her time in Paris during the early 1960s, Minujín connects this period with an embrace of ‘existentialist feelings’, vividly recounting how ‘I wanted to commit suicide and I was crying as I worked. It was like torture art’ (2000, 231). The physical barrier erected between the inhabitant of Minujín’s Colchones and the outside world by their unwieldy padded segments, together with the transformation of subject into object implied by the equivalence between live flesh and the striated epidermises of the mattress-material, echo Jean-Paul Sartre’s understanding, in Being and Nothingness (1943), of the relationship between the individual and society as one of alienation. For Sartre, the experience of subjective embodiment results in the individual’s recognition of both the impossibility of ever fully registering other subjects and their interior lives, and the contemplation of their object-hood in the eyes of others: ‘I exist my body: this is its first dimension of being. My body is utilized and known by the Other: this is its second dimension. But in so far as I am for others, the Other is revealed to me as the subject for whom I am an object’ (Sartre 2003, 375). Sartre presents human interaction as a paranoid process whereby interiority and autonomy are constantly sabotaged through the internalization of external objectification. This is because, ‘with the appearance of the Other’s look I experience the revelation of my being-as-object; that is, of my transcendence as transcended’ (375). 20

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The photographs of Minujín secreted within her early Colchones encapsulate this tension between subjecthood and objectification, as the individual attempts to shore up a coherent sense of self in the face of incursions from within and without. Although existentialism seems to have made a particular impact on Minujín while she was in Paris, Philip Derbyshire notes that Sartre’s influence in Argentina during the 1950s had also been ‘extensive’ (2009, 11), owing in part to the longstanding cultural and linguistic ties between Buenos Aires and the French capital. After her return to Buenos Aires in 1964 by way of the Venice Biennale, Minujín ostensibly rejected existentialist feelings, declaring, ‘ “I want to be happy, I don’t want to be an existentialist, I want to be pop” ’ (2000, 231). Yet even the Colchones Minujín previously created in Paris, with their gaudy stripes and yielding parts, witness a mocking and humorous hijacking rather than a clear instantiation of existentialist tenets. This ambivalent relationship with existentialism can be detected in La destrucción, in that the piece apparently both embraced obliteration, and signalled a conceptual break with the grungy and abject assemblages of mattresses, fabric, cardboard and found objects that Minujín had made under the influence of ‘existentialist feelings’ (2000, 231). Yet from the outset, La destrucción was more than an instance of existentialist pessimism. Daniel Quiles notes that by scripting a section of the group performance in which artists, including the provocateur Jean-Jacques Lebel and others, such as Christo, associated with the Nouveau Réalisme movement, were specifically asked to adulterate and adapt Minujín’s works, ‘it was not only her sculptures that were obliterated. Diffused into the activity of other artists, her very identity was “burnt out,” undone through collectivity’ (2008, 73). As Quiles’ reference to ‘collectivity’ indicates, the self-destructiveness on display in La destrucción was also enabling. While Andrea Giunta observes that Minujín ‘appropriated resources she had picked up in Paris and […] put them at the service of her own work’ (2007, 150), by inviting other artists to create their own additions to her mattress-pieces before she destroyed them, Minujín moreover metaphorically condemned their work to the fire at the same time.7 A photograph by Harry Shunk and Janos Kender documenting the performance (see Figure 3) shows six of Minujín’s sculptures lined up in the lot like cars on a production line. Artists work busily on four of them, as Minujín 21

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Figure 3. Marta Minujín, La destrucción, happening at the Impasse Ronsin, Paris, June 1963. Photo: Shunk-Kender. Courtesy of Marta Minujín and the J. Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. (2014.R.20) Gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender.

adopts the position of overseer. In employing and supervising the labour of the artists who gathered at the Impasse Ronsin, Minujín reversed the perceived centre-periphery relationship between Paris and Buenos Aires, by first trapping the French artists in the role of parasitical dependents on her sculptural forms for the realization of what effectively became their own work, and then by slyly inveigling them to commit group annihilation, razing their efforts along with hers.8 Sabotage here is achieved through infiltration, conducted via seditious engagement with, rather than direct attack on, a comparatively established international network of avant-garde practitioners – and by adoption, rather than outright rejection, of an artistic definition (the ‘happening’) associated primarily with the US. Minujín’s claim to the role of director, meanwhile, which she reprised in later performances such as the complex multi-media collaboration Simultaneidad en simultaneidad [Simultaneity in Simultaneity] (1966), countered the gendered restrictions of the early 1960s. In this respect, though Sartre might provide one source for Minujín’s engagement with existentialism, Simone De Beauvoir’s 1949 text The Second 22

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Sex further illuminates the specifically gendered subjectivities at stake in Minujín’s work. De Beauvoir maps the subject-object positions of existentialism onto the experience of the female subject – a female subject constantly required by patriarchal society ‘to make herself object, to be the Other’ (1997, 291). In the wrecking of the Colchones and their symbolically alienating structures, together with the placing of the woman artist centre stage, La destrucción can be construed as a manifestation of De Beauvoir’s insistence that the female subject has ‘the power to choose between the assertion of her transcendence and her alienation as object’ (82). In the catalogue accompanying the major exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007), which featured Minujín’s work, Marsha Meskimmon emphasizes the need to explore ‘affinities between diverse geographical positions’ when tracing transnational feminist activity (2007, 325). Minujín’s output comprises a unique, but interconnected, aspect of wider challenges to reductive conceptions of femininity during the 1960s and 1970s. Although the Colchones were physically destroyed in La destrucción, the violent ramifications of the happening can be interpreted as the ultimate realization of the conflict threatened by their composition. The covertly aggressive, enfolding actions of the first Colchones staged in the Paris photographs, and in later large-scale fabric works such as Chambre d’amour [Chamber of Love] (1964) and ¡Revuélquese y viva! [Wallow Around and Live!] (1964) were amplified and made explicit in other early happenings such as Minujín’s infamous Suceso plástico (1965) at the Montevideo football stadium in Uruguay. For this piece, Minujín gathered together a group of participants before pelting them with missiles from a helicopter, including lettuces and live chickens. Minujín describes the scene dramatically: ‘the chickens – heavy chickens on your head. It was crazy – pow, pow, pow. Like bombs all the chickens […] some of the people got hurt in the head’ (1991, 22). The physical violence of this attack on her actors corresponds with the implicit cruelty of their recruitment and direction: Minujín advertised in local newspapers for ‘fat women’, ‘muscle men’ and ‘prostitutes’, reducing the individuals involved to purely one-dimensional physical and social categories (22).9 She then demanded that they execute a range of awkward social interactions, including grabbing and kissing each other. There is an element here of what Claire Bishop, drawing on Masotta’s characterization of the happenings that he devised in Buenos Aires during 1968, 23

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has identified as ‘social sadism’ (2012, 105–128).10 The festival humour of mayhem and confusion in Suceso plástico is deeply ambiguous, cut through with the malice that can accompany laughter. As such, Minujín’s changing conceptualization of sabotage can be linked to the understanding of carnival behaviour elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin in relation to medieval literature. Bakhtin celebrates the carnival as establishing ‘a boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed [to] the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastic and feudal culture’ (1984, 4). For Bakhtin, the carnival opens up moments of rupture in official culture, but never manages – or even arguably intends – to dislodge or change the superstructures of power, which remain obdurately in place. Works like Suceso plástico, the public condemnation of which entailed that Minujín felt unable to return to Uruguay for several years (Minujín 1991, 22), achieved a disruptive mayhem at odds with prevailing social norms, but its provocation seems almost deliberately, deliriously random, without a clear target. Moreover, the tipping point at which carnival liberation and elation might become coercive violence and destructive frenzy shadows both La destrucción and Suceso plástico in equal measure.11 Despite using a very different formal vocabulary, the Colchones constitute immersive situations that teeter on a knife-edge between enjoyment and aggression, as indicated by the psychedelic stripes of the mattress-related works made in late 1963 and 1964. ¡Revuélquese y viva!’s intestinal, uroboric forms twine themselves around each other, hanging in pendulous neon orange and pink confusion to create a nest-like environment that is both inviting and disorientating. The large-scale sculpture, big enough for people to crawl inside, went on display at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella during 1964 to the strains of rock music, which was intended to create a total sensory experience in which viewers could immerse themselves.12 Like other works that developed out of the early Colchones in the mid-1960s such as Chambre d’amour, ¡Revuélquese y viva! uses Pop-inflected vocabularies of fluorescent colours and entertainment, but infused with bodily overtones.13 While these works might stage the sabotaging impulses embroiled in many romantic and erotic relationships, they also celebrate sensuality and sexuality, aligning Minujín with other women practitioners from this period such as Niki de Saint-Phalle, Yayoi Kusama and Carolee Schneemann. As its title underlines, ¡Revuélquese y 24

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Figure 4. Marta Minujín with a pair of unidentified Colchones. Photographer unknown, as published in Fanny Polimeni, ‘La Muchacha del Colchón’ in the magazine Para Ti, Buenos Aires, 22 December 1964. Courtesy of Marta Minujín.

viva! established a carnivalesque zone in which audiences were invited to intermingle, but which also had the potential to be deeply destabilizing.

Countercultural Carnival The majority of Minujín’s Colchones offer abstracted correlations with interlinked, often sensuous organic forms reminiscent of the US critic Lucy 25

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Lippard’s 1966 formulation of ‘Eccentric Abstraction’ as much as Pop Art, but she also used them to execute figurative works.14 In the same year as the 1964 group exhibition La feria de las ferias at the Galería Lirolay in Buenos Aires, Minujín constructed two gigantic, cartoon-like mattress figures, their faces reduced to goggling eyes and gaping mouths. Realized on a larger-than-life scale – a photograph shows them towering over Minujín – they are reminiscent of the effigies paraded at festivals (see Figure 4). Their brightly coloured, plump and fleshy forms, covered in bands of lurid stripes, manifest carnivalesque exuberance. For La feria de las ferias, meanwhile, Minujín and her fellow artists installed themselves in the gallery and sold their work directly to the public, with Minujín hawking sections of mattress. They were joined by Minujín’s friend and supporter the French critic Pierre Restany, who sat in a small kiosk purveying catalogue ‘forewords’, thus parodying art world systems (Giménez 2006, 240). In an echo of La destrucción, any works left unsold were demolished at the exhibition’s close and thrown into the River Plate during an act of ‘ritual destruction’, undermining the production, circulation and consumption of stable artworks (240). The delight this finale manifested in transformative, metamorphic demolition is not without an element of critique. Here carnivalesque self-sabotage interrupts established processes of commodity exchange, specifically the reliance of commercial galleries on unique, saleable objects. As she moved from the early Colchones into the larger mattress-based works, together with installations and happenings, Minujín thus used self-sabotage to explore the power imbalances inscribed in subject-object relations, resulting in implicit attacks on established social structures. Rather than borrowing from existentialism, sabotage became increasingly linked to Minujín’s enthusiasm for countercultural identities, which led to Restany crowning her the ‘hippie queen’ (n.d., 3). Between 1964 and 1966, Minujín produced works in New  York, Washington DC and Montreal. On her travels, Minujín joined mass hippie gatherings in Central Park and embraced US counterculture.15 Building on these experiences, in July 1968, Minujín returned to Buenos Aires and created a work entitled Importación-exportación at the Di Tella’s Centre for Visual Arts (Centro de Artes Visuales, CAV). Importación-exportación was a combination of environment and happening for which Minujín imported subcultural ephemera from the US into Buenos Aires, plastering the walls 26

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Figure 5. Marta Minujín, Importación-exportación, July 1968. Installation and environment at the Centro de Artes Visuales, Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Marta Minujín and Archivos Universidad Di Tella.

of the Di Tella with posters and light-projections, and infusing the rooms with the smell of incense (see Figure  5). This resulted in what Romero Brest described as ‘a festival of images, lights, colours, sounds’ (1969, 77), conveying how Minujín created a miniature carnival gathering inside the Di Tella. As in ¡Revuélquese y viva!, there was a significant sonic element to Importación-exportación, with music by Jimi Hendrix and Hare Krishna chants flooding the space. Minujín herself formed an important part of the mise-en-scène, moving through the environment clad in the kinds of identifiably countercultural fashions with which she had become associated in Argentina – partly as a result of newspapers and magazines indulging in detailed descriptions, for example, of her predilection for miniskirts with ‘large concentric flowers’ (Anon. 1966, 54). At a literal level, there are clear links between the fluorescent bands of acid colour that adorn the later Colchones such as ¡Revuélquese y viva! and Minujín’s hallucinogenic 27

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‘hippie’ installation. Moreover, Importación-exportación similarly constituted a distinct zone that audiences were invited to occupy and explore, after leaving their inhibitions behind upon entering. Comparably, Minujín wanted her 1967 installation Minuphone, a modified telephone booth presented at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery, to send its users on ‘a unique trip’ (cited in Longoni and Carvajal 2010, 114).16 While it might be easy to dismiss Minujín’s engagement with counterculture as trivial, it is important to situate it within the particular context of Buenos Aires in the late 1960s. In his history of the Di Tella, John King notes that Importación-exportación received favourable reviews and created widespread public commotion, but concludes that it offered an ‘amusement’ rather than anything ‘interesting or valuable’ (2007, 219). Importación-exportación could moreover be viewed as a straightforward embrace of US culture – and a highly compromised one, considering US interventions into Latin American politics and economics during the Cold War. Importación-exportación was initially envisaged as a two-part piece, which would result in the export of Argentine cultural signifiers back to the US. That Minujín was unable to realize the second section of the work might be taken as symptomatic of the asymmetrical relations between the USA and Latin America – succinctly encapsulated by Luis Camnitzer as ‘the centre-periphery relationship and its parallel denominations, empire-colony, North-South, developed-underdeveloped’ (2009, 86). Yet it is as if Importación-exportación entertains these possibilities in order to offer an alternative vision of cultural exchange, in which signifiers circulate laterally rather than being imposed hierarchically, and are adapted as they pass between hands. On the flyer advertising Importación-exportación Minujín asserted that: ‘Information enables us to adopt facts, ideas, fashions without taking their nationality into account. The economic factor (place of origin) does not confer nationality on the product. Import is an interpretation of the materiality of information’ (see Noorthoorn 2010, 82). The goods on display in Importación-exportación, which were also for sale in a small shop Minujín incorporated into the exhibition (82), belonged to an alternative economy, which existed alongside official routes of exchange sanctioned by the Argentine and US governments, or officiated by private companies. This shop component recalls La feria de las ferias, indicating the continued 28

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presence of a subtle but significant interest in economic disruption in Minujín’s practice, by establishing alternative and even anti-commercial or anti-market operations. Minujín’s aim in transferring the living artefacts of US – but also, significantly, identifiably transnational – ‘hippie’ culture into Buenos Aires had political undertones, proposing that individual and group identity did not have to be based on nationalism, or for that matter, market economics. Responding to the rise of mass media communications, and the ability to exchange ideas through radio and television as well as print and travel, Minujín conceived of Importación-exportación as a point in a wider international community united by enthusiasm for, to take one example, the music of Jimi Hendrix, while nonetheless registering the ease with which such counter-cultural identifiers could be reduced to mass commodities. In 1968, the year in which Importación-exportación went on display at the Di Tella, there was widespread social and political unrest throughout Argentina in response to the increasing cultural and economic repression of the military government led by General Juan Carlos Onganía, who had assumed power in a 1966 coup. The Tucumán Arde [Tucumán is Burning] initiative emerged in the city of Rosario and saw artists align themselves with striking sugar-cane workers, while in Buenos Aires artists launched a series of critiques against the censorship of works in the Experiencias 68 [Experiences 68] May exhibition at the Di Tella (see Longoni and Mestman 2013, 100–120). Importación-exportación was not part of this unrest, while the Di Tella itself was increasingly viewed as embodying the kind of political complicity against which many politicized avant-garde artists protested. Although the Di Tella and the surrounding Calle Florida district were targets for the right wing, Laura Podalsky notes that left wing commentators were equally dismayed by ‘the allegedly decadent behaviour [the Di Tella] supposedly promoted’ (Podalsky 2004, 139). Indeed, the Di Tella’s difficult, compromised position is encapsulated by a report from one reviewer that the residue of the exhibit which was closed by police during Experiencias 68 – Roberto Plate’s toilet stall installation, inside of which visitors took to writing anti-government messages – was still visible to viewers entering Importación-exportación.17 The presence of Plate’s work reflects the ambivalence of Minujín’s project, underlining her readiness to inhabit the rooms of the Di Tella which had so recently been rejected by the 29

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explicitly politicized wing of the Argentine avant-garde, yet also potentially inferring a shared commitment to free expression.18 Importación-exportación’s alignment with international counterculture is moreover arguably significant in light of the draconian laws Onganía’s government attempted to impose in Buenos Aires, which at one point included a proposed ban on miniskirts. King notes that although ‘there were few hippies’ in Buenos Aires, ‘the public reaction to them was brutal and indiscriminate. […] The new “look” […] provoked suspicion and repression’ (2007, 170). At the same time, in their re-assessment of countercultural activity in the USA, Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner observe that ‘its emphasis on culture and lifestyle alienated it from political histories of 1960s radicalism’ (2012, xviii). Importación-exportación indicates how the transplantation and covert circulation of subcultural identities into the Argentine context of the later 1960s might be a quietly subversive, disruptive move, if an idiosyncratic and unconventional one which sits outside received histories of resistance. A hit with the public that provoked both those on the right and the left of the political spectrum, Importación-exportación occupied a conspicuously indeterminate place among jockeying political positions. Although undeniably reliant on the institutional context of the Di Tella, it provided a carnivalesque space apart, where visitors could relax and play, and perhaps indulge in a momentary flirtation with countercultural identifiers, such as the miniskirt, that might attract persecution outside its circumscribed safe area. Importación-exportación effectively established a temporary place for solipsism and inward mental voyages – for indulgent meditation on individual and group psychology. Its economy within an economy, and alignment with an alternative aesthetic understood as superseding national borders, re-purposed countercultural liberation as a counter-intuitive mode of covert sabotage against nationalism and conservatism, even as the project remained open to accusations of compromise. In drawing out the latent radicality within Minujín’s embrace of destructive and strategically self-destructive tendencies, this chapter by no means seeks to suggest that Minujín’s work should be viewed as politically engaged in the manner of her contemporaries, such as the artists Graciela Carnevale or León Ferrari. Minujín’s reticence in committing overt acts of 30

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Figure 6. Marta Minujín, scheme for Espi-art, installation at the Galería Birger, Buenos Aires, July 1977. Courtesy of Marta Minujín.

political critique is demonstrated by Espi-art, a collaborative exhibition in 1977 (see Figure 6), executed at the Galería Birger during the beginning of Argentina’s brutal dictatorship and ‘Dirty War’, which lasted from the mid 1970s until the return of democratic government in 1983.19 Formed from two rows of partitioned cells in which a range of performers created their 31

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works, visitors could watch the artists inside the small, box-like structures through spy-holes in the doors to each cubicle, so that the invited practitioners were simultaneously enclosed and protected, yet subject to voyeurism and scrutiny (Glusberg 1986, 83). Minujín describes how Espi-art occurred at ‘a time of much repression, when you couldn’t walk down the street or be in large groups in one place; it wasn’t a political work but it was a reflection of this’ (cited in Noorthoorn 2010, 151). The cubicles Minujín created for Espi-art impose separation, confinement and privacy, yet the environment as a whole also opened up an alternative site away from the street in which people could gather together in a large group, under the legitimating auspice of the exhibition. Like Importación-exportación, Espi-art might be conceived of as providing access to what Bakhtin describes as the ‘second life’ of carnival and festival forms, experienced as the ‘utopian realm of community’ (1984, 8 and 9). Yet we might also want to bear in mind Fredric Jameson’s definition of ‘utopian space’ as an ‘an aberrant by-product […] a kind of eddy or self-contained backwater’ (2007, 15), a phrase that recalls the sequestering effect of Minujín’s early Colchones. The sabotaging impulses that recur throughout Minujín’s practice oscillate constantly between self-destruction and communal intervention, immersion and expulsion, rupture and failure, entrapment and liberation, but the violence and aggression that fissure her work need to be understood as more than mere spectacle, revealing a productive tendency for provocation which consistently contests social restrictions and limitations.

References Anon. 1966. “Una invasión con minifaldas.” Confirmado, 19 September: 54. Auther, Elissa, and Adam Lerner. 2012. “ The Counterculture Experiment: Consciousness and Encounters at the Edge of Art.” In West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977, edited by Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, xvii–xxxvi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Barnitz, Jacqueline. 1966. “A Latin Answer to Pop.” Arts Magazine, June: 36–39. Bishop, Claire. 2012. “Social Sadism Made Explicit.” In Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, 105–128. London: Verso.

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Entrap, Engulf, Overwhelm Camnitzer, Luis. 2009. “The Artist’s Role and Image in Latin America” (2004). In On Art, Artists, Latin America and Other Utopias, edited by Rachel Weiss, 76–92. Austin: University of Texas Press. De Beauvoir, Simone. 1997. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. London: Vintage. Derbyshire, Philip. 2009. “Who was Oscar Masotta? Psychoanalysis in Argentina.” Radical Philosophy, 158: 11–23. Ferrer, Christian. 2010. “A Box of Surprises.” In Minuphone, 1967–2000: Marta Minujín, edited by Ana Longoni and Fernanda Carvajal, 72–86. Buenos Aires: Fundación Telefónica and Fundación Espigas. França, José-Augusto and Robert Filliou. 1963. Marta Minujín, Alejandro Otero and Lourdes Castro. Paris: 22 Rue Delambre. Giménez, Edgardo et  al. 2006. Jorge Romero Brest:  La cultura como provocación. Buenos Aires: Edición Edgardo Giménez. Giunta, Andrea. 2007. Avant-Garde, Internationalism and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties. Translated by Peter Kahn. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Glusberg, Jorge. 1986. Art in Argentina. Milan: Giancarlo Politi. Jameson, Fredric. 2007. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. Katzenstein, Inés, ed. 2004. Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. King, John. 2007. El Di Tella y el desarrollo cultural argentino en la década del sesenta. Buenos Aires: Asunto Impreso. Lippard, Lucy. 1966. “Eccentric Abstraction.” Art International, 10 (9): 28, 34–40. Longoni, Ana, and Fernanda Carvajal. 2013. “ ‘Technical Psychedelia’: An Interview with Marta Minujín.” In Minuphone, 1967–2010: Marta Minujín, 112–133. Buenos Aires: Fundación Telefónica and Fundación Espigas. ——— and Mariano Mestman. 2013. Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde”: Vanguardía artística y política en el 68 Argentino. Buenos Aires: Eudeba. Masotta, Oscar. 1967a. “Los imagineros Argentinos.” In El “Pop Art” edited by Oscar Masotta, 21–28. Buenos Aires: Editorial Columba. ———1967b. “Tres Argentinos en Nueva York.” In Happenings, Oscar Masotta et al., 99–110. Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Álvarez. ———1967c. “Prólogo.” In Happenings, Oscar Masotta et  al., 9–16. Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Álvarez. ———2004. “I Committed a Happening” (1967). In Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, edited by Inés Katzenstein, translated by Brian Holmes, 191–201. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Meskimmon, Marsha. 2007. “Chronology Through Cartography: Mapping 1970s Feminist Art Globally.” In WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, edited by Lisa Gabrielle Mark, 322–335. Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art.

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Sabotage Art Minujín, Marta. c.1966. “Artist’s Statement.” Lawrence Alloway Papers, Box 21, Folder 1. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. ———1991. “Eat Me, Read Me, Burn Me: The Ephemeral Art of Marta Minujín.” Interview by Richard Squires. Performance Magazine, 64: 19–27. ———2000. “An Interview with Marta Minujín,” by Elsa García and Hemma Schmutz. In Vivências / Lebenserfahrung / Life Experience, edited by Sabine Breitwieser, 230–238. Vienna: Generali Foundation. ———2004. “Destruction of my works in the Impasse Ronsin, Paris” (June 1963). Archivo Marta Minujín, reprinted in Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, edited by Inés Katzenstein, translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz, 59–61. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Noorthoorn, Victoria, ed. 2010. Marta Minujín:  obras 1959–1989. Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Fundación Costantini. Paez, Alicia. 1967. “El concepto de happening y las teorías.” In Happening, Oscar Masotta et al., 17–47. Buenos Aires: Jorge Alvarez. Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2000. The Turbulence of Migration:  Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pierre, José. 1963. “Pop! Pop! Pop! (D’une esthétique des lieux communs).” Combat-Art, no. 102, 1 July: 2–3. Podalsky, Laura. 2004. Specular City:  Transforming Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955–1973. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Quiles, Daniel. 2007. “Burn Out My Potentiality:  Destruction and Collectivity in Greco and Minujín.” In Beginning With a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy: An Exhibition of Argentine Contemporary Artists, 1960–2007, edited by Victoria Noorthoorn, 69–80. New York: Americas Society. Restany, Pierre. Not dated. “South America at the Edge of the Seventies: A Crisis of Civilization.” Pierre Restany Papers, PREST.XSMAL13. Rennes: Archives de la Critique d’Art. Romero Brest, Jorge. 1969. Arte en la Argentina:  últimas décadas. Buenos Aires: Paidós. ———2000. Marta Minujín. Buenos Aires: Edición Edgardo Giménez. Rottner, Nadja. 2014. “Marta Minujín and the Performance of Softness.” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 83 (2): 110–28. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2003. Being and Nothingness:  An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. London and New York: Routledge. Traba, Marta. 2005. Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950–1970. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno. Tucker, Bonnie. 1968. “B.A.’s ‘Beautiful People’ Light up Di Tella.” Buenos Aires Herald, 29 July: 9.

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2 Shaman, Thespian, Saboteur Marcos Kurtycz and the Ritual Poetics of Institutional Profanation Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra L’intimité est la violence. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (1974) The profanation of the unprofanable is the political task of the coming generation. Giorgio Agamben, ‘In Praise of Profanation’ (2007)

An iconic figure of Mexico’s early performance art scene, Marcos Kurtycz moved from Warsaw to Mexico City in 1968. At the time of his arrival, the country was undergoing one of the most difficult political crises it had experienced in the twentieth century. Days before the opening of the locally-hosted 1968 Olympic Games, paramilitary police opened fire on a peaceful protest in the ‘Plaza de las Tres Culturas’ in Tlatelolco, massacring tens or even hundreds of students.1 This demonstration of state violence showcased the country’s authoritarianism and sparked a series of critical responses to the regime of the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) in the art world.2 Yet, according to Olivier Debroise and Cuauhtémoc Medina, the 1968 crisis also ‘marked the beginning of an era of cultural repression’, directed especially against young people and so-called ‘counter-cultural’ or ‘alternative’ art circuits (2014, 23). Moreover, the state’s crackdown on emerging, experimental 35

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artists was accompanied by an official disregard for new media and a lack of state support for contemporary art, resulting in what the authors describe as ‘institutionalized amnesia’ regarding more than two decades of Mexican art, extending from the late 1960s to the first years of the 1990s (21). From the early days of his life in Mexico, Kurtycz collaborated closely with this emerging generation of critical young artists working either against or at the margins of official art institutions and bringing explicitly political concerns to their creations.3 Kurtycz shared these artists’ interest in using certain forms of (often parodic or ludic) violence to expose other, less visible forms of state violence. Nevertheless, Kurtycz’s early performances were also somewhat distinctive in their approach to violence, for they joined together an aggressive and intimidating rhetoric directed against what he saw as the ‘stuffiness of the Mexican art scene’ with an embrace of ritual (Camnitzer 2007, 107). The artist’s unusual association of the violence of avant-gardism with a critical, profanatory and playful approach to ritual will therefore be my central object of attention, as I seek to shed light upon what, speaking of Kurtycz’s work, Mónica Mayer identified as ‘an unusual force that could combine violence and vulnerability’ (1996, 2). This chapter will almost fully revolve around one of Kurtycz’s early performances, entitled Potlatch after Georges Bataille’s writings on this notion. Potlatch was partly conceived of as a mock guerrilla assault, as it involved breaking into an exhibition opening without consent and publicly burning a painting with acid. Rather than merely seeking to produce destruction and aggressively shock the audience, however, the performance unfolded into a celebration of loss over accumulation, contact over confinement and self-critique, if not self-sabotage or self-erasure, over conceited self-affirmation. Exploring the work’s ritual elements in light of Bataille and Victor Turner’s understanding of sacrifice, I shall suggest that in Kurtycz’s Potlatch the political critique of the art institution and the embodiment of a ‘secular rite’ (Bell 1992, 38) continuously look back upon each other. As I intend to show, the artist’s destruction, or more precisely ritual transformation, of his painted canvas during Potlatch is not only an attack on an art object but also an intervention in a particular ‘artistic regime’ and its accompanying, constitutive prohibitions in the spatial, temporal and sensuous terrains (Rancière 2000). 36

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Potlatch On the evening of 1 November 1979, the ‘Day of the Dead’, as a group of artists were celebrating the opening of the exhibition Muertos en el Foro at the Forum of Contemporary Art (FCA) in Mexico City, Kurtycz gatecrashed the gallery in order to publicly destroy an abstract, unframed painting which he had made in his workshop over the past months. As detailed in a script outlining his action that the artist kept in his personal archive, Kurtycz conceived of this live action as a potlatch or ‘gift of rivalry’ (Bataille 1988, 63). Signed by Kurtycz, the script reads: The work, manifestly gothic, involves the ritual destruction of an object that is significant to the author through a ritual that puts both performer and audience at risk. This is a certain form of sacrifice known by the name of potlatch. This particular sacrifice is analysed by Salvador Elizondo and George [sic] Bataille in the prologues to Bataille’s Madame Edwarda.

Following this description, the document details that Potlatch was strictly divided into eight steps or moments. The performance began with Kurtycz’s abrupt, bare-chested entry into the venue carrying a series of objects whose presence in a vernissage could only seem strange, if not openly dangerous, including marigold flowers [flores de cempazuchitl], a petate5 and an axe. The artist then proceeded to prepare the ritual’s setting in front of one of the gallery’s empty walls. In silent concentration, Kurtycz unrolled the petate along the floor so that it was perpendicular to the wall, and used soil to outline a human silhouette on its surface. He then placed two pedestals on top of each other and climbed onto them in order to hang and fully unfurl what would become the ritual offering: a large abstract painting featuring white, formless stains over a dark, and very long, unframed cotton canvas (see Figure 7). According to the artist, the painting had been made over several months, using a ‘sophisticated solar technique’ combining the application of chlorine with long periods of solar exposure.6 Upon hanging the painting on the wall and tautening its lower edges with two rocks (in order to secure the fabric at an angular incline), Kurtycz attached the flowers to the canvas’ uppermost edge and hid a bottle of corrosive acid behind them. As he carried out these vertical 37

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Figure 7. Marcos Kurtycz, Potlatch, 1979. Photograph of performance at the Forum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City intervened by the artist in 1984. Author unknown. Courtesy of Marcos Kurtycz Archive.

and horizontal movements, which involved unfolding, exposing, placing and creating objects associated with death and rest  – thus creating an ephemeral ‘Day of the Dead’ offering or installation – a number of people started to form a circle around him. It was in front of this improvised and somewhat puzzled audience that, from the top of the platform, Kurtycz pulled the axe from his belt and firmly smashed the bottle of acid, causing the burning substance to spill over the canvas, ultimately leaving it entirely in shreds (see Figure  8). Exposing (déchirant)7 the canvas’s 38

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Figure 8. Marcos Kurtycz with axe, March 1985. Photo by Michael Schnorr. Courtesy of Marcos Kurtycz Archive.

debased materiality, the fall of the acid marked a break in time and a spectacle of definitive destruction, whereby a painting that was itself ritually produced was ‘sacrificed’ for the sake of a single lived and witnessed moment. The flowers, which also fell as a result of the axe’s stroke, landed on the now disfigured and pierced soil human silhouette, which was also burned by the corrosive substance. According to the artist’s own records, for roughly 30 seconds8 both artist and public witnessed this ritualized dance and attack that, as a whole, entailed:  a disruptive attempt to sabotage the normal development of an art event; 39

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Figure 9. Marcos Kurtycz, Potlatch, November 1979. Photo:  author unknown. Courtesy of Marcos Kurtycz Archive.

the sacrifice or desecration of an artwork in the place usually reserved for its consecration and the creation of a situation of uncertainty and potential danger within the gallery (see Figures  9–10). Hence, in its secular and violent rituality, Kurtycz’s action combined the affective potentiality aroused by the spectacle of destruction (and the shock of a startling attack) with a more subtle intervention in the viewers’ perception of time and space. Furthermore, Kurtycz’s Potlatch made visible an ephemeral, cyclical process from the moment of composition to degeneration, while provoking the physical relocation of the artist and its impromptu public through contingent, potentially confused or uneasy movements.

A System of Giving While Kurtycz borrowed the concept of potlatch from Bataille, the latter (mis)appropriated it in turn from Marcel Mauss’ study of gift exchange among so-called archaic societies (2002 [1925]).9 In Chinook, the language of Chinookan peoples from North America, potlatch means ‘to 40

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Figure  10. Marcos Kurtycz, Potlatch, November 1979. Photo:  author unknown. Courtesy of Marcos Kurtycz Archive.

feed’ or ‘to consume’, but its use refers to a ‘total system of giving’ that involves a series of feasts, fairs and rituals in which the assembled tribe attempts to outdo rival chiefs by means of lavish splendour (Mauss 2002, 7). The destruction of wealth through potlatch is thus part of a societal contract that extends beyond the circulation of wealth into the structuring of the community through the production of ranks and social hierarchies. However, as Roger Sansi suggests, Bataille was less interested in this aspect of Mauss’ theory of the gift – which grounds it in a social contract of sorts – than in ‘the creative potential of “the pleasure of expense” ’ (2014, 92). Indeed, Bataille’s interest in potlatch results, first, from the fact that it is an institution that invites the subject to explore forms of exchange and communication that are not primarily led by a search for accumulation. Second, the centrality of potlatch in Bataille’s reading of Mauss derives from its capacity ‘to turn expense into public spectacle’ (92). In Bataille, then, ‘the ultimate outcomes of this spectacle in terms of hierarchy, ranking or fame, what it is made for, are less interesting that the very act of expenditure’ (92). 41

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One can observe significant affinities between Bataille’s writings on potlatch and Kurtycz’s own performative appropriation of this concept. To begin with, the strictly economic aspect of potlatch constituted a foundational concept within Kurtycz’s understanding of live art. Dismissing the Anglo-American concept of performance as a ‘linguistic miscarriage’, Kurtycz described each of his performances as an artefacto or art-i-fact. Perhaps inspired by the ideas of Polish theorist Jerzy Ludwinski, who replaced the notion of the work of art with ‘artistic fact’ (Radomska 2011, 48), this neologism presents performance art as a medium that not only seeks to resist the market, but which also involves various dynamics of materialization. Kurtycz writes: Art-i-fact ingeniously eludes any attempt at definition, but it has certain constants, such as, for example, visceral sincerity. Art-i-fact is the polar opposite of commercial art (only thus could the former destroy the latter one day). The value of an event-art-i-fact consists of its multiple interpretations, according to the level and the mental state of the spectators (and/or actors).10

In a text discussing Kurtycz’s oeuvre, the noted Polish philosopher Stefan Morawski, who corresponded with the artist for more than two decades, describes this stark resistance to the market as a ‘spontaneous kind of anarchism […] entirely free of doctrinal elements’. In explicit admiration, Morawski also contrasts what he calls the ‘sham qualities of postmodern art’ with the ‘spiritual splendor that radiates from Marcos Kurtycz’s anti-art (strictly speaking, his beyond-art)’.11 While I  shall not dwell on whether Kurtycz’s art possesses spiritual qualities, it is clear that, like in Bataille, the artist’s approach to destruction goes beyond an iconoclastic passion for effacement and seeks instead to produce a ritual poetics that is both performative and declassificatory. Indeed, one would be mistaken to understand Kurtycz’s ritual actions to have been primarily focused on the end product of this practice (the mere effacement of a painted canvas or an attack on painting tout court), instead of emphasizing those processes that take place during the ritual: the act of bringing near, touching, polluting or purifying; the confusion of subjectivities; the sharing of risk and intimacy; the possible reconfiguration of subject-object relations; the 42

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ritual act as an embodied form of transgression that indulges irreverence and play. This sort of irreverence may be understood in relation to Giorgio Agamben’s description of profanation as the possibility of challenging the distancing (and disciplining) effects of exhibitionary display, which not only privileges the gaze but also foregrounds the exchange value of art over its everyday or profane use value (2007, 73).12 In this sense, one could argue that Kurtycz conceived of the museum and the art gallery as temple-like institutions that not only consecrated works and artists but also neutralized their social value and prevented the ‘sacrificial’ shedding of their ‘sacred’ aura. Yet Kurtycz’s work did not simply seek to embrace the profane over the sacred, but strove for the mutual contamination of the two, in a movement that reminds us of Bataille’s own hybrid rendering of sacred and profane. That is, as Joseph Libertson has discussed, Bataille’s project is one that privileges contamination over synthesis and sustains the tension between opposing categories instead of aiming at their fusion or obliteration (1995, 212). In this sense, both Kurtycz’s work and Bataille’s writings introduce another level of complexity to an understanding of sacrifice as merely ‘rendering sacred’ or, correspondingly, profanation as merely ‘rendering profane’. Kurtycz and Bataille do not see the profane and the sacred as separate, homogeneous domains, but as fundamentally intertwined and heterogeneous; they conceive of the sacred as being both holy and base, ‘entirely other yet intimate’ (Bois 1997a, 52). Likewise, for them, sacrifice, as potlatch or dépense is neither an opening up to the transcendental nor a concept linked to André Breton’s appropriation of the marvellous, but an experience of base materialism, entirely distant from organized religion and devoid of an idealist or transcendental conception of closure (53). Moreover, according to Neil Cox, the sort of ‘[b]ase materialism’ involved in Bataille’s conception of sacrificial acts, ‘has the job of de-class(ify)ing, which is to say, simultaneously lowering and liberating from all ontological prisons, from any “devoir être” ’ (53). Rather than serving to create a stark line between sacrality and profanity, here sacrifice seeks to expose the confusion between these notions, to declassify them and expose their mutual contamination. This declassificatory potential of ritual goes hand in hand with Victor Turner’s discussion of the production of a condition of liminality – and its accompanying liminal personae (‘threshold people’) – through ritual (1969, 95). 43

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Following the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, Turner describes the ritual dynamic as a societal process going through successive phases – ‘separation, margin (or limen, signifying ‘threshold’ in Latin) and aggregation’ – and involving different arrangements of time and space, paired with certain subjective dispositions or states (1969, 94). The liminal phase of ritual creates possibilities for the emergence of what Jeremy Biles calls the Bataillan ‘sacrifice of form’ or ‘monstrosity’ (2007, 63).13 ‘Liminal entities’, writes Turner, ‘are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial’ (1969, 95). These entities have ambiguous and hybrid attributes that situate them at the margins of established social norms, identities and ranks. And, according to Turner, this social indeterminacy is expressed through a rich multiplicity of symbols: ‘liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality’ (1969, 95). The rich symbolic imaginaries associated with a liminal state or a liminal subjectivity bring to mind the multiple descriptions of Kurtycz as a ‘Polish magician’, ‘shaman’, ‘exorcist’ and even ‘cultural terrorist’ in the Mexican press.14 One could argue that Kurtycz occupied all of these positions and none. Above all else, he destabilized the division between Mexican and non-Mexican artist, for even though Kurtycz’s earliest artworks date back to his life in Poland, he became a performance artist in Mexico and ended up adopting Mexican nationality (facts that the press often overlooked). In Potlatch the artist further intensified this identity confusion by embodying the sacrificial disposition of the arguably ‘ancient Mexican’, as anachronistically and exotically described by Bataille in La Part maudite. Likewise, Kurtycz may be said to have come close to Joseph Beuys’ idea of the artist as shaman, insofar as he privileged the emotional and often strictly gestural elements of his art over its self-reflexivity, narrativity or conceptual closure (Foster et al. 2011, 527). Kurtycz’s shamanism was entirely simulacral, for he did not claim any exceptional quality for healing, nor did he call for a religious or societal reawakening. Th e artist’s shamanic associations were, by contrast, grounded in his theatrical embodiment of an expressive, repetitive and solemn gesturality that is often associated with archaic rituals led by shamanic figures. Thus, rather than partaking in an avant-garde celebration of innovation and 44

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originality, Kurtycz’s performances, like Jerzy Grotowski’s experimental theatre, endeavoured to recuperate a type of ‘corporeal unconscious’ that over time seemed to have been forgotten (Schechner 1993, 12). Indeed, Grotowski also conceived of his performances as ritual acts and paid special attention to the body’s movements and ‘resonances’ as well as to the affective intentionality of gesture (Osinski 1991, 103). Furthermore, Grotowski (who may or may not have had a direct influence on Kurtycz), defined the ‘performer’ as a ‘man of action’, namely, one who does not ‘play another’ but who, in performance, becomes ‘a dancer, a priest, a warrior’ (quoted by Osinski 1991, 105). Kurtycz’s exploration of his own forgotten gestural archive was deeply influenced by his experience of the violence of war in Nazi-occupied Poland. As Jennifer Burris observes, Kurtycz’s ‘long-standing preoccupation with self-destruction was […] grounded in the traumatic experiences of his early childhood in Eastern Europe’ (2015, 72), where most of the artist’s relatives, including his mother, were victims of the Holocaust. In his notebooks the artist made repeated references to his mother’s death, often sketching her as someone about to be executed by firing squad. Further, in the documentation accompanying the performance Cruz-Cruz [Cross-Cross] (1984), which was carried out in Tepoztlán, Mexico and involved burning a large-scale wooden swastika, the artist wrote: The swastika, […] the cross-over-a-cross is associated with myself; since childhood I  have known how to survive and escape death […] The fact is that I survived five years of war as a child; out of eighty people that constituted my family only three survived, my father, my sister and I. For me this symbol is very alive, a reminder of a strange and terrible occurrence in our century. But in itself it is not frightening it’s funny, it’s a heliocentric symbol, completely  solar. (Quoted in Alonso

Espinosa 2014, 265) Although this account of Kurtycz’s memories of Nazism may at first glance feel far removed from the shamanic logic of his Potlatch, the artist perceived this action and Cruz-Cruz to be intimately associated. As one can observe in Figure 7, Kurtycz wrote the title Cruz-Cruz on one of the few pictures of his action at the FCA, as if belatedly re-naming the 45

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original performance. Other references are present in Kurtycz’s description of the swastika as a solar sign and his own use of a solar technique to produce the painting that became the ‘sacrificial gift’. The description of Kurtycz in the Mexican press as a terrorist brings us to a different, yet equally complex terrain, which echoes long-standing critical debates on the relationship between the avant-garde and violence. As Boris Groys suggests, both the avant-garde artist and the terrorist search for visibility through shock while sharing an aspiration for radicalism (to the point that ‘the worst thing that can be said of an artist [is that] his or her art is “harmless”’). Yet for Groys these two social categories can be said to promote different understandings of radicalism: The terrorist, the warrior is radical  – but he is not radical in the same sense as the artist is radical. He does not practice iconoclasm. Rather, he wants to reinforce belief in the image, to reinforce the iconophilic seduction, the iconophilic desire. And he takes exceptional, radical measures to end the history of iconoclasm, to end the critique of representation. (2008, 125)15

These words construe a fundamentally antagonistic relationship between the avant-garde artist and the terrorist, based on a seemingly clear difference in their relationship to iconicity. Groys even defines the terrorist as the ‘enemy of the modern artist, because he tries to create images that have a claim to be true and real – beyond any criticism of representation’ (126). Likewise, for this author, the terrorist strives to found the social bond on the basis of fear, while the artist relies on affect in order to destabilize social convention. This universalizing model, however, fails to take into account the fact that when these concepts are not linked to a specific social setting they become increasingly fragile. In today’s world, where the category of the terrorist has gained prominence and lost almost any cultural or political specificity, these types of stark categorizations reduce terrorism to a unilateral and highly mediatized image of pure evil, ignoring changes in uses of the notion of ‘terror’ throughout history. Likewise, this perspective overlooks the possible strategic rendering by the state of certain public expressions of discontent into acts of terror, with the aim of justifying repressive policies. Furthermore, by creating a distance between artists and 46

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terrorists, and calling them enemies, this view fails to take notice of the difficulties inherent in differentiating between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, real and staged (or simulacral) forms of violence. Ultimately, Groys’ division disregards the Latin American experience between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, where, on the one hand, the definition of terror became entirely arbitrary, for states themselves practiced terror while homogenizing all dissidence as ‘terrorism’, and, on the other, guerrilla groupings adopted increasingly performative, not to say artistic, communicative strategies. Among the latter, there were many artists who did not conceive of their artistic practice as being separate from their political commitments (Camnitzer 2007, 53). Calling Kurtycz a ‘cultural terrorist’ in light of his bare-chested and self-sacrificial dances in front of impromptu audiences seems exaggerated and arguably inappropriate. Yet the artist himself repeatedly mobilized the symbolic associations of terrorist warfare with his works by accompanying his embodied attacks on official art venues with ‘letter bombs’ threatening museum directors should they not incorporate new media, new creators and new publics into their politics of display.

Letter Bombing One of Kurtycz’s most openly combative projects against a Mexican art institution involved threatening to tear down a small portion of the outer wall of Mexico’s Modern Art Museum (MAM). Before carrying out this action, the artist sent a letter to the museum’s director, Jorge Alberto Manrique (in tenure between 1987–88), which read: The Museum is surrounded by a thick wall that drastically separates it from the real world. As a consequence I have decided not to set foot in the Museum of Modern Art until this insulting fence disappears. I demand that you remove it within three months, thus avoiding severe physical consequences […] I already have a mass event perfectly planned and programmed entitled: RECOVERED XPACE.16

Kurtycz’s fury was triggered by a programming mistake, whereby one of his performances was planned for (and advertised as taking place on) a 47

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bank holiday, when the museum was closed. In light of the museum’s poor organization, Kurtycz’s letter threatened the director with the reappropriation of the space by and for the public, in a democratizing move that would allow a more porous relationship between the museum’s inside and outside. The artist did not follow up on his threats. Yet this letter served to express – and perform – his disagreement with the museum’s stagnant institutionality. Five years earlier, the artist had carried out a similar action, in which he suddenly appeared at the MAM to announce to the then director Helen Escobedo (1982–83) that she would be subjected to bomb attacks. This verbal threat was followed by 365  ‘letter bombs’ (one a day over a year), which encompassed a diverse array of communications sent by mail, each reflecting the artist’s inventive use of collage and his exploration of a wide range of printing techniques, including directly imprinting with ink traces of his own body on the letters. The first letter bomb, sent on 31 October 1981, reads towards the end: ‘It is a war. There will be no truce (unless the cost of postage rises)’. Despite the letter’s threatening tone, the closing joke reveals the duality of its intentions, endorsing spontaneity and humour as the keys to challenging institutional power. Kurtycz’s ‘bombardment’ of the MAM therefore sought to incite Escobedo to open the museum to new media, while developing innovative forms of relationality between the former and the public realm. Escobedo recalls that, as absorbed as she was by bureaucratic practicalities, sometimes she did not even have ‘time to open them, they kept piling up’ (2007, n.p.). Even as a mountain on the museum director’s desk, however, Kurtycz’s bombs did not go unnoticed; if only for their arresting envelopes (one of which juxtaposes Escobedo’s name ‘Helen’ with the word muerte [death], written backwards in capital letters) (see Figure 11). Escobedo continues: ‘the tone of the letter bombs was varied:  sometimes poetic, sometimes angry, sometimes grotesque, never straightforward’ (2007, n.p.). Yet, rather than being directly harmful, aggressive or explosive, the bombs were meant to be provocative, simultaneously triggering fear and laughter, while motivating the receiver to act (creatively) in response (see Figure 12). 48

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Figure  11. Envelope of a letter bomb sent by Marcos Kurtycz to sculptor Helen Escobedo when serving as Director of Mexico’s Museum of Modern Art (MAM) (c. 1982–83). Courtesy of the Estate of Helen Escobedo.

Although it might easily go unnoticed, there is a significant link between Kurtycz’s Potlatch and his letter bombs, since the latter’s affective demand for a binding response from the receiver recalls the idea of the ‘gift or rivalry’  – which in Mauss’ theory is tied to the circularity of exchange through the notion of the counter-gift (Mauss 2002 , 95). During her tenure at the MAM, Escobedo, herself a sculptor, did not consider these letters to be ‘art’ or keep them in the museum’s archive, but instead kept this correspondence for herself (in what would later on become her personal archive). Yet, according to Rita Eder’s recently published history of the MAM during Escobedo’s tenure, the sculptor conducted a silent dialogue with Kurtycz as she launched a series of major transformations to open up the museum to new media and embodied practices: With hindsight, it seems that Escobedo’s days in the museum elapsed in tandem with this character who provoked art with his invention of actions whose strange delicateness alluded to an extreme collective and individual violence, and who submitted the body of the artist to rigorous performative acts and a visual practice of paradox and irony. (Eder 2010, 35,

146, my translation on the basis of the bilingual edition) 49

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Figure 12. Letter bomb sent by Marcos Kurtycz to sculptor Helen Escobedo when serving as Director of Mexico’s Museum of Modern Art (MAM) (c. 1982–83). Courtesy of the Estate of Helen Escobedo.

Paradoxically, closing the cycle of gifts and counter-gifts, desecration and consecration which characterized Kurtycz’s relationship to the MAM, the artist’s letter bombs returned to the museum in 2013, as part of the exhibition Obras son amores [Works are Loved Ones] that revisited 50

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artistic production in Mexico from 1964 to 1992. This time, Kurtycz’s letter bombs did not need to infiltrate the institution clandestinely, for they were displayed as an ‘established’ form of art that had been influenced by movements like Fluxus and hence could be understood institutionally as ‘mail art’.17

Serialized Incineration In 1982, three years after Potlatch, Kurtycz printed a self-promotional leaflet which further emphasized his identification with Bataille. The leaflet’s inside pages displayed six successive stages in the process of destruction of a photographic self-portrait, burnt by the artist with fire (see Figure 13). In one of the leaflet’s outside pages, Kurtycz printed a summary of his biography (beginning: ‘I was born in Poland, an important but not very pleasant fact. Look. As a child, I  made it through the war. I  was eight when my mun was killed’) and, in another, he cited a long excerpt from La Part maudite, translated by Elizondo. In line with Bataille’s blood-soaked primitivism, the text, entitled La víctima sagrada y maldita [The Sacred

Figure 13. Marcos Kurtycz, leaflet for Artefacto Kurtycz (1982). Courtesy of Marcos Kurtycz Archive.

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and Accursed Victim], refers to the Aztec practice of sacrifice, stating that from the moment of being ‘chosen’ the sacrificial victim is ‘destined for violent consumption’. In other words, the victim becomes ‘the accursed share […] But the curse tears him away from the order of things, it gives him a recognizable figure, which now radiates intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living beings’. The text then continues by construing sacrifice as comprising ‘a mixture of anguish and frenzy’ that resulted from not just any form of excess, but from ‘excess […] that went beyond the bounds, and whose consumption appeared worthy of the gods’. ‘This was the price’, writes Bataille (cited by Kurtycz), ‘men paid to escape their downfall and remove the weight introduced in them by the avarice and cold calculation of the real order’. In this excerpt, the sacrificial victim escapes the state of ‘thing’, thus renouncing any social utility and entering the unstable and Janus-faced domain of the sacred, that is ‘at once life-giving and death-dealing’ (Eagleton 2005, 115). As stressed by Rosalind E. Krauss, it was this ‘double condition of the sacred’ (1986, 55) that interested Bataille in his approach to Aztec sacrifices as he referred to the ‘astonishingly joyous character of these horrors’ (Bataille 1970, 157). By bringing together this text, his own bibliography and his burnt portrait in this leaflet, Kurtycz seems to suggest a self-identification with the sacrificial victim.18 There is, however, an unsettlingly controlled aspect of this approach to self-erasure. The division of the destruction of Kurtycz’s portrait into six stages reveals the delicately contained and mediated character of this production of a (self-)sacrificial sensibility. In this light, Kurtycz’s serialized staging of the incineration of his own face echoes Éli Lotar’s series of pictures of the butchery at La Villette, in Paris, which accompanied the entry ‘Abattoir’ in Documents’ Critical Dictionary.19 In one of Lotar’s pictures two rows of chopped cows’ feet are depicted as carefully cleaned and aligned against an exterior wall, an image that resists Bataille’s initial attempt to associate the butchery with ‘the mythic mysteries and lugubrious grandeur typical of those places in which blood flows’ (1970, 205). Yve-Alain Bois considers these pictures as a ‘kind of climax, within the journal, of the iconography on horror’ (1997b, 43). Paradoxically, however, this feeling did not result from their depiction of unbounded blood and indiscriminate mutilation, but from their ‘sinister’ representation of killing as an orderly, symmetrical fully systematic act (44). For Bois, these images suggest that ‘it is not violence as such that 52

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interests Bataille, but its civilized scotomization that structures it as otherness, as heterogeneous disorder’ (46). That is, Bataille conceives of violence as deeply entrenched in human societies, and therefore only able to be understood as ‘other’ through its organized veiling. As revealed in his serialized portrait, a similar treatment of violence seems to traverse Kurtycz’s work, yet in this case the artist’s orderly impulse towards self-erasure both cloaks and makes visible the violence of his iconoclastic critique of figuration. Likewise, here the artist puts into tension the arguably false distinction between creation and destruction.

… by Way of Proximity Focusing on the place of violence and ritual in Kurtycz’s performance art, this chapter has offered a close reading of the artist’s 1979 Potlatch at the FCA. I have argued that this work partakes in the profanation of the symbolic and marketable value of art while, concomitantly, creating the conditions for its consecration as a lived, ritual experience similar to play in that it structures a series of actions, movements and interactions without being linked to any particular mythology, political or otherwise.20 Similarly, the live action explores the de-classificatory potentiality of ritual, indulging in what Turner describes as the ‘opening up’ of time and space. In other words, the artist’s violent entry into the art gallery not only marked a temporal break but also made visible the time-dependency of the artwork’s sensory effects. Potlatch profoundly affected the gallery’s usual dynamics of sociability, as the spatial disposition of the public changed in relation to people’s interest in becoming part of the performance (and coming close to one another while encircling the artist, possibly putting themselves at risk of receiving a drop of the falling acid) or remaining distant from it, ignoring the artist’s interruption of the ‘official’ event. Fully exploring the liminal ambiguity characteristic of ritual process, Kurtycz may be said to have embodied the roles of thespian, saboteur and shaman; to have conducted a risk-infused playful ritual and conceived of it, in Richard Schechner’s words, as ‘liminal-liminoid, unauthorized, antistructural, subjective (“if ”), and subversive’ (1993, 256). The liminal quality of certain performative practices opens the way for new models of embodiment and social structuring, but avoids bringing them to a state of closure, because, as suggested 53

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by Schechner, rather than being an experience oriented towards the establishment of new foundations, they allow the subject to experiment with new ontic possibilities. I see Kurtycz’s embrace of indeterminacy, and (what Morawski saw as) his ‘anarchist’ resistance to align his art with any predefined political goal, as embodying a shift away from the distanced antagonism of earlier experiences of political art both in Mexico and the Southern Cone and towards the practice of déchirure (using Bataille’s terminology) or exposure by way of proximity. ‘Déchirure’ in Bataille, as Didi-Huberman suggests, ‘always begins as access, as contact. It is here that touch exposes: it is the transgression of the taboo of touch which, almost always, ends by opening up concepts or words’ (1995, 36, original emphais).21 Thus, in Kurtycz’s ritual performances, the act of institutional profanation unfolds through direct contact with the institution, its infiltration, the (expository) play with its norms and categories and the search in situ for new forms of contact and organization of artist, artwork, public and exhibitionary space. In this process, all of these categories are closely dependent upon each other, yet also mutable, re-imaginable and, ultimately, sacrificable.

References Acha, Juan. 1993. “De la modernización a la posmodernidad, 1970–1990.” In Las culturas estéticas de América Latina, 173–197. Mexico City : UNAM. Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. “In Praise of Profanation.” In Profanations, 73–92. New York and London: Zone. Alonso Espinosa, Ángeles. 2014. “Marcos Kurtycz.” In América Latina 1960–2013. Fotos + textos, 264–265. Puebla and Paris:  Museo Amparo and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Appi, Amadá. 1985. “Transborder:  Marcos Kurtycs Espectáculo del polaco.” Untitled, 6. Bataille, Georges. 1949. La Part maudite:  essai d’économie générale. Paris:  Les Éditions de Minuit. ———1970. Oeuvres completes. Premiers écrits, 1922–1940. Paris: Gallimard. ———1974. Théorie de la religion. Paris: Gallimard. ———1988. The Accursed Share:  An Essay on General Economy. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone. ———1992. “Formless.” Translated by Dominic Faccini. Documents 7. Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York:  Oxford University Press.

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Shaman, Thespian, Saboteur Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum:  History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge. ——— 2007. Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form. NY: Fordham University Press. Bois,Yve-Alain.1997a. “Abattoir.” In Formless: A User’s Guide, edited by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, 43–50. New York: Zone Books. ———1997b. “Base Materialism.” In Formless: A User’s Guide, by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, 51–62. New York: Zone. Bradley, Fiona, and Dawn Ades. 2006. “Introduction.” In Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, edited by Dawn Ades and Simon Baker, 11–16. London and Cambridge, MA: Hayward Gallery-MIT Press. Burris Staton, Jennifer. 2015. “Marcos Kurtycz.” In Arqueologías de Destrucción 1959–2014, 72. Haveford, PA: Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. Camnitzer, Luis. 2007. Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation. Austin: University of Texas Press. Camp, Roderic A. 1999. Politics in Mexico:  The Decline of Authoritarianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coffey, Mary K. 2012. How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cortés, Ana Lilia. 1985. “Marcos Kurtycz:  Un Terrorista Cultural.” El Mexicano, July 22. Cox, Neil. 2006. “Sacrifice.” In Undercover Surrealism. Georges Bataille and Documents, edited by Dawn Ades and Simon Baker, 106–117. London and Cambridge, MA: Hayward Gallery and MIT. Debroise, Olivier, and Cuauhtémoc Medina. 2014. “Genealogía de una exposición.” In La era de la discrepancia, edited by Olivier Debroise and Cuauthémoc Medina, 20–26. Mexico City : UNAM. ———eds. 2014. La era de la discrepancia: arte y cultura visual en México, 1968–1997. Mexico City : UNAM. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1995. La Ressemblance informe, ou, Le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille. Paris: Macula. Douglas, Mary. 2002. Foreword to The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, by Marcel Mauss, ix–xx. Oxon: Routledge Classics. Eagleton, Terry. 2005. Holy Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eder, Rita. 2010. El arte contemporáneo en el Museo de Arte Moderno de México durante la gestión de Helen Escobedo (1982–1984). Mexico City : UNAM. Escobedo, Helen. 2007. “Conversación Con Helen Escobedo.” Testimonios. Kurtycz. http://www.marcoskurtycz.com.mx/testimonios.htm. Accessed: 7 January 2014. Espinosa, César, and Araceli Zúñiga. 2002. La Perra Brava. Arte, crisis y políticas culturales. Periodismo cultural (y otros textos) de los años 70 a los 90. Mexico City : UNAM and STUNAM.

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Sabotage Art ffrench, Patrick. 2007. After Bataille:  Sacrifice, Exposure, Community. Leeds: Legenda. Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and David Joselit. 2011. Art since 1900:  Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. London: Thames & Hudson. Groys, Boris. 2008. Art Power. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Kosuth, Joseph. 1999. “Art After Philosophy.” In Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, 158–177. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT. Krauss, Rosalind E. 1986. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Libertson, Joseph. 1995. “Bataille and Communication:  Savoir, Non-Savoir, Glissement, Rire.” In On Bataille:  Critical Essays, edited by Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons, 209–230. Albany : State University of New York Press. Mariotte, Corinee. 1985. “Kurticz, un polaco mágico.” Unpaginated. Mauss, Marcel. 2002. The Gift:  The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Oxon: Routledge Classics. Mayer, Mónica. 1996. “Marcos Kurtycz (1934–96).” El Universal. March 19. Miller, C.F.B. 2006. “Archaeology.” In Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, edited by Dawn Ades, Simon Baker, and Fiona Bradley, 42–50. London and Cambridge, MA: Hayward Gallery and MIT Press. Monsiváis, Carlos. 2005. “No sin nosotros”:  Los días del terremoto 1985–2005. Mexico City : Ediciones Era. ——— 2010. Historia mínima de cultura mexicana en el siglo XX. Mexico:  Colegio de México. Navarrete Cortés, Alejandro. 2014. “La producción simbólica en México durante los años ochenta.” In La era de la discrepancia, edited by Olivier Debroise and Cuauhtémoc Medina, 291–297. Mexico City : UNAM. Oles, James. 2013. Art and Architecture in Mexico. London: Thames & Hudson. Osinski, Zbigniew. 1991. “Grotowski Blazes the Trails: From Objective Drama to Ritual Arts.” TDR 35: 95–112. Radomska, Katarzyna. 2011. “Illustration of the Field of Art.” In Jerzy Ludwinski. Filling the Blanks, 45–49. Wrockaw : Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu. Rancière, Jacques. 2000. Le partage du sensible. Paris: La Fabrique. Rodda, John. 2012. “ ‘Prensa, Prensa’:  A  Journalist’s Reflections on Mexico ‘68.” In Reflections on Mexico ‘68, edited by Keith Brewster, 1–22. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. Sansi, Roger. 2014. “The Pleasure of Expense: Mauss and The Gift in Contemporary Art.” Journal of Classical Sociology 14 (1): 91–99. Schechner, Richard. 1993. The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance. London: Routledge.

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Shaman, Thespian, Saboteur Turner, Victor W. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Routledge and K. Paul. Vázquez Mantecón, Álvaro. 2014. “Los Grupos: una reconsideración.” In La era de la discrepancia, edited by Olivier Debroise and Cuauhtémoc Medina, 194–196. Mexico: UNAM.

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3 Pictorial Eviscerations, Emblems and Self-Immolation in Mexico Dissensus in the Work of Enrique Guzmán and Nahum B. Zenil Erica Segre

I. Insubordination ‘The hired applauder, considered by someone as recent as Daumier as an excrescence, has now attained respectability as an official agent of the cultural system.’ Theodor Adorno, ‘Death of Immortality’ (1945)1 ‘I must rebel against my submission/and submit myself before my rebelliousness./The stagnant waters watch me fixedly’. José Emilio Pacheco, ‘Status quo’ (1969) ‘Think of the storm that with rain-blast disorders everything into shreds’. José Emilio Pacheco, ‘1968 (III)’ (1969)2 ‘He fell to the ground, was kicked, lost his marijuana. Then they put him against the wall with his trousers round his ankles and hands in the air. With a sidelong glance he managed to distinguish the murderous gleam approaching, as the scissors penetrated his hair and moved up to the top of his scalp with their atrocious hissing, destroying his once legendary locks […] Day by day the repression was becoming 58

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more brutal and a bayonet could ensure that his entrails would suffer the same fate as his hair.’ Juan Villoro, ‘1969’ (1986)3 ‘Reality in Mexico is subversive. This is how things are now. I would go so far as to claim that it isn’t even necessary to adopt a political position on the left. Repression (torture, disappearances, censorship) is deployed so that through the instrument of terror it may be possible to prevent others from speaking of and denouncing what a few had refused to silence. And likewise so that also through intimidation and a sense of insecurity, the so-called agitators of protest rein in their activity. In short, reality on being known becomes denunciation, on being denounced becomes subversion. The repressive measures that have taken place have revealed that the dominant class, at every level, has so much to hide that civil liberties/freedoms instead of being expanded are being reduced.’ Octavio Rodríguez Araujo, ‘Reality is subversive’ (1978)4 ‘Art does not turn us into rebels by throwing in our faces the despicable, nor mobilizes us simply by dint of pursuing us outside the museum. Perhaps it can infect us with its critique, not only its indignation, if art disengages itself from the languages that are complicit with the prevailing social order.’ Néstor García ‘What are we Talking about When we Talk of Resistance?’ (2009)5

II. Decorum ‘ “– Excuse me, Don Alfonso [Reyes, the celebrated writer and luminary] would you mind if I take the liberty of removing my jacket? – Ye Gods! After the monstrosity that we have just heard, you can defecate on the table if you feel like it” ’. Jaime García Terres, The Theatre of Events (1988)6

‘The Mexican populace like all peoples educated to an exacting ethical standard – today fallen out of fashion – is convinced that the world is made up of goodies and baddies. We are the goodies and the rest are the baddies. The following step in this logic consists in assuming that everything that comes from outside can infect us, or, what is even more serious in Mexican terms, denigrate us. So have come into being a variety of legal instruments serving as the prophylactics of censorship, the operations of which may be unconstitutional, but that spring from the very depth of the Mexican soul, which left to its own 59

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devices likes to interfere where it has no business and rub out what it doesn’t like.’ Jorge Ibargüengoitia, ‘An Examination of Patriotic Conscience’ (1974)7

III. Self-Immolation ‘I will not renounce the abyss/Nor the tightrope/When I plummet/I fear being injured by the net […]/If you tell me to stop/I will continue to the end […]/Demolitions fortify you’. Marco Antonio Montes de Oca, ‘Retobos’, from Splinters (1973)8 ‘But sometimes undulating it descends/Silk Manta ray/carnal flag/living wave […]/I am knocked awake/ a purple gash/cuts the wind’s tail/ the turbulence of exiled flesh boils […]/clearly visible the wounds stitched/ with the white thread trailing behind boats’. Montes de Oca, ‘Journey Around a Pillow’ (1973)9

IV. Sabotage ‘We call on the militant student community and on revolutionary intellectuals to transform schools and workplaces into the frontline of the struggle for the Socialist Revolution. We call on all the population to fight the rich capitalists wherever they may be, to attack their wealth and property and destroy their police-military forces and their exploitative and oppressive system. The duty of every revolutionary is to prosecute the Revolution with weapons in hand: Victory or Death!’ Communiqué from Lucio Cabañas, Party of the Poor, Mountains of the State of Guerrero (March 1973)10

The Poetics of the Razor Blade In the 1970s, the Mexican painter Enrique Guzmán (1952–1986) turned the disposable razor blade into a personal double-edged emblem that spoke of the self-embedded nature of his pictorial disassembly and desecratory splicing of a conservative image environment and its dogmatic nationalist iconography. The illusionistically rendered Gilette blade, its sheet steel as slice-thin as the promised closest of close shaves, evokes the epidermic proximity of a body of wincing superficiality not always in the frame; a body often represented through truncated extremities, such as the 60

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ambivalent clasp of clasped hands compressing flesh on the slit insertion of reciprocated blades in Friendship (1974); or as the series of absented self-portraits in ink and pencil where solitary hand or thumb brandish the eponymous safety razor’s wafer-thin, reflective surface and its seamless cutting double-edges.11 The gestural language of choreographed solidarity, insubordination and subaltern power that Diego Rivera developed in mural narratives and graphic illustration in the 1920s, so ubiquitous a device as to inspire the satirical dislocation of mannequin’s fists and arms in José Clemente Orozco’s The Carnival of Ideologies (1937–38),12 is here, in Guzmán’s figuration, rescaled and segmented into disassembly rather than panel sequencing turning the dramatic body language of epic rebellion into that conceptual ‘double-edge’, the paradox of self-suppressing art. On reflection, the guarantee of the safety razor that its incisions may be trusted to cut but not to wound creates an interestingly equivocal emblem of an artistic practice that while at first seeming to flatter a dangerous facility to sever, slice and puncture, is peculiarly resolved into the nullity of the blunt, disposable blade, a mere symbol of its lost incisions and incisiveness. Therein lies the suspenseful possibility, conveyed by the gravity-defying hovering of blades in his spatial compositions, that the blunted through overuse may be only a simulated inertia reactivated by the scalpel-effect of a self-immolating reflex. So we turn to the fragile contours of the sketchily rendered, kitsch laughing baby and fluffy–bunny pet encircled by the radii of out-sized blades (1973) or the decorous Tehuana substitute of Señora Tehuana (1976) coifed with archetypal ‘Huipil grande’ as she clasps a razor blade as if to pluck an implausible folkloric tune. And then perhaps obediently recoil before the carefully modelled reclining head in profile, Untitled (see Figure 13), the tendons straining on the exposed neck, mouth open, a daintily held blade between thumb and forefinger glimpsed into view as if piercing the frame from above against a celestial blue and, unexpectedly, register the applied scalpel scraped brush strokes in formless textures disfiguring the eyes and forehead, interjecting our vision of the painted gaze. The expectant baring posture seems compliant, prepared for the approaching blade yet our attention is displaced to the effect of an actual rather than imagined contact. The impasto of virulent, overlaying strokes, in a neat inversion, surfaces a subtext of insubordination inflicted on the image by an inferred, much less regulated second hand. The sacrificial and 61

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self-mutilating intersect in the preserve of Guzmán’s figurative equivocation on the fine razor line between inconformity and restoration. In Sacrificio (1976), the razor’s countercultural sorties are involuted as its edge, upscaled to resemble a guillotine, protrudes from a proffered neck, the head of the victim resting on a window sill with blood dripping frozen in a tear below. A white flag of surrender and an emasculated agave cactus in a pot allude metonymically to the severing of a pictorial jugular that would have led irrevocably to the Escuela Mexicana de Pintura [Mexican School of Painting], and perhaps, to Orozcos’s own emblem of a foundational cultural castration, the maguey topado (or pruned cactus). Found in an initiatory mural panel evoking conquest and coerced conversion, it appears as a still-life composition beneath the prostrate body of the sacrificed Indian male lying at the feet of Hernan Cortés and his native consort La Malinche (1926, located in the former Escuela Nacional Preparatoria).13 In Guzmán’s painting the familiar trope of the window and exposed casement seen from behind, so that the framework is reversed into view, acknowledge the mimicry of figuration but converted into the site of a gratuitous act of self-inflicted violence. For the conceit of trompe-l’oeil has been excised from the domain of artfulness and inserted into the scenography of its discontents, a caesura manifesting impotence rather than ironic ingenuity. The anti-establishment disfigurations and the anti-painterly practices of collectives in Mexico, with conceptual infractions of civic infrastructure and museum spaces, articulated provocations at odds with reputable canvas, art school diplomas and an aesthete’s realism, leaving Guzmán to unfurl his self-negating emblems and icons in a knowingly discredited currency. And if the razor blade may be the instrument of choice of the cutting and pasting, splicing and dissective techniques of the iconoclasts of fine art’s superfluities, perhaps the pictorial assimilation of such an eviscerating aggressor in Guzmán’s series of subtractive self-portraits (in pencil and ink) may be understood as complicitous rather than as a prelude to a wounded victimhood.14 For example, the Promethean hand as transformative utensil of homo faber, the limb denoting technical mastery and metaphysical grace, encountered in Albrecht Dürer’s hyper-naturalistic sketches of hands in grasping and gestural poses, provides a meta-pictorial counterpoint for Guzmán’s line drawing Hand with Flag and Blade (1976). Here the consecrated trinity of figurative art, nationalism and defensive 62

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violence acquires a self-parodying irony. The irregularly scaled emblems defy their naturalistic rendering and the drawing hand, the active principle, is stilled and objectified – appearing, in its dismembered state, rather more like a prosthetic appurtenance. Such disabused juxtapositions may appear unsurprising in the discrepant artistic environment in the aftermath of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre and the intensifying repression and neutering of the media that ensued, but its derision is tacit and calibrated.15 We find the precedent for this evocation of a facile and self-congratulatory art co-opted by the State in Guzmán’s painting Sound of a Hand Clapping or Wounded Marmot (see Figure 14), where two pairs of applauding hands of a compliant (art) establishment (alongside frankly sycophantic smiling heads) are pictured so as to resemble, with calculated ambiguity, the praying gesture of the worshipful. The hollow resonance of such ingratiating art-making is matched by other emblems of flaccid or diminished power providing a wallpaper pattern at once inanely decorative and well-mannered, as well as surreptitiously scatological and obscene. The Mexican National Flag (or Tricolor) folded limply on its mast is picked up in a repeated, diminutive motif. Equally miniaturized penises create a parallel line of unassuming display. The paradigmatic trompe-l’oeil object, the square of blank paper pinned to canvas often carrying the artist’s signature, in Guzmán’s flattened composition provides a fringe of small, illusionistic shapes showing indecipherable, blurred marks on their white surfaces. A sequence of lurid red tongues neatly rendered, each with the perforation used for hanging ex-votos of limbs and organs in commemorative altars, turns their potential branding of irreverence into something incongruously demure and obsequious. The vivisected body of a hare-like creature, sliced belly with entrails exposed, extending its limbs in a crucified pose occupies the centre with furred sexual orifice visibly splayed. Between the clapping hands, the disturbing anthropomorphism of kitchen still lifes with hanging, eviscerated game reflects obliquely not only on Christian sacrifice and punishment but also on carnality (both rabbit and hare imagery being traditionally associated with lasciviousness).16 The flesh of this quintessential victim of violence, the wounded persecuted animal, has been unfurled and its cadaverous blue entrails re-arranged decorously as pleasing pattern and form, conflating its status as a memento mori and bibelot artefact. If Dürer’s iconic hare exemplifies an unsurpassed lifelikeness, 63

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Figure 14. Enrique Guzmán, Sonido de una mano aplaudiendo or marmota herida/ Sound of a Hand Clapping or Wounded Marmot, 1973. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Galería Arvil.

in Guzmán’s painting it is this very lifelikeness of art that is made captive and eviscerated in an act of sardonic and unpalatable consumption. How much more stilled and deathly for being the body of an animal glimpsed for speed and evanescence. Guzmán’s penned quarry opens a view onto his peculiarly dyspeptic devotion to a cult of painting fixated by its own iconicity: as Carlos Monsiváis observed of Guzmán’s inclination to subvert his non-conformist art-making: ‘someone so far removed from all conventionalism in art still believed it to be sacrosanct’ (2004, 8). Of course to call 64

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a hare by another name is to reveal the inadequacy of the resemblance, to expose the grain of the self-deprecating pastiche: a marmota does not have the art historical pedigree of a hare, it is a poor equivalent and a tellingly inferior execution. Can one read these entrails as shamans of old (or Josef Beuys) reviewed the palpitating innards of tribal familiars? Surrounded as it is by decontextualized emblems, the dead animal congregates the conventional signs (flags, roses, doves) with the disjecta that exceed their meaningful plasticity yet which invite, through the physical disclosure of the wound, a deeper scrutiny and perplexity. Guzmán’s exhibitionary autodestrucción [self-destruction] traverses a commonly held ground of meta-subversive practices in creative media that turned provocation into burlesque and self-parody, that included cells such as Roberto Bolaño’s vandalic Infrarrealistas (1973–76) and the self-annihilating mock nihilism of No grupo (1977), a parodic guerrilla who targeted the solemnity of engagé artist collectives.17 His attachment to the razor blade in painting only simulates the inertia of the emblem, for it intersects with multiple fronts of non-conformist art and performance implicating the body as site of pain, injury, substance abuse and protest that radicalize the stillness of his compositions. From reflexive still lifes such as Alternativa 2 (1977), where it peers from a blank fold of paper in a glass jar, to the transfixed mannequin against a transversed wall impaled by protruding blades of El melancólico (1977), the object acquires a less enigmatic versatility for example when it is reprised in the widely referenced wounding and incising actions of the founder of body art Gina Pane from 1970 to 1976. Pane resorted to photographic stills in black-and-white and in colour, using the graphic supports of scrapbook, grid or contact sheet, for a posthumous visualization of her self-infractions.18 This vein of artistry based on the affects of literal mutilation and the commingling of blood-letting (through the use of a razor blade) as symbol, trace and technique sought to suture the biological, the psychological and the social by affronting the spectator through the directed spectacle of the wound. Works such as Blessure théorique (1970), Azione sentimentale (1973), Action mélancolique 2 x 2 x 2 (1974) and Action Le Corps pressenti (1975) incorporated gestures of self-mutilation in the history of art, such as that of Van Gogh, as a tribute to an estranged and yet aggressively invested practice of image-making predicated on a disassociated individualism. If we turn to Guzmán’s Pacto de 65

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sangre (1975), the instrument of self-expression and the instrument of torture are one and the same. The title here alludes to a lexicon of negotiation, adhesion and complicity that is frequently disarticulated from the vantage point of the empty zones and insular figures of his disjunct scenarios, cleft frames and black mirrors, and the transubstantiated interior landscapes (see Interior Landscape, 1975) that posit elsewhere as structures of visual entrapment and marooning (see Platform with Signal, 1975). The pact in this painting seems sealed by a self-destructive pledge:  grasping hands align in close-up with the fingers interlaced over biro pen and razor resting on the white paper presumably to collect the signature in blood. The overlaying hand is marked by a sharp bleeding cut on skin obtruding into the central viewing punctum of the frame. These penetrating, puncturing implements, grasped so as to turn their points of contact inwards while enacting a haptic moment, serve to belie what is evidenced, to undo the relational act emblematized on canvas and turn it into a mordant undercutting of its symbolic code of communication (reverentially associated with victimhood and transcendence that Guzmán had thematized in Estigma [1974]). This curtailing of signifying agency through a suppressive design that deflates the potency of the body language represents Guzmán’s deployment of self-defeating processes as a form of ‘selfless’ dissent and de-consecration.

¡Oh Santa Bandera!: Civic Decorum, Disrespect and Dissensus A recurrent preoccupation in Guzmán’s work during the years that witnessed the Dirty War, guerrilla activism and sabotage (Lucio Cabañas [1936–74] and the Party of the Poor)19 and the emergence of gay20 and feminist militancy in Mexico, was the reconfiguring of the symbol of state nationalism and patriotic fervour, ‘Oh Holy Flag!’. Distressing its immutable verities, Guzmán relocated it within the unstable territory of his painting, alongside an eccentric mythology of revolutionary relics, dismemberment, popular replicas and self-absenting portraiture that figuratively defiled and soiled without actually attacking the material integrity of the painting as object of the specular gaze and curatorial regimes. In La patria (see Figure 15) he transgresses a conventional patriotic still life, 66

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Figure 15. Enrique Guzmán, La patria/Motherland, 1977. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Galería Arvil.

replacing the national coat of arms in the centre with the yawning cavity of a mouth stretched into a wordless shout. Rather than the well-rehearsed defiance of the anthem or the ritual ‘Grito’/’Shout’ of the insurgent Padre Hidalgo performed at celebrations of Mexican independence, the painting commemorates the deadly fixations of an official populism disinclined to respect the freedom of speech of its people. A discarded brogue-like shoe, redolent of the officious clerks of capitalism and of bourgeois respectability, holds the balance of power in the composition, treading down the white square of cloth within an inch of the gaping mouth in lieu of a paper weight. 67

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A commemorative rose positioned so as to absorb the blood red square on the flag seems to speak a language of remembrance and disenchantment. We live in indecorous times and it is worth being reminded of the decorum, deference and ceremony that prevailed in Mexican political and civic life, the ossified pageantry and longevity of which was memorably satirized by writers such as Carlos Monsiváis and Jorge Ibargüengoitia, along with multimedia artists such as Felipe Ehrenberg, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Helen Escobedo.21 It is important to acknowledge the extent to which the prerogatives of these official symbols of nationhood and collective identity, and of the ceremonies in which they were paraded and venerated, were and are enshrined in laws that protect the inviolate appearance of patriotic symbols such as the flag and the national anthem.22 It is interesting to note that despite the existing regulations to standardize uses and properties of the national flag, it increased in size and ubiquity in public spaces as the crisis of the one party state under the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) and the discrediting of official nationalism deepened in the 1990s. The Monumental Flag programme was inaugurated in Mexico City in 1999 by presidential decree and then spread countrywide. Administered by the Ministry of National Defence this amounted to a campaign to renationalize symbolic spaces of cultural power in the mass-mediatic age with flagpoles reaching 50 metres and flag dimensions ballooning to over 14 metres in height. With this degree of vigilance and prohibition centred on the national emblem, the bellicose lyrics of the anthem and the etiquette of spectating, irreverence can readily turn into a criminal act with overtones of treason. From this presumption of wrongdoing to sabotage of the nation state is an easy extrapolation to make in relation to even the most taciturn yoking of such references to dissent as in the case of Guzmán’s derisory flag-waving. In Patriotic Day (1978), the bisected picture plane reflects on one side a framed classic landscape of transparent blue sky and unmatched luminosity seen through a circular inset, while on the other, outside the pictured frame an ashen-hued tree and makeshift hut in sullied cobalt speak of a fall from the Mexicanist sublime. A  long-stemmed flag cuts across the panoramic view of the central valley of Mexico reminiscent in both style and eagle-eyed perspective of José María Velasco’s foundational geographies, large-scale illusionistic works exhibited in salons and international fairs during Porfirio Díaz’s nation-building dictatorship. Velasco’s 68

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awe-inspiring vistas had become synonymous with the idea of a pictorial heritage of splendid monumentality even as the terrain it idealized in the late nineteenth century was disappearing under the urban sprawl.23 While not flying at half-mast as the funereal drop in iconic value might suggest, the cloth sports the tell-tale shoe on white ground where the prophetic symbols of Empire should be, the eagle on a cactus gripping a snake with its talons signalling the site of a prophesied Aztec homeland. The valedictory irony of this painting encompasses the pathway of the figurative in the Mexican tradition, as if Guzmán’s return to a painterly tradition was itself a threshold to spectrality, to a deracinated and irrecuperable site of foundation. As we have seen, Guzmán’s figurative art-making, through careful excisions and re-assembly of segments, slices at the surface of its semblance and rescales the constrictions of his own picture library (full of readymade images and conventional icons). His hyper-framed works, with casements, panels, edges, trompe-l’oeil partitions and underscored contours seem to point to a closed world of pictorial objects and their margins – but the displacements of things in his paintings often yield to the lure of desecratory appropriations, tacitly irreverent yet well-presented in the stultifying decorum of the public picture frame. While retaining faith in the capacity of the figurative as a strategy of ironic and dissective inscription in a contemporaneity marked by state terror, censorship and the radicalization of art practices influenced by Fluxus, Arte Povera and non-conventional media, Guzmán gained notoriety not through his painterly insolence but through an act of seemingly spontaneous vandalism that sought to sabotage the operations of the cultural institutions controlling awards, exhibitions and the politics of visibility in the arts. In 1978, Guzmán attacked and sought to destroy the winning entry by artist Beatriz Zamora (b. 1935) at the awards ceremony held in the Palace of Fine Arts before assembled media, critics and cultural bureaucrats. The large monochrome painting with an abstract expressionist texture that Zamora was to perfect and execute in a continuous series of black canvases for the next four decades absorbed his assault (wielding a fire extinguisher) with little damage to its coarse-grained surface.24 Guzmán used the ensuing fracas at this Salon of National Painting (SNP), in which he was arrested and publicly berated by art historian Raquel Tibol, to make known 69

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through the media the contestatory agenda behind what he defended as a ‘lucid’ act of sabotage against work that he claimed was both cynically derivative and instrumentalized.25 The apparently frenzied performance elaborated on Guzmán’s contrarian defence of creative disaffection from within what he upheld as the exacting labour of figuration. It made explicit his opposition to deferential and retrograde mimicry of non-figurative ‘high art’ in a prevailing international, New York-based style that offered portentous solemnity without content or engagement. Although his incursion was roundly demonized and ridiculed, it is worth remembering that it was part of a wider phenomenon of insubordination in 1978 against the state-funded art establishment’s political ties and lack of independence, as charted in the press of the period:  the alleged corruption and ineptitude of judges behind exhibition selections, patronage and awards had been the source of vocal protests by artists and art historians (including Raquel Tibol).26 Compared to the no less implosive interventions based on his style of subtractive exposure in Patriotic Symbols (1973), The Swallows Escape to Switzerland (1977), La patria (1977) and ¡Oh Santa Bandera! (1977), Guzmán’s action (rather than act) in the gallery seemed out of artistic character with its dramatic and overt testimony and its affirmative self-daubing. Yet it served to reinstate, through the collateral damage to his reputation, the necessarily self-inflicted destruction prescribed by the Devil’s pact with an aesthetic co-opted by a hegemonic cultural nationalism. It vindicated the self-immolating pact Guzmán had visualized, his compromising espousal of ‘the art of killing art’ in Marco Antonio Montes de Oca’s line from his poem about a new sentience ‘The Art of the Deaf and Dumb’ of 1973 (17–20): The art of inverting everything/The art that erases the blank page/The art of reading the entrails of an eviscerated female python/uninhabited and taciturn art/The art that lives cursing history.

The possibility of a self-defeating and misguided act provides a disposable aura of menace to the exhibition of his paintings, presaging an indiscipline apparently at odds with the formal finish of his works. In 1983, in his guise as unfaithful disciple of figurative art, Guzmán slashed with a cutter his own mise-en-abyme painting Well-known Young Lady of 70

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the Club, the Arrival of Happiness Having Its Picture Taken with a Parasol (1973) while it was being shown in the art gallery of the Casa de la Cultura of Aguascalientes, sealing his reputation for self-arresting development. The many anchored ships and empty perfume or medicine bottles portrayed in his work provide a poeticization of becalmed vanguards, evocative of an art aware of its superfluity where image is a shade of a shadow, like the imperceptible olfactory memory clinging to an empty vessel used to contain masking or suppressing infusions. If this constitutes Guzmán’s self-sabotage it can only be so in the most diffuse mimicry of the contemporary instances of political acts of sabotage, predicated on violent action, against a social order and government taken to be illegitimate and oppressive. In pressing the analogy further it yields a troubling equidistance, pointing to the two sides of the coin that Guzmán liked to flip literally in pictorial close-ups. Assaults, the aim of which is to disrupt and destroy the operations or symbolic sites of power, presume an adversarial engagement based on irreducible polarities. While bent on pure negation such tactics of sabotage rather than effecting the rupture so urgently desired, enact a retaliatory dependence that interpenetrates fatally the enemy of the state and the defenders of the system. Not only two-sided but also duplicitous, the only exit from this paradoxical two-way street, in which subversion perpetuates the subordination it is intended to overcome, seems to reside in the zone of utter indeterminacy, placing a death wish at the centre of figurative art. As to whether an act of mutilation that is self-destructive can be made interchangeable with the terminology of subversive guerrilla movements without a qualifying irony or ethical scruple, remains a pressing question since its violations register a comparatively harmless sort of harm and require a different kind of courage in confronting public opinion and authority. In Montes de Oca’s consoling poetic vision of generational rebellion (in the wake of the repression of the student movement of 1968) the sullen human meteor falls but does not extinguish his spirit of contradiction and disobedience ending on the axiomatic promise ‘Demolitions fortify you’. Against this optimistic re-pledging of resistance it is not at all clear whether Guzmán’s deconstructions, his disrespect, can be regarded as a successful strategy of counter-demolition resistant to the coercive ideology of the nation state whose signage he so overtly interjected in the cultural domain. It seems that Guzmán was exercised by the unbridgeable lack of 71

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consequence of an iconoclasm operating within a reflexive and merely tautological pictorial frame. Guzmán’s conflictual relation with the canvas, art institutions, masculinity, representational traditions and posterity had a reflexive dimension that resonated as a polymorphous insurrectionary attitude beyond the poetics of the razor blade and the pictorial gestures of self-harm that culminated in the destruction of part of his own corpus in a bonfire in 1983 and finally in his suicide in 1986. The bayonet-sharp mast of Guzmán’s Oh Holy Flag! (see Figure 16) offers his acerbic tribute to the national flag and its power of seduction and mystique of sacrifice in the aftermath of the 1968 massacre by armed troops that had ushered in a militarization of surveillance and counterinsurgency. He toyed with its corporeal overtones through the transposition of the open-mouthed visage device as an alternative coat of arms with a homoerotic potential that was to be exploited by a key artist of post-modern Neomexicanismo, Nahum B. Zenil (b. 1947). The implicit carnality of the national flag had been amplified into grandiloquence by muralist Jorge González Camarena’s Allegory of the Patria (1962), the celebrated long-serving cover design for the textbooks of the National Commission of Free Books.27 In this canonical work of pedagogic illustration, González Camarena reprises the embodiment of the nation found in the academic painting by Petronilo Monroy in which the 1857 liberal constitution was personified in female form (1869), to vindicate an equally anthemic vision of popular education as the guarantor of unity and sovereignty.28 Holding a large, billowing flag in one hand and an open book in the other, the dark-skinned woman stares proudly forwards in a composition of unmitigated banality. It is against this civic image environment that Guzmán’s scatological Miraculous Image (1974) acquires its putrid efficacy and secures its afterlife in the neo-figurative trends of the late 1980s. With its monochrome folded flag, levitating WC of immaculate conception and blessing hands, the painting vies to evacuate sacrality from a frame in which a disembodied Christ-figure cut-out, in floodlit celestial radiance, shares the foreground with the blank oval of a no less generic emblem, the raised toilet lid. Artist and gay rights’ activist Nahum B. Zenil sought to texture affinities with Guzmán through self-referential, cross-dressing and progressively explicit if ludic homoerotic desecration – of religiosity, chauvinism 72

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Figure  16. Enrique Guzmán, ¡Oh Santa Bandera!/Oh Holy Flag!, 1977. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Galería Arvil.

and masculinist rituals – in the context of the rampant Neoliberalism of the 1990s and the identitarian crisis prompted by the discourse of desnacionalización within a still undemocratic, homophobic one party state.29 Zenil’s early interrogation of self and pre-packaged pictorial identities played on the ‘En busca/Se busca’ [In search of/Wanted] (1992) of sought and prescribed elements which, as in Guzmán, turned on a preoccupation with figuration’s cannibalistic practices, dwelling on social masquerades and acts of aesthetic estrangement and personal negation/ denigration.30 Its overt performativity overstated deliberately the implicit 73

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Figure  17. Nahum B.  Zenil, Tiro de dardos/Game of Darts, 1994. Oil on wood. Courtesy of the artist.

subversion of Guzmán’s self-effacing compositions. The narcissistic turn in his self-representation, understood as a measure of artistic ingenuity with allusions to the conceit-prone colonial baroque, Casta paintings’ racial typologies and the circus freak show, was acknowledged in the title of his exhibition The Invention of Narcissus (2002).31 In the title of another work Y el ver… dugo? (1993) Guzmán coined a Joycean neologism that twinned seeing (ver) with a form of execution (verdugo or ‘executioner’) – a punitive act of sanctioned violence that implicated representation as a categorizing tool of identification and exhibition with sadistic, authoritarian overtones. In Game of Darts (see Figure 17), Zenil portrays (on wood) with emphatic frontality his nude self as the target in a competitive game.32 His body splayed in an x formation substitutes the ideally proportioned Vitruvian man of the Western art canon, occupying the centre of a large tricolour bulls-eye anticipating the wounding gaze 74

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of spectators in a ritual of homophobic denigration. In In the Zócalo in Front of the National Palace (1992), Zenil donned the politicized body language of Diego Rivera’s imagery of proletarian marches and scenes of solidarity from mural narratives in the National Palace and the Ministry of Education, their radicalism neutered by institutionalization, to impersonate the protesting crowd with multiple self-portraits of Zenil as the prototypical engaged artist in workers’ overalls holding up a banner calling not for Marxist revolution but for something perhaps less utopian but as challenging in the Mexican context:  ‘Respect For Human Rights’ as the manifesto of civil plurality and equality.33 The carefully crafted and self-parodying phallocentricity of his paintings in the late 1990s and his prominent support for campaigning events such as the Semana Cultural Gay (which used his paintings on publicity posters) prepared the way for the themed mixed media exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, The Great Circus of the World (1999).34 The design of the installation, combining retro fairground, puppet theatre and wrestling arena, and which included labial and other suggestive openings through which the spectator was obliged to penetrate as part of the tour, emphasized the guilty pleasures of voyeurism and consumption, of violent entertainment and sensational spectacles. It synthesized the gratification of the museum flâneur or habitué with the less elevated popular distractions and appetites of the masses, placing the artist persona in a risible Grand Guignol construction of national myths and symbols (not excluding the biggest myth in the room, namely that of a uniquely Mexican art).35 Making good on the vernacular of the scurrilous and inane within the Modern Art Museum’s architecture of modernistic good taste, Zenil reminded the academy how impolite and indecent figurative realism could be when courting the discreditable vote. The exhibition unabashedly insinuated the prevalence of homoerotic desire within the scenography of cultural nationalism.36 Zenil orchestrated risqué and carnivalesque appropriations of sacrosanct imagery through painting imbued with a knowing archival patina typical of the polished anachronism of his technique.37 He thereby both affronted and embodied an aesthetic tradition predicated on difference rather than impersonality. If bodily indiscretion was the recurrent gag of the farcical environment he created for the art museum, the painting Eye Contact (1998) exemplified its scatological humour. The 75

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one-eyed Zenil peers from his foreshortened unbuttoned fly directly at the viewer as if his tumescent stare was an overture for a sexual arousal if not a palpable encounter. Interspersed within an installation display that made use of actual intervened objects (mostly domestic furniture) was a notable and still controversial take on Guzmán’s countercultural ¡Oh Santa Bandera!, an artistic heirloom of a more disturbing genealogy than even the Buñuelesque recreation of the Last Supper on show. Zenil’s homage took the form of a vertical or inverted triptych, ¡Oh Santa Bandera! (a Enrique Guzmán) (see Figure  18), which perpetrated a sadomasochistic manoeuvre with a fetishized object intended to exploit the fear of homoerotic contagion. The artist portrays himself in a full-length nude as a contortionist whose anal orifice provides the support for a stately flagpole in all its pompous scale and phallic glory. From its elevation the national flag hangs limply rather than with heraldic symbols dutifully displayed as envisaged by the towering flag masts that began to be erected in landmarks to compete with the espectaculares or huge advertising hoardings dominating the capital’s skyline. The lavatorial referencing of the body and its profane humours in the works on show made ribald use of what in Guzmán had been the allusive and decontextualized but equally provocative deployment of Duchamp-inspired ‘excusados’ or WCs in works such as Daddy’s Advice (1971) and Miraculous Image (1974) which perpetrated offenses against patriarchy. In Guzmán’s intervened iconicity, the emblems of discreet hygiene (for processing the expelled and the impure) are rendered with finely observed, undeluded realism, yet volatilized so as to join the realm of transcendent purities. If implied fecal matter can be as potent a repellent as defecating in public can serve a political or aesthetic protest, then Guzmán’s sanitized toilets are designed to offend hypocritical morality rather than transgress the boundaries of the permissible. Conversely, by introducing a full-frontal self-referentiality, Zenil dispels euphemism in favour of a face-off with the ever-present inferred spectator without repudiating the emetic uses of such art for expelling bigotry from public life. If the untouchable homosexual is remembered in Man with Condom (1994), in which a giant prophylactic sheaths the naked Zenil from head to toe like transparent full-body armour, then Circus Character (1997) exposes a further degree of complaisant abjection, with the artist look-alike 76

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Figure 18. Nahum B. Zenil, ¡Oh Santa Bandera! (a Enrique Guzmán)/Oh Holy Flag! (to Enrique Guzmán), 1996. Mixed media on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

sat disconsolately on the toilet facing the public in an unflatteringly intimate representation that leaves little to even the most prurient imagination or kitchen-sink aesthetic. The dissensual tension of contraries that animates the inertia and depersonalization of Guzmán’s still painting becomes in Zenil’s work a simplified political dissensuality that is non-consumable but also non-transferable in its physiognomic determinism. The exhibition nevertheless perpetrated a less expected immolation by devaluing the very 77

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Neo-Mexicanist currency in which his work had been traded internationally and most especially across the border.38 His illusionistic landscape with a stitched vagina in the higher register where conventionally a bucolic epiphany might be effected (Forbidden Zone, 1998) and his blown up studies of the male and female genitalia in lieu of sanctimonious portraits of progenitors, Portraits of Mum and Dad (1999), put paid to the easily trivialized erotic masquerades and transvestitism that had made his reputation, agitating for a rather more disreputable niche. In August 2000, Zenil hosted a burlesque act of collective indecency in his religiously themed home, full of Catholic paraphernalia. The mock orgy under the punning title Tras–eros [Erotic Behinds]:  Homage to Buttocks. United Cheeks Against Censorship, featured a sadomasochistic performance which urged the public to do the unthinkable and defile the buttocks of a woman artist before assembled journalists and photographers.39 The political expediency of nakedness had been memorably enacted by striking miners in Pachuca, Hidalgo in 1985 during which they kept the characteristic implements of their labour (including helmets and boots) while baring their scandal-inducing bodies in a protest captured by photojournalist Pedro Valtierra. These violations of public decorum although clearly not equivalent share a faith in the viability of symbolic capital in the mediatized terrain of the everyday. This performative supplement in Zenil emerged even as the theme of self-immolation gained ground in his painting. Persistently developed within the iconography of martyrdom and transfiguration that he admired in Frida Kahlo, it acquires explicitly suicidal overtures to Guzmán with works such as Suicida I (a Enrique Guzmán) (1995) and Suicida II (a Enrique Guzmán) (1997). By acknowledging an insufficiency, a formal inadequation between consequences and intentions in art, Zenil seems to have disowned the impersonations of relational pacts of his earlier paintings where popular emblems assisted in creating the deceptively companionable and consoling dwelling-place of the canvas. The dispersal of any kind of esprit de corps that might be assuaged by the fictitious communality of emblems such as the flag introduces a perplexity for the representational process of vandalizing the symbols of authoritarianism. For it turns the trope of internecine conflict, of a country or society at war with itself, into something akin to an internal bleeding for art, undetected but haemorrhaging its vigour. 78

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The 2013 collective exhibition Los irrespetuosos [The Disrespectful Ones] held in the prestigious Carrillo Gil Museum of Art (MACG) in Mexico City (curated by Carlos Palacios) comprised mostly non-pictorial works that sought to challenge art historical establishments, museum spectatorship and the normative styles of the contemporary art market.40 While the organizers adopted Guzmán’s self-lacerating razor blade as the rebellious emblem of choice for the cover of the exhibition pamphlet, its redeployment may have inadvertently confirmed its disposable applications, turning it into a neutered retro trophy. Recycled within an obtrusively tamed and scaled down terminology of disenchantment, insolent play and reflexive critique that recalled the well-tried derisions and infringements of the 1970s to the 1990s but divested of political controversy and existential urgency, its equivocal edges usually seen in Guzmán’s paintings from oblique or angled purchases, had been flattened by the cover design into a brand icon (with unconvincing punk associations) in keeping with the theme of adolescent rebellion as a reproducible act rather than a condition. The curatorial text alludes ineluctably to cynicism, parody and scorn as shared traits behind the defiance and feigned indifference of most of the exhibits which are described as not concerned with radical supplanting but with a sarcastic occupation of the infrastructure of vanguardist projects. In this context of disingenuous play with the legacy of one’s elders and betters (the curator cites Alfonso Reyes, prepared to exchange seniority to be the butt of a new generations’ mockery [Palacios 2013, 4]), Guzmán comes to symbolize failure as the only truly connective finality of art.41 This chapter has discussed the transgressive or risk-taking playfulness of Guzmán and Zenil’s figurations which they supplemented with acts of subversion and inconformity through which their own aesthetic separateness and integrity were undone publicly. By contrast the sardonically low-key and disbelieving provocations of Los irrespetuosos at the MACG are pitched so as to appear self-servingly evasive and opaquely defiant – as if the embarrassment of conviction, even of a self-destructive kind, could not be countenanced seriously within the precinct of non-figurative art-making’s globalized discontent and recursive ironies. On the more wryly retro end of the agents provocateurs convened in the gallery we find Óscar Cueto’s I Love Contemporary Art (2008), a panel series in oil portraying scenes of erotic gratification through the 79

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handling and ogling of glossy art monographs with prurient titles such as ‘ART NOW’. The avid young collector’s dirty secrets are exposed in a figurative style:  treated as sex toys and cult objects in the privacy of the home, we see them being looked at, hugged, licked with the arousal culminating in the open book being penetrated by a full frontal erection, followed by a genuflexion scene in which the image icon on the page is kissed. Iván Argote opts, in another, perhaps lacklustre twist on graffiti rebellion, for the gallery drama afforded by spray can ‘retouchings’ of classic works of modern art, interventions caught on video in real time (see Retouch 2008). It is by turning away from comparable platitudinous disrespect to the work of Ilán Lieberman (b. 1969), which painstakingly dissects internet archives, video and photographs in Mexican print media, slowing down the process of representation through his drawing and re-installation, that Guzmán’s meticulously executed eviscerations of emblems and Zenil’s arduous infractions of heteronormativity may be understood as prosceniums for heterodox viewing; viewing that disowns its objects so as to register beyond the frame the blinded facility of a contemporary regime of image saturation.42 In ‘Mexicans arise in battle cry’ (2007–2009), which borrowed its title from the lyrics of the national anthem, Lieberman devised a video animation based on the daily ceremony in honour of the national flag held in state primary schools. He created a montage of still photographs of disappeared children in which the mouths dutifully sing the patriotic rhetoric while making faces; the spontaneous shots of the individual children used after their abduction for purposes of identification provide, when animated together, a wide gamut of grimaces and expressions. This lip-synching to the lyrics which the artist described as ‘an archive of mouths’ (Lieberman 2010, 19) is not dissimilar in its visual conceit to Guzmán’s visceral scream in the central panel of his defaced flags in the 1970s. By superimposing the mouths of the disappeared on the voices of primary school children, the animated composite resurfaces the subtracted life and gives the living a flavour of the posthumous, making speechless the song, and voicing the wordless. There is an apt precariousness in this metaphorical presentation of long-lost children, of art silencing its own proficiency in fixing fugitive moments, resisting, as perhaps Jacques Rancière would have it, its own tendency to supplant resistance (2013, 183). 80

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Coda: `The same indocile innocence’43 In 1978 the poems of José Emilio Pacheco on the theme of childhood inspired Vicente Rojo’s series of serigraphs Jardín de niños [Kindergarten] with collaged and pop-up elements and flaps that created a palimpsest effect of doodles, handwritten pages, diagrams and childish daubs, combining a highly elaborate construction where the learned and the spontaneous intersected, and random and directed effects alternated. The stilled rebelliousness of youth in Pacheco’s poem, ‘Reading Primer’ provides a fitting epitaph for the breakage within the ancestral house of art that Guzmán and Zenil perpetrated with both deliberate deceptions and unwitting betrayals. Always knowing that with every stroke he takes possession of something not only irreversibly inhabited by previous disorderly children but also, inescapably, the place where ageing is more acutely present than living, a place where precocity turns into premature ejaculation: ‘The child breaks all the things of THE HOUSE./He wants to take over THE HOUSE./He breaks all the old things that are in THE HOUSE./The child represents THE new LIFE./THE new LIFE is condemned to become THE old LIFE./ One day he will become like the old things that are in THE HOUSE’. The prevalence of the still-life effect in Guzmán’s output is more credibly a testament to its eloquent inaction when translated back to his native terminology, naturaleza muerta/dead nature, for as his partial eviscerations insist nothing is quite so un-lifelike than the appearance of living in art.

References Adorno, Theodor. 2005. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. London: Verso. Anon. 2003. Lucio Cabañas Barrientos y el Partido de los Pobres. Mexico City : Self-Published Pamphlet. Anon. 2011. El gabinete gráfico: Enrique Guzmán-Autorretratos. Mexico City : Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil. Anon. 1978. “Piden artistas y críticos al INBA que cumpla con la convocatoria del Salón Nacional de Pintura.” Unomásuno, June 22: 21. Benítez, Issa D. 1996. “¿Hay cura para el arte contemporáneo?,” Curare 9: 10–14. Blas Galindo, Carlos. 1992. Enrique Guzmán: Transformador y víctima de su tiempo. Mexico City : Era and CNCA. Carnell, Simon. 2010. Hare. London: Reaktion.

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Sabotage Art Craven, David. 2002. Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press. Debroise, Olivier, ed. 1985. Nahum B. Zenil. Mexico City : Galería de Arte Mexicano. ———ed. 2008. Informe:  Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. Mexico City : Fundación Bancomer, MUAC and UNAM. ———and Cuauhtémoc Medina, eds. 2006. The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968–1997. Mexico City : UNAM. Del Conde, Teresa, ed. 1982?. Nahum B. Zenil: “Pase usted”. Mexico City :  Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil. ———ed. 1999. Nahum B. Zenil: El gran circo del mundo. Mexico City : MAM. Delgado Massé, Cecilia, ed. 2010. Superficies del deseo, profundidades del placer. Mexico City : MUAC and UNAM. Duplaix, Sophie. 2012. Gina Pane: “È per amore vostro: l’altro.” Arles: Actes Sud. Elliot, David, ed. 1980. Orozco!. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art. Emerich, Luis Carlos. 1989. Figuraciones y desfiguros de los 80s. Pintura mexicana joven. Mexico City : Diana. ———ed. 1992. Nahum B. Zenil: Se busca. Mexico City : Galería de Arte Mexicano. ———ed. 1995. Espíritu. Escondido: California Center for the Arts Museum. ———ed. 1999. Enrique Guzmán: Su destino secreto. Monterrey : MARCO. Escobedo, Helen, and Paolo Gori, eds. 1989. Mexican Monuments:  Strange Encounters. New York: Abbeville. Florescano, Enrique, ed. 1995. Mitos mexicanos. Mexico City : Aguilar. ———1999. Bandera mexicana; Breve historia de su formación y simbolismo. Mexico City : FCE. García Canclini, Néstor. 2009. “¿De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de resistencia?,” Estudios Visuales 7: 16–37. García Terres, Jaime. 1988. El teatro de los acontecimientos. Mexico City : Era. Garduño, Eduardo. 1993. “Niños aún…” In La gráfica del 68:  Homenaje al movimiento estudiantil, edited by Grupo Mira. Mexico City :  UNAM and Sentido Contrario: 6. Ibargüengoitia, Jorge. 2012. Instrucciones para vivir en México. Mexico City : Biblioteca Gandhi. Jiménez, Arturo. 2000. “Celebran el glúteo 69 artistas: se manifiestan contra la censura.” La Jornada, August 29: 5. Lieberman, Ilán. 2010. “Mexicanos al grito de Guerra.” In Transurbaniac (Art Emotions and Some City Traces), edited by Rubén Ortiz Torres et al. Mexico City : MUAC and UNAM. Medina, Cuauhtémoc, Hal Foster, and Francisco Reyes Palma. 2004. Resistencia: Tercer simposio sobre teoría del arte contemporáneo. Mexico City:  SITAC, CONACULTA and INBA. Mejía Sánchez, Frabrizio, ed. 2009. Ilán Lieberman: Niño perdido. Barcelona and Mexico City : Verlag and RM.

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Pictorial Eviscerations, Emblems and Self-Immolation in Mexico Monsiváis, Carlos. 2004. “Enrique Guzmán: La batalla de las imágenes y los símbolos.” In Enrique Guzmán: Animador de íntimas catástrofes. Guadalajara: Museo de las Artes, Universidad de Guadalajara: 5–13. ———, Teresa del Conde, and Carlos Emerich. 1989/1990. Ex profeso: recuento y afinidades – colectiva plástica contemporánea. Mexico City : Círculo Gay Cultural, UNAM and Museo Universitario del Chopo. Montes de Oca, Marco Antonio. 1973. Astillas. Mexico City :  Ediciones El Mendrugo. Pacheco, José Emilio. 1969. “Diez epigramas.” Revista de la Universidad de México 7: 14–16. ——— 1991. “Cartilla de lectura.” In Vicente Rojo, Obra gráfica completa (1969/1990). Mexico City: Galería Universitaria Aristos and UNAM: 21. Palacios, Carlos, ed. 2013. Los irrespetuosos/The Disrespectful/Die Respektlosen. Mexico City : INBA and MACG. Pérez Montfort, Ricardo. 2007. Expresiones populares y estereotipos culturales en México. Mexico City : CIESAS. Rancière, Jacques. 2013. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury. Rodríguez Araujo, Octavio. 1978. “La realidad es subversiva.” Unomásuno, June 22: 5. Rubio, Eduardo. 2003. Beatriz Zamora: Historia de una artista excepcional. Mexico City : INBA and CNCA. Segre, Erica. 2007. Intersected Identities: Strategies of Visualization in Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Mexican Culture. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Siller, David. 1978. “Lo conceptualmente negro del jurado de premiar el cuadro de Zamora me llevó a derrumbarlo por negro.” Unomásuno, July 21: 19. Sullivan, Edward J. et al. 1996. Nahum B. Zenil: Witness to the Self. San Francisco, CA: The Mexican Museum. Velez, Gonzalo, ed. 1997. Las transgresiones del cuerpo:  Arte contemporáneo de México. Mexico City : MACG. Villa Lever, Lorenza. 2009. Cincuenta años de la Comisión Nacional de Libros de Texto Gratuitos. Mexico City : SEP. Villoro, Juan. 1986. Tiempo transcurrido: Crónicas imaginarias. Mexico City : FCE. Widdifield, Stacie G. 1996. The Embodiment of the National in Late Ninenteenth-Century Mexican Painting. Tucson, AZ: Arizona University Press. Zenil, Nahum B. 1994. Del circo y sus alrededores. Mexico City : Galería de de Arte Mexicano.

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4 Bureaucratic Sabotage Knocking at the Door of the ‘Big Monster’ Zanna Gilbert

Statement of the Oblivious: To Jack Burnham, There are some of us who work within the system* There are some of us who work with the system* There are some of us who create systems* [*artists]

Image Bank1

Mail artists have often conceived of their mailings as ‘bombs’. Venezuelan artist Damaso Ogaz, for example, frequently stamped the sentence ‘Mail Art: A home-made bomb’ on his missives while the Argentine Carlos Ginzburg designed visual poems he called ‘atomic bombs’.2 A surprising and unexpected release of energy through the means of explosives, the bomb as metaphor suggests the destruction or disruption of a given target. But what exactly were mail art ‘bombs’ designed to explode? Understood as closed units that often governed human activity and behaviour coercively (Beniger 1986; Castells 1996), financial, bureaucratic, commercial, linguistic and epistemological systems came under attack by artists. Through their network – an expansive form of collectivism – mail artists attempted to short-circuit these structures of coercive power by asserting the 84

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importance of direct artistic interaction. Mail artists aimed to infiltrate media systems and critique bureaucratic organizations as structures that were controlled by an elite, immanent to power and emblematic of a tendency towards dehumanization. This critical attitude towards bureaucracies addressed specific conditions, such as the authoritarian use of administrative systems that characterized the ruling regimes in some Latin American countries from the 1960s–1980s. While the metaphor of the bomb reflects the hopes of efficacy that some artists had for their work, the attempted ‘short-circuiting’ of control society employs varied tactics of resistance and disruption of the bureaucracy of the mail system. If mail artists primarily aimed to reconfigure the principles of the circulation of art, they compounded this implicit systemic attack by making works that intended to disrupt, subvert or sabotage a variety of ordering systems. For this purpose, they resorted to trickery, stealth and humour; jamming, infestation or outright disruption; and parody and over-identification. Exploring the works Obra secretamente titulada Arriba y Adelante…y si no pues también [Work Secretly Entitled Upwards and Onwards…Whether You Like It or Not] (1970) by Felipe Ehrenberg (b. 1943), Ação Postal (Postaction, 1975) by Paulo Bruscky (b. 1949) and La llave/abrelatas que viajó (junto a 200) La Plata/Buenos Aires/La Plata, el 7 enero ’71 [The Key/Can Opener that Travelled (with 200 others)  La Plata/Buenos Aires/La Plata, on 7 January ’71] (1971) by Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1928–1997), this chapter examines how mail artists’ metaphorical bombs developed tactics to sabotage bureaucracies and the wider order they represented.

Systems Art and Bureaucratic Systems Mail artists’ aim to reconfigure top-down mass media structures into a system of horizontal information-sharing can only be understood in the context of the technological changes propitious to the rise of media, information and systems theories. State formation in Latin America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries introduced bureaucratic forms of power consolidation in order to control territories and populations by legal means (Garavaglia and Ruiz 2013, 2). While the introduction of bureaucratic structures was a hallmark of modern political systems, they 85

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developed  increasingly complex  patterns throughout the twentieth century, shifting from rational-legal structures designed to implement political decision-making, to ever more complex systems of control and surveillance. These systems permeate the condition of late modernity, which is characterized by increasingly complex bureaucracies, technological development and highly sophisticated mass media. From earlier still, since at least the 1950s, such systems began to infiltrate artistic imaginaries, as was first evidenced by kinetic art.3 Bureaucracy in the highly – if unevenly – modernized contexts of some Latin American countries endowed authoritarian governments with a capacity for gathering information and engaging in selective political repression, even if in some cases the actual torture and murder of dissidents was arbitrary and extra-judicial (or extra-bureaucratic). In the United States, according to Benjamin Buchloh, conceptual art first reflected uncritically upon, and only later critiqued, administered consumer society (1990, 136). Buchloh’s ‘aesthetic of administration’ responds to Adorno’s view of art as ‘inextricably intertwined with rationalisation’ when operating within a ‘totally administered world’ (136). In Buchloh’s account, conceptual art ‘mimed the operating logic of late capitalism and its positivist instrumentality in an effort to place its auto-critical investigations at the service of liquidating even the last remnants of traditional aesthetic experiments […], purging itself entirely of imaginary and bodily experience, of physical substance and the space of memory’ (143). As Brian Holmes observes, Buchloh defines an art that ‘connotes rather than critiques the bureaucratic structures’ (2011). However, Buchloh also points to a second moment in US conceptual art in the late 1960s – a moment which he terms the critique of institutions – during which artists such as Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke ‘turned the violence of the mimetic relationship back onto the ideological apparatus itself, using it to analyse and expose the social institutions from which the laws of positivist instrumentality and the logic of administration emanate in the first place’ (1990, 143). If Buchloh’s account is by no means unproblematic in its teleology, it underlines a key characteristic of conceptual art in its early stages: a stripped bare aesthetic that responded to information society mimetically, dissecting the aesthetic humanist subject and analysing alienated, technical, capitalist society in the process. While artists living under authoritarian rule in Brazil, Argentina and Chile also explored 86

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the implications of information society, administration had the further connotations of being endemic to free-market capitalist modernization and desarrollismo (developmentalism) (Kay 2010; Legé Harris and Nef 2008).4 Indeed, the ‘strong participation of the state in economic growth […] enlarged the participation of bureaucracies and of the military in Latin America’ (Cardoso and Faletto 1971, 27; O’Donnell 1988 2, 12). Furthermore, in those countries suffering authoritarian rule, bureaucracy also signified a multi-layered regime of control that subjected the body to a high level of policing. Guillermo O’Donnell’s ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ describes power abstracted through authoritarian institutions permeating civil society (1988, 31–33). If the ‘aesthetic of administration’ registers the response to information society in the US and Europe, a distinct response can be traced in artistic approaches to bureaucratic authoritarianism  – approaches that focused on somatic excesses and attempted to create fissures in established systems. Moreover, these responses can be considered distinct within different experiences of authoritarianism (Pereira 2005, 6–7).5 In mail art works, bureaucratic systems correlate closely with state control, repression and censorship. Take, for example, one of Chilean artist Guillermo Deisler’s (1940–95) undated ‘Poetry Factory’ series in which the phrase ‘unterschrift des zahntechnikers’ [signature of the dental technicians] is printed in German in tiny letters. The reference may be a humorous dig at onerous bureaucratic ‘teeth-pulling’, but it introduces the somatic into the bureaucratic realm, and may allude to the torture of political dissidents. The rubber stamp references the disciplinary techniques of administered society on the body, drawing an equation between the sterile apparatus of the state and the extra-bureaucratic activities that it both propagates and seals – namely the torture and disappearance of its citizens. ‘Sabotaging’ bureaucratic systems by interfering with or disrupting the assumptions upon which they were based entailed exploring possibilities for the freedom of expression.6

The Big Monster In 1977, Ulises Carrión, a Mexican artist resident in Amsterdam, wrote the text ‘Mail Art and the Big Monster’, stating that ‘mail art knocks at the 87

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Figure  19. Ulises Carrión, Mail Art and the Big Monster, 1977. Poster: Private Collection. Courtesy of Sucesión U. Carrión.

door of the castle where the Big Monster lives’ (1981, 15) (see Figure 19). Carrión, however, is at a loss to define what the ‘big monster’ is: ‘To tell you the truth, I do not know exactly what or whom I am talking about. All I know is that there is a Monster. And that by posting all sorts of mail art pieces I am knocking at his door’ (15). Still, Carrión clearly relates the bureaucracy of the mail system with an imposition on ‘freedom’: ‘when I write a letter I am free to write whatever I want. What about the mailing? Then we are not free, we are subject to certain rules established beforehand’ (15). 88

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For Carrión, playing with the bureaucracy of the postal system equated to a wider political action because it functioned as an analogy for the state, capitalism, censorship and dehumanization. Sending mail art, Carrión affirms, is to participate in a ‘guerrilla war’ against these amorphous enemies (14). For artists participating in the mail art network, bureaucracy appears to have represented everything wrong with the modern capitalist state: impersonal, alienating and guided by an instrumentalism that impedes human interaction. The sociologist Max Weber described bureaucratic society as a method of rationalizing outdated patrimonial structures, which would be replaced with objective and neutral institutions run by salaried workers who could not personally benefit from their positions (1922). Weber emphasizes the rationality of bureaucracy, from which the acceptance of authority would stem:  ‘Experience tends universally to show that the purely bureaucratic type of administrative organisation […] is […] capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency, and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of carrying out imperative control over human beings’ (Weber 1947, 337). If Weber’s own notion of an ethic of responsibility tempered this stance, his description makes clear the dangers of the bureaucratic method of government. According to Craig Saper, bureaucracy stands for: a cold, faceless, and excessively complicated system of administration. It epitomizes the distance between a governing body’s procedures and the needs and desires of its citizens, subjects, or customers. It also suggests a large-scale mechanism familiar to anyone who has lived through modernity in the twentieth century. In tragic situations, it has Kafkaesque overtones and the markings of fascism. (2011, n.p.)

While patrimonial structures also denoted control and repression, and anti-bureaucratic sentiment could be taken as a justification for neoliberalism, bureaucracy can be considered particularly anathema to mail artists’ concerns for the freedom of expression, due to the de-personalization that it brings to the political realm. Even the most petty of bureaucratic structures came to represent the wider state apparatus of repression that controlled behaviour and contributed to the mechanization of the human spirit. The figure of the whipper in Kafka’s The Trial embodies this abstraction 89

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of personal responsibility to the other. He bluntly refuses to take pity on his victims, stating:  ‘I’m appointed to whip, so I  whip’ (Kafka 1924, 68). This ‘rule of nobody,’ as Hannah Arendt called it, ‘is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them’ (Baehr 2000, 264). Saper’s denomination ‘intimate bureaucracies’, by contrast, describes mail art practices’ ‘poetic use of the trappings of large bureaucratic systems and procedures […] to create intimate aesthetic situations’ (2001, xiii). In this sense, the network of mail artists might be considered to be a self-organized alternative bureaucracy that attempted to supplant art–world systems. Like a trade union organizing a strike, or a worker breaking the machinery of the factory owner, mail art as a network diverts and sabotages (art) production.

Tactic I: Trickery and Stealth In 1970, Felipe Ehrenberg created a work for the Salón Independiente [Independent Salon] in Mexico, an event organized in protest against excessive control of the art market by state governed institutions. Obra secretamente titulada Arriba y Adelante…y si no pues también (see Figure 20) is indicative of the way the postal system could be used to create works with multiple layers of meaning which questioned bureaucracy, the art institution and aesthetic parameters. Arriba y Adelante was an ambitious work conceived when Ehrenberg was living in London. It was constituted by 200 pre-franked postcards, which together formed a large painting of a topless woman holding a football branded ‘Mexico ‘70’. The image was drawn from a collection of nude photographs published in England to celebrate the World Cup held in Mexico in 1970. Together, Ehrenberg’s postcards formed a mobile mural that, in its use of bold, black–and–white design and clearly marked out forms, at first glance seems to emulate Pop Art. However, this work extended Pop’s blithe critique of the media by travelling through the very communications circuits it commented upon:  on 15 November 1970, the postcards were sent in three packages from different post offices in London. Each was addressed to the Salon, which would hold its third exhibition in the University Museum of Science and Art (MUCA), Mexico City. In the instructions that accompanied the work, Ehrenberg specified: ‘During the 90

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Figure 20. Felipe Ehrenberg, Obra secretamente titulada Arriba y Adelante…y si no pues también/Work Secretly titled Upwards and Onwards...Whether You Like It or Not, 1970. 200 postcards. Courtesy of Felipe Ehrenberg.

opening night of the Third Annual Exhibition of the Salón Independiente, and after a respectable amount of citizens are gathered, my duly appointed representative shall begin by tacking up each card in order […]. Members of the public are happily invited to help’ (1970). The year 1970 also marked Mexico’s presidential elections. The title of Ehrenberg’s work refers ironically to ‘Arriba y Adelante’ [Upwards and Onwards], the campaign slogan of the PRI’s Luis Echeverría (the ruling party’s candidate). The maxim denoted a politics of desarrollismo closely 91

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tied to Mexico’s role as host of the Olympic Games in 1968 and the World Cup in 1970, which offered up an image of Mexico ripe for modernization and international investment (Flaherty 2012, n.p.). As Interior Minister in 1968, however, Echeverría was widely considered responsible for the Tlatelolco massacre of 2 October 1968, in which, ten days before the opening ceremony of the summer Olympics, government forces opened fire on a peaceful protest in Tlatelolco Square.7 The fragmentation of the postcards’ shipment sought to bypass both moral and political censorship, given that, as Ehrenberg pointed out, the Mexican postal system refuses to carry pornographic material of any sort and criticism of the government was a ‘risky business’ (1970, n.p.). Yet Ehrenberg’s political critique was redoubled by the works’ passage through the mail service as a bureaucratic institution. Just as Echeverría’s sloganeering, in its thrusting call for a glorious future, concealed a violent element in his approach to politics, Ehrenberg’s ludic and collaborative approach to assembling the cryptic work had a serious point lingering (literally) under its surface. According to Ehrenberg’s instructions, the work was to be mounted on a red backing, so that any failure of the postal system to deliver a postcard would be represented by a crimson gap, stimulating a visual equation between the inefficiency of the postal bureaucracy, specifically identified by Ehrenberg as ‘a government institution’ (1970, n.p.), and the violent means of controlling the student movement pursued by the government. At the same time, the work playfully destabilizes the impersonal efficiency of the British postal system and its state figurehead. The serious propriety represented by Queen Elizabeth’s profile on each of the stamps is undermined and overwhelmed by Ehrenberg’s outsized and overwhelmingly sexual figure. Bureaucracy and the somatic – this time erotic – are brought into collision. The work travels by stealth, allowing the communication of a surreptitious message to be conveyed through the very system that prohibits it. The redoubling of power back onto itself therefore appears as a key strategy of this artistic sabotage.

Tactic II: Ridicule, Jam and Infest the System Practical jokes and humorous interventions were rife in mail art. Sending outlandish objects through the post was another strategy used to test the 92

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limits of the system that supported the exchange of mail works. Brazilian artist Paulo Bruscky’s Postação (see Figures 21 and 22) brought together his already established interests in both urban intervention and mail art. In 1975, Bruscky sent an enormous envelope to The Last International Exhibition of Mail Art organized by Edgardo Antonio Vigo and Horacio Zabala in Buenos Aires. He recounts: I made some envelopes three meters long by one meter wide, photographically blew up the stamp, made a letter on the section of paper from a large roll; I invited some friends and we went out on the streets carrying the envelope; people started following us as we approached the post office […] we wanted to know what would happen at the post office when the group arrived. (Quoted in Freire 2006, 252 and Tejo 2010, 133)8

After negotiations, the post office staff agreed to send the work, since they had no regulation that would prevent someone from sending something of this size. According to Bruscky, the envelope contained a letter measuring five metres in length, which on arrival in Argentina became a support for the projection of slides documenting the action (presumably forwarded separately), while the envelope was hung alongside, the three elements together forming an installation (2010). Postação converts the mail art gesture into an exaggerated public intervention in which the envelope’s proportions are magnified and paraded through the streets, attracting the attention of passersby. This exhibitionary gesture blows the mail art work out of proportion, and through that enlargement, makes clear the bureaucratic confinements of the postal service; it encourages us to look more closely at these systems and structures. Once again, the conversion of abstract and hidden aspects of capitalist society into visible constructs is at the centre of mail art’s circulation. While Ehrenberg’s work tricked the mail system by stealth, only opening up to collaborative action once safely past the threat of censorship, Bruscky’s overtly public gesture worked through exaggeration and parody, testing the system’s limits and loopholes. But like Ehrenberg’s trickery, Bruscky’s light-hearted gesture veils a more disturbing connotation; the photographic documentation of the action that was later projected on to the envelope might also be seen as an attempt to guarantee the safety and 93

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Figure 21. Paulo Bruscky, Ação Postal – Post Ação, 1975. Photographic register of performance. Courtesy of Paulo Bruscky.

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Figure 22. Paulo Bruscky, Ação Postal – Post Ação, 1975. Photographic register of performance. Courtesy of Paulo Bruscky (detail).

security of both the artist and his work, serving as a bureaucratic record that holds the system to account, using its own logic to confront it. Another related strategy that can be detected in Bruscky’s works is that of the malfunctioning bureaucracy, in which the language of the postal system, of order and legitimization, is constantly disrupted. Bruscky exposes bureaucratic/classificatory rules and regulations through absurd and playful actions and the promotion of an aesthetic of chaos. His cacophonic rubber stamp compositions assert a principle of anti-order even as they use a vehicle used to impose that order – the rubber stamp. In a frenzy of bureaucratic activity in overdrive, the system jams. The legitimating presence of the rubber stamp can also be taken as an analogy for the legitimizing force of the art institution. Indeed, Bruscky’s works constantly reference the arbitrary or reactionary attitudes of certain institutions. For example, a photograph of a petri dish is stamped: É Arte: Confirmada [It’s Art:  Confirmed]. Additionally, Bruscky often introduces somatic elements into his mailings, often as parodies of bureaucratic forms 95

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that serve to interfere with the impersonal character of administration. Bruscky’s mail art works are laden with indexical traces that establish an immediate reference to the body:  photographic self-portraits, human figures on exposed negative film, x-rays of body parts and fingerprints. These interventions constitute a bodily infestation that is particularly resonant if we consider the dictatorship-era ‘Operação Limpeza’ [Operation Cleanliness]. During the first months of dictatorship in 1964, General Castello Branco initiated this operation to promote ‘order’ and ‘cleanliness’. Drawing attention to the body, Bruscky employs indexical traces and rubber-stamped insects in order to create an aesthetic of contamination. A work created for an issue of Commonpress, an ‘assembling magazine’ with a rotating editorship organized by Bruscky and Leonhard Frank Duch in 1978, elaborates on the artist’s interest in critiquing bureaucracy using the mail as metaphor. The work depicts an envelope, from which two items emerge; one represents a letter bearing a label stating ‘Confidential’; the other is an image of Bruscky himself, in which his face and body are partially obscured. The envelope also bears two labels that read: ‘Careful with Violation’ (the direct equivalent in English would be ‘Take Care when Opening’) and ‘Air Mail’. On this occasion, Bruscky’s contribution alludes to the mailed work as a metaphor for the body, which might be ‘damaged’ during transit, a direct connection being made between bureaucracy, censorship and violence against the body. The work makes a clear reference to the physical vulnerability of the body and to its precarity, drawing a comparison with the violation of the body constituted by the military government’s use of torture against dissidents.9 Furthermore, the package’s stated confidentiality plays with the risk of persecution for practising mail art as well as acting as an instruction or warning to potential censors. Bruscky’s tactic of playing with the lexicon and rules of the system exposes their laws and loopholes through exaggeration and excess. This infestation sabotages the system’s ability to convey meaning and bestow value.

Tactic III: Disruption and Overidentification In the work of Edgardo Antonio Vigo a subtle evocation of bureaucracy is created through a method of ‘overidentification’: as with Bruscky’s stamps, but in a more parodic manner, Vigo is able to expose the absurdity of 96

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Figure 23. Edgardo Antonio Vigo, La llave/abrelatas que viajó (junto a 200) La Plata/Buenos Aires/La Plata, el 7 enero ’71 / The Key/Can Opener that Travelled (with 200 others) La Plata/Buenos Aires/La Plata, on 7 January ’71. Courtesy of Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo and MoMA.

bureaucratic principles through an enaction of the bureaucratic process of institutional artistic legitimization. His work La llave/abrelatas que viajó (junto a 200)  La Plata/Buenos Aires/La Plata, el 7 enero ’71 (1971) (see Figures 23 and 24) is a folding document containing numerous disparate elements and perhaps resembling the case files carried in the justice ministry where Vigo worked (Davidson 2011, 98). The elements consist of a key for opening tins attached to the document by a piece of string, Vigo’s outward and return bus tickets from La Plata to Buenos Aires, a certificate from a former member of staff at the Di Tella Institute, a photo of the artist with the key and a list containing details of the four stages of the action completed by the artist. The llave – a can opener that is at the same time named a key by Vigo – is a mass-produced object that Vigo has chosen to designate as a work of art. We might interpret it as a readymade, especially since Vigo then goes about employing it in a series of actions that serve to expose the systems and processes of the art world, as well as the alienating effects of bureaucracy. 97

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Figure 24. Edgardo Antonio Vigo, La llave/abrelatas que viajó (junto a 200) La Plata/Buenos Aires/La Plata, el 7 enero ’71 / The Key/Can Opener that Travelled (with 200 others) La Plata/Buenos Aires/La Plata, on 7 January ’71 (detail). Courtesy of Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo and MoMA.

This readymade is attached to the file by a piece of string, reminiscent of the string used to bind archive files. 10 The key also resonates symbolically as something crucially important or a clue. Alongside the key we find Vigo’s itinerary:  (1)  Departure, (3)  Documentation, (2)  Certification and (4)  Return, an overzealous but subtly disordered registration of his movements. Like Bruscky’s cacophonous overdrive of rubber-stamping, Vigo’s registration suggests a systemic malfunction. We are informed of the first stage of the action with the exact time and details of departure: 3pm, seat 149, ticket 68984 (accompanied by the exclamation ‘two more is a palindrome!’) and the information that the service was ‘fast’. This journey corresponds to the bus ticket reproduced and displayed on the adjoining page. Secondly, the itinerary informs us that at 4.40pm the third stage of the action was undertaken  – a photograph of Vigo with the keys registering the action – and we are told that the ‘time was measured by the clock of the Torre de los Ingleses’ [Tower of the English], England being a nation noted for its business-like time keeping. 98

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The photograph, branded with Vigo’s personal stamp, shows him sitting in the Plaza San Martín with a bag containing the 200 keys. The third point in the itinerary is recorded by Vigo as the second stage – the certification of the works by Samuel Paz, ostensibly an employee of the Di Tella Institute’s Centre of Visual Arts (Centro de Artes Visuales [CAV]). However, the itinerary tells us that this happened at approximately 5.15pm, after stage three. The artist thereby introduces doubt as to the numerical and temporal systems he employs in the work. Vigo gives us a choice, then, between understanding the action either in terms of action time or the stages of his itinerary. The certification of the keys by Samuel Paz appears on another leaf of the folder with the following text: ‘I CERTIFY: by the present document that I have had in front of my eyes the two hundred keys for opening cans and that they were brought by Edgardo Antonio Vigo from La Plata, Buenos Aires, 7 January 1971’. The statement is signed and sealed with the rubber stamp bearing the name of the Institute, an organization famed for its avant-gardism and its presentation of the latest international trends in contemporary art. The file that contains The Key/Can Opener that Travelled is pristine and polished. The clues to its idiosyncrasy are subtle; holes that perforate its exterior reveal fragments of its contents but seem to serve no purpose. An irregularly shaped label is loose inside the file. It details basic information about the work, while the perforations at its edges resemble bite marks. The veneer of respectability is disturbed (only slightly) by Vigo’s intrusions into established convention, and the disturbances operate on the edge of the ‘viewer-participant’s’ consciousness. Vigo puts the institutional mechanisms of the art world and those that rule us in everyday life into play. His strategy reveals the processes of institutional legitimization of art: he travels 60 kilometres from La Plata to Argentina’s capital city (which he called ‘el Hermoso Monstruo Real’ [The Real Beautiful Monster]) (cited by Davidson 2011, 68) in order to have an object certified as art by a cultural bureaucrat (one that was no doubt a friend of Vigo). However, closed by the military junta in 1969, the CAV was no longer open to the public at the time of Vigo’s visit and Samuel Paz’s certification was a mockery. Vigo’s dutiful pilgrimage to Argentina’s art centre and its most prestigious institution results in a false or useless affirmation. His action attempts artistic legitimization from an institution that no longer exists. Yet one could posit 99

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that his keys ‘travel’ to metaphorically and temporally reopen the institution. Over the preceding years, Vigo had kept such institutions at arm’s length, a fact which lends an ambivalent character to this ‘reopening’. Nevertheless, the piece is more than a wry take on the machinations of the art world and the increasingly repressive political situation in Argentina in the early 1970s; Vigo introduces an irrational aspect in his malfunctioning system. It is useful to consider Argentine media theorist Oscar Masotta’s notion of apercepción (apperception), a strategy that engages a sense of discontinuity and disturbance in the perception of the viewer or participant. Drawn from Masotta’s readings of Liebnitz, Kant and Husserl, Masotta describes apperception in terms of its operation on the mind: ‘a reflexive principle, highly intellective, belonging to certain cognitive operations’ (1967, 73). In media art, apperception is created by strategies of delay and redeployment in the communication of a message, by means of which the structural conditions of the media are perceived; through this process the viewer gains the power to analyse a given system. Vigo obliges the recipient of The Key/Can Opener that Travelled to choose between ordering systems and, in the process of choosing, these systems are revealed. In the suspension of logical order a fissure is created:  in this case, the confusion of chronology constitutes a suggestion of liberty in the viewer’s perception since the structure of order has been suspended. Vigo’s notion of ‘revulsive practices’ aimed to reveal systems by enabling the consciousness of the subject through a strategy of rupturing perception (Davis 2010, 16) and was, then, likely a meditation on and development of Masotta’s work on media art. Daniel Quiles notes that apperception exposed different media, ‘opening them up to scrutiny and simultaneously breaking or disabling them’ (2011, n.p.). Apperception and Vigo’s more direct prácticas revulsivas therefore aim to rupture, break or sabotage the systems they encounter. The Key/Can Opener that Travelled shows Vigo to be subjected to the bureaucratic process, submitting to the futility of its procedures, and it provides a portrait of the conditioning of human beings through bureaucratic processes. It approaches a condition of ‘overidentification’, a process usefully defined by Stevphen Shukaitis as the ‘approach of adopting a set of ideas, images, or politics and attacking them, not by a direct, open or straightforward critique, but rather through a rabid and obscenely exaggerated 100

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adoption of them’ (2011, 597). A parodic intervention, overidentification calls systems of power into question by aping them rather than by opposing them, thus treading a fine line between critique and mimicry.

Administered Society and the Body Alongside their heterogeneous tactics, the works described in this chapter have in common the insertion of the somatic and the organic into a bureaucratic realm. Ehrenberg’s eroticism, Bruscky’s performative interventions into the public space and Vigo’s physical insertion of himself (and the hand that turns the key) into a system are all acts of sabotage that work against a bureaucratic logic. These artists reflect the severe distortion of affective impulses in which the irrational meets the bureaucratic. Therefore, a development of Saper’s understanding of ‘intimate bureaucracies’ mobilizes the somatic as potent or – to reintroduce the bomb metaphor – symbolically explosive offerings to what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer notoriously described as a ‘totally administered world’. These Frankfurt School thinkers draw attention to aesthetics as a mode of raising critical awareness; through aesthetics, the subject becomes conscious of the constructed nature of social reality (Adorno and Horkheimer 2007, 16). Adorno and Horkheimer warn that artistic techniques have been appropriated by private and public administrations, blinding the public to oppressive social arrangements (13). This kind of manipulation, they argue, has manifested itself in Western liberal democracies as well as totalitarian states (25). Indeed, mail artists worldwide felt that they were battling an inherently oppressive capitalist system. Ehrenberg, for example, was careful not to allow political conditions in Eastern Europe and Latin America to be translated into a reading of Western Europe and the United States as free and prosperous by comparison, describing the political condition of the latter as being like ‘subtle prisons’ (1973, 1). Michael Warner corroborates Ehrenberg’s claim, arguing that the bureaucratization of the public sphere is what constitutes totalitarianism: ‘Everyone’s position, function and capacity for action are specified by administration. The powerlessness of the person in such a world haunts modern capitalism – we navigate a world of corporate agents that do not respond or act as people do’ (2002, 52). Warner’s comment reminds us that mail art was a globalized movement 101

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that took a stance against authoritarianism of all kinds; perhaps the target of the sabotage was indeed Carrión’s ‘Big Monster’. Art historian Eve Meltzer argues that North American conceptual artists embraced the rhetoric of information theory because they were deeply immersed in the ideological fantasy that accompanied informational processes – namely, that information and communication technologies were, as Marshall McLuhan puts it, ‘programming our world to bits’ by stripping it of its detail, paring away phenomenological ‘excess,’ and reducing it to data to be used. (2006, 125)

The idea of the information world  – administered and bureaucratized  – as one that strips away somatic experience is particularly prescient if we consider mail artists’ preoccupation with the body, stains and infestation; mail artists interrogate bureaucracy because it is a reduction of our human excesses, because it disciplines desires. Unlike the conceptual works described by Buchloh and Meltzer, mail artists reflected upon both the purging of bodily excess in their use of the paraphernalia of the bureaucratic world or postal system and the reintroduction of the somatic, organic and artisanal into that sphere. At the same time, bureaucracy is approached though the quotidian, as found objects were often employed in mail artists’ bureaucratic inventions. This chapter began by stating that mail art as a medium constitutes a kind of sabotage, a broad attack on art–world systems through undisciplined work, interventions and attempts to form completely new modes of artistic production and circulation. We have also seen how, more broadly, mail artists became concerned with intervening in systems and with questioning bureaucracy in particular, something which had a special resonance for those living in authoritarian states. In the confrontation between the private and intimate in mail art and the public and impersonal in the administered mail system, mail artists engaged tactics of disruption and sabotage to symbolically or literally disrupt those systems that relied on a de-personalized logic. The de-capacitation of this ruling power is engaged through the presence of the body or its index, the affective realms of humour, the celebration of the trickster and the exposure of the system’s limits by aping the system itself. While the targets of these bombs 102

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are steadfastly secured systems, the projected explosions deviate unusually, since their recipients are audiences, participants and passers-by, who are invited, in turn, to invent new bombs of personalized and somatic excess.

References Adaid, Germon Alfonso. 2010. “Translation, Ideology and Nationalism: Post-war Readings of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics.” Paper presented at the Meeting Margins International Conference:  Transnational Art in Latin America and Europe 1950–1978, University of Essex, 4–5 December. Baehr, Peter. 2000. The Portable Hannah Arendt. New York: Penguin. Beniger, James R. 1986. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bonin, Vincent, and Michèle Thériault, eds. 2010. Documentary Protocols. Montréal: Galerie Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery. Bruscky, Paulo. 2010. Interview with the author. Recife. Buchloh, Benjamin. 1990. “Conceptual Art 1962–1969:  From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions.” October 55: 105–143. Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, and Enzo Faletto. 1979. Dependency and Development in Latin America, translated by Marjory Mattingly Urquidi. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Carrión, Ulises. 1981. “Mail Art and the Big Monster.” Reprinted in Nucleo Arte Postal, 16th São Paulo Bienal by Walter Zanini. São Paulo:  Biennial Foundation: 12–14. Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society, Volume 1 of The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Davidson, Vanessa. 2011. “Paulo Bruscky and Edgardo Antonio Vigo:  Pioneers in Alternative Communication Networks, Conceptualism, and Performance (1960s–1980s).” PhD dissertation, New  York University, Institute of the Fine Arts. Davis, Fernando. No date. “Prácticas ‘Revulsivas’:  Edgardo Antonio Vigo en los Márgenes del Conceptualismo.” http://servicios2.abc.gov.ar/lainstitucion/sistemaeducativo/educacionartistica/34seminarios/htmls/descargas/bibliografia/ problematicas-arte/4-Davis.pdf. Accessed: 6 April 2015. Ehrenberg, Felipe. 1970. “Instructions for a Work Secretly Entitled ‘Arriba y Adelante…y sí no, pues también’.” Document in Tate Gallery Archive. ——— 1973. Introduction to Hungarian Schmuck. South Collumpton: Beau Geste Press: unpaginated. Flaherty, George F. 2012. “Appropriation, Parody and Space in the Mexico City Student Movement Graphics, 1968.” In Contested Games:  Mexico 68’s Design Revolution by Zanna Gilbert. Colchester: University of Essex: unpaginated.

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Sabotage Art Garavaglia, Juan Carlos, and Juan Pro Ruiz. 2013. Latin American Bureaucracy and the State Building Process (1780–1860), translated by Tiffany Carter and Edward W. Krasny. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Holmes, Brian. 2007. “Extradisciplinary Investigations. Towards a New Critique of Institutions.” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (EIPCP) website, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0106/holmes/en. Kafka, Franz. 1994 [1925]. The Trial. Translated by Idris Parry. London, Penguin Kay, Cristóbal. 2010. Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment. London: Routledge. Legé Harris, Richard, and Jorge Nef. 2008. Capital, Power, and Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield. Masotta, Oscar. 1967. El ‘pop art’. Buenos Aires: Columba. Meltzer, Eve. 2006. “The Dream of the Information World.” Oxford Art Journal 29: 115–135. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1988. Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Argentina 1966–1973 in Comparative Perspective. Translated by James McGuire and Ray Flory. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Pereira, Anthony. 2005. Political (In)Justice: Authoritarianism and the Rule of Law in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Quiles, Daniel. 2011. “Between Media and Message:  Argentine Conceptual Art, 1965–1975.” Paper delivered at the Association of Art Historians Annual Conference, University of Warwick, March 31 – April 1. Saper, Craig J. 2001. Networked Art. Minneapolis, MN:  University of Minnesota Press. ——— 2011. “Intimate Bureaucracies.” In Intimate Bureaucracies: Art and the Mail, edited by Zanna Gilbert. Colchester: University of Essex: unpaginated. Shukaitis, Stevphen. 2011. “Fascists as Much as Painters:  Imagination, Overidentification, and Strategies of Intervention.” The Sociological Review 59:3: 597–615. Spieker, Sven. 2008. The Big Archive. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture, 14 (1): 49–90. Weber, Max. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Translated by A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. New York: Oxford University Press. ———1992. Economy and Society. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA:  University of California Press.

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Part II

Cannons and Canons: Explosive vs. Implosive Postures

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5 Cogs and Clogs Sabotage as Noise in Post-1960s Chilean and Argentine Art and Art History Sophie Halart In December 1970, shortly after Salvador Allende assumed presidential office in Chile, the conservative association El Poder Feminino [Feminine Power] organized its first grand-scale protest on the streets of Santiago. Voicing concerns about the daily problem of food shortages affecting the country, the association’s women members banged kitchen pots as they walked through the city, filling the air with a metallic din. Although rarely acknowledged as such, this ‘March of the Empty Pots and Pans’ marked the birth of the cacerolazo (‘casseroling’), a prominent form of popular protest that, now stripped of its rightist genesis, regularly resounds on the streets of Latin American metropolises.1 Through its auditory properties, the cacerolazo also shares an unexpected kinship with one early acceptation of the French verb saboter which used to refer to the way factory workers manifested their discontent, interrupting their patrons’ speeches by stomping on the floor with their wooden shoes – or sabots (Huysecom n.d., 1).2 In the public realm of the street, the cacerolazo performs a similar gesture: assaulting dominant discourses via the production of noise, it both performs and symbolizes the interruption of dialogue. 107

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Communication theory traditionally understands noise as an undesired signal whose interference disrupts the faithful reception of a message, thus proving counter-productive to the outcome of constructive exchange.3 Noise, however has also been defended as a valid political posture of resistance against the dominance of certain discourses, ‘an encounter with the chaotic that loosens the lug-nuts of routine’ (Schwartz 2011, 858). However, even among its advocates, two lines of argument oppose a conception of noise as pure interrupter: its status as a meta-operation, whose sole purpose is to make the audience aware of the manipulative nature of communicative strategies, and a conception of this interruptive property as preliminary to the reinstatement of exchange (Hainge 2013). These contrasting readings of the disruptive potential of noise help us foresee the various  – and, at times, opposite  – understandings of its etymologic heir, sabotage itself, as an operation that can similarly be understood as the anarchist interruption of discourse or the re-routing of the latter toward dialogical forms of exchange. Building upon these tensions, this chapter examines Chilean and Argentine post-1960s neo-avant-garde art  – both in its contemporary production and subsequent historicization  – as performing gestures of sabotage. For artists active during the 1960s–1980s, a novel strategy of political involvement in the public sphere – especially in view of the rise of repressive military regimes in the region – entailed the creation of disruptive noises in order both to take over and manipulate the dominant channels of communication represented by the press and the street, two historical loci of public debate. Similarly, the subsequent efforts made by scholars and curators from the 1990s onward to disseminate this production outside Latin America was also conceived as the insertion of a discordant voice interfering with the narratives established by the art historical canon. Examining the writings of two authors  – Luis Camnitzer and Mari Carmen Ramírez – as those of saboteurs will thus shed light on their articulation and defence of a specifically Latin American form of Conceptualism and how it fared among the North American-European art history corpus. Ultimately, however, the subversive strategies conceived in both artistic productions and their historicized utterance have come under critical revision, leading one to question sabotage as the most suitable term to account for post-1960s Latin American art and its 108

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ambition to become a recognized advocate of cultural specificities in the face of an increasingly global art history.

Interrupted Flows: Neo-Avant-Garde Art in Chile and Argentina Political Orthodoxy and Committed Artists In urban Argentina and Chile, cultural involvement in political matters was mediated by political parties, trade unions and neighbourhood life for most of the 1950s. As suggested by the Argentine cultural theorist Néstor García Canclini, in these years, ‘[r]eading and sports, militancy and neighbourhood sociability all blended in an utopian continuity with national political movements’ (2001, 262).4 While García Canclini claims that this model came to an end in the 1960s with the interconnected rise of state bureaucracy and the mass media, specific forms of artistic activity remained closely associated with party allegiances. In Argentina, the Communist Party’s ‘artistic arm’, the Sociedad Argentina de Artistas Plásticos [The Argentine Society of Visual Artists] (SAAP) called for the adoption of figurative realism while the charismatic figure of Ricardo Carpani was, along with his Grupo Espartaco [Spartacus Group], actively involved in the creation of murals and graphic art for the party and trade unions (Longoni and Mestman 2000, 65–69). Similarly, in Chile, the works of the muralist collective Brigada Ramona Parra supported Allende’s 1970 presidential campaign. Defending a subordination of visual art to leftist ideals, the Chilean brigadista was described by the art critic Nelly Richard as a ‘functionary [working] within a strictly prescribed programme of oppositional politics still held by the more “orthodox” exponents of “militant” culture’ (1987, 20). Although in both countries, collaborations occurred between this branch of engagé artists and the emerging avant-gardes, the ‘old school’ continued to harbour suspicion towards what they perceived as the latter’s overdependence on foreign trends.5 More crucially, this divide reflected different conceptions of the political role and social responsibility of artists. As Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman argue, the differences between the older generation of committed artists and the younger avant-gardes reflected ‘two aspects of the relation between culture and politics […]: if, 109

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in the first instance, politics is part of the artists’ identity, in the second, it belongs to the works’ (2000, 72). In moving away from political parties, avant-garde artists grew increasingly convinced that their task lay in a different form of social critique.

Argentine Mass Media Art and (Anti-)Happenings In 1960s Buenos Aires, the cultural centre Instituto Torcuato di Tella brought together avant-garde interest in installations, performances and happenings via the regular organization of lectures, exhibitions and prizes. It is in this context that the psychoanalyst and writer Oscar Masotta, a scrupulous reader of Marshall McLuhan, announced that the 1960s heralded a new ideological paradigm as ‘machinism’ was replaced by mass media technologies. Masotta saw a meaningful correlation between this new means of communication and the artistic developments brought about by Pop Art. After Pop, Masotta argued, the art object was no longer solely conceived as the aesthetic vehicle of a message but, rather, it came to constitute a gesture that ‘permit[ted] the inspection of the conditions that dictate the constitution of any message’ (2004, 221; original emphasis). One of the key concepts Masotta used to characterize this artistic shift was ‘dematerialization’, a notion he borrowed from the writings of the Russian constructivist El Lissitzky. As artists started moving away from pure reliance on the physical existence – and visual experience – of the artwork, Masotta also encouraged an opening of their scope of intervention beyond the restrictive realm of the art institution.6 This was especially relevant because, for him, the radical novelty of the mass media lay in its ability to operate on the ‘collective unconscious’ of a society (2004, 222). Closely associated with Masotta, the artists Roberto Jacoby, Eduardo Costa and Raúl Escari created in 1966 El grupo de las artes de los medios de comunicación de masa [The Mass Media Art Group] that aimed to intervene on and in mass media’s ability to ‘generate events, determine people’s behavior, and shape reality’ (quoted in Longoni and Mestman 2004, 168). In May 1966, they began plotting their Participación total happening (also called Happening para un jabalí difunto [Happening for a Dead Boar]), contacting journalists from different national newspapers about a happening, which, they claimed, had recently taken place (see Figure 25). As 110

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Figure  25. Press coverage of Eduardo Costa, Raúl Escari and Roberto Jacoby’s ‘anti-happening’, Participación total o Happening para un jabalí difunto in the newspaper El Mundo (Buenos Aires), 21 August 1966. Courtesy of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

several newspapers, starting with the widely read El Mundo, relayed the news, printing photographs sent in by the artists and publishing interviews with self-proclaimed participants, the fictitious nature of the event was revealed by its ‘organizers’. This admission forced the misled press to publish an erratum, which, in turn, set into motion a debate among readers. This entire process – the printing of false information, the press retraction and the public discussion that ensued  – was part of the group’s ploy to perturb the media’s claim to objectivity and factual accuracy. Moreover, in these politically tense days – the coup d’état that brought to power military dictator Juan Carlos Onganía would take place just one month later7 – the 111

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work also provided an ominous warning about the poisonous role that the mass media would play once it fell under authoritarian control. In this sense, Jacoby’s non-happening, as Masotta qualified it, functioned as a trigger. By endorsing the misleading costume of ‘event’, the intervention inserted itself into dominant discursive channels and sought to sabotage them from within, revealing the mass media’s power of mystification.

CADA and the Chilean Escena de Avanzada In 1979, the Chilean collective CADA performed its first public art action.8 Entitled Para no morir de hambre en el arte [In Order Not to Starve to Death in Art] (also commonly referred to as Inversión de Escena: Acción de arte [Scene Reversal: Art Action]), it spanned multiple locations and performances. One episode involved the driving of ten dairy trucks through the streets of Santiago. Upon entering the city centre, the trucks crossed the Alameda, Santiago’s main artery, bringing chaos to the already dense traffic. In the video footage of the action, captured from a nearby car, the wide boulevard appears perpendicularly cut off by the trucks, while the Diego Portales building, the official seat of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial government, towers in the background (see Figure 27). As the trucks’ crossing obstructs both the perspectival logic of Santiago’s urban plan and the vertical elevation of military surveillance, the image from the video accurately captures CADA’s visual strategy as a gesture of intervention, blockage and disruption of official flows, be they physical or symbolic. The trucks’ final destination was the Museum of Fine Arts where the artists unrolled a large white sheet that temporarily blocked the institution’s entrance (see Figure 26). The first measures taken by the Chilean military following the 1973 coup had been to obliterate leftist visual production from the early 1970s. In a large operation that historian Luis Hernán Errázuriz described as Operación limpieza [Cleaning Operation] (2012), the murals were destroyed, political posters removed and houses whose colour suggested leftist leanings were re-painted. This operation represented the symbolic underside of a much more concrete violence:  the arrest, torture, disappearance or (self-) exile of thousands of leftist militants and intellectuals. In this context, the art scene that emerged towards the end of the 112

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Figure  26. CADA, Inversión de Escena:  Acción de arte CADA/Santiago de Chile, 1979. Photographic register of performance. Photo credit: CADA.

1970s worked like a delayed reaction to the collective shock provoked by the coup. Art critic Nelly Richard interpreted CADA’s interventions as belonging to this neo-avant-garde that she baptized Escena de Avanzada and which, she claimed, sought to transform ‘the mechanics of production and subverted the codes of cultural communication’, particularly in their adoption of new genres like performance, body art and happenings 113

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Figure  27. CADA, Inversión de Escena:  Acción de arte CADA/Santiago de Chile, 1979. Photographic register of performance. Photo credit: CADA.

(quoted in Ivelic and Galaz 1988, 19). For the Avanzada, a salient gesture of resistance lay in imploding the repressive order and parodying the government’s rhetoric of power, especially in its spatial conception of the street as a space of fear and control.9 The caravan of trucks in Para no morir was constitutive of this strategy. Mimicking the shock gesture of the military coup, it aimed to unsettle the pretence of normality engendered by the cars’ daily commute while obscuring the panoramic order of governmental surveillance. Covering the façade of the art museum with a white sheet could also be read as an ironic nod towards the ‘operación limpieza’ deployed by the junta a few years earlier. Beside their critique of the junta’s symbolization of power in public space, CADA also devised strategies of insertion into mass media, which at the time remained the prerogative of a bourgeoisie largely complicit to the military order.10 In an action entitled Viuda [Widow] (1985), two CADA members, Diamela Eltit and Lotty Rosenfeld, collaborated with 114

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Figure 28. CADA, Viuda: Prensa Acción CADA/Chile, 1985. Newspaper clip. Photo credit: Paz Errázuriz.

the photographer Paz Errázuriz in the purchase of an advertising space in different national magazines in which they published the black-and-white picture of a working class woman whose husband had been killed by a blind bullet during the military repression of a riot (see Figure  28). The confrontational pose of the woman staring defiantly at the camera was further heightened by the insertion in capital letters of the word ‘viuda’ 115

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[widow] at the bottom of the picture. For Eltit, this action followed a strategy of infiltration that bore similarities to that pursued by Jacoby’s group a few years earlier: The idea was precisely to insert ourselves into a means of communication whose purpose is not to broadcast an artwork but a multiplicity of information: economy, politics, sports. In this specific case, we include an artistic object that puts in crisis the other sections of the magazine: they get tainted with the artistic and somehow become traversed by this artistic object. (Quoted

in Saul 1985, 30) As insertion turned into contamination, the work contributed to interrupt the monotonous narrative of the printed press with a direct interpellation of the reader. Moreover, there was an ironic undertone to this action, whose appearance in the magazine was only due to its ‘passing’ as advertisement, a field understood in the neoliberal mind of the Chilean censor as void of subversive content. Thus camouflaged, the irruption of the image in the newspaper did not only reveal the discrepancy between the free circulation of mercantile discourses and the gagging of editorial content, it also contributed to rendering the border between the two fields dangerously porous, inserting into the tightly controlled narrative of daily facts a repressed fragment of the country’s political reality:  the harsh repression of the lower classes and their economic annihilation by the junta’s free-market agenda. If the Mass Media Art Group and CADA were successful in fomenting a sustained critique of the dominant channels of power, it was primarily due to the ambiguity they maintained as to the actual nature of their messages. Rather than adopting the frontal opposition of their militant counterparts, the artists proceeded by exploiting the ‘flaws’ in the dominant system. In the case of Mass Media Art, this flaw, it would seem, lay in the media’s excessive confidence in their authorial claim over reality. Meanwhile, CADA’s subversive method relied on the dictatorship’s inability to identify critique when conveyed in parodic actions or inserted via the inconspicuous medium of advertising.11 Although this calculated opacity raises questions as to the groups’ ability to actively comment on the political and economic regimes in place (conveying messages which, some 116

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might argue, were so successfully opaque they left their intended audience as puzzled as the censors), it also outlines another form of artistic intervention. Where the artists associated with political militancy mentioned at the start of this text would conceive of resistance in terms of acoustic deafness, orchestrating loud interventions to cover the lies of the establishment, the avant-garde came closer to sabotage as a form of interference, whereby the production of ‘white noise’ would ultimately reveal official discourses as rhetorical constructs aimed at justifying the repressive order of the junta. The legacy and place that these avant-gardes came to occupy in the Latin American canon of the following decades would, themselves, be the product of another type of ‘sabotage’, aimed this time at undoing a historiographical corpus perceived as hegemonically dominated by European and North American production.

Latin American Conceptualism: Sabotaging Art History? Beginning in the 1990s, the Argentine and Chilean avant-gardes were subject to renewed interest from scholars eager to account for post-1960s Latin American art. Making a link between artists’ decreased interest in object-based art and the polarization of ideological tensions in the region, curator Mari Carmen Ramírez argued that this search for renewed forms reflected a politicization of Latin American artistic activity. As artists became first-hand witnesses of their countries’ experience of social inequality, economic hardship and political authoritarianism, they increasingly adopted the role of ‘active intervener in political and ideological structures’ (1993, 158). This shift entailed a radically different approach, which consisted in ‘transferring artistic practice from aesthetics to the more elastic realm of linguistics’ (Ramírez 2004, 425). New-York based Uruguayan artist and critic Luis Camnitzer also reflected on his own artistic training in Montevideo in the early 1960s as a time when artistic activity could not be conceived autonomously from politics, leading artists toward works that broke ‘decisively from the historical dependence of art on physical form and its visual apperception’ (Camnitzer et al. 2004, viii). Striving to provide a new interpretative framework that included a variety of epochs and national stages, ranging from 1950s Brazilian Neo-Concretism 117

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to the collective experiments of Los Grupos in 1970s–80s Mexico, these authors defended the importance of a culturally specific context of political engagement for understanding the conceptual turn in Latin America. In the course of this process of re-interpretation, both the 1960s Argentine scene, with its devising of strategies of intervention in the mass media, and CADA’s attempts to disrupt the syntax of power became incorporated into a conceptualist framework. Although Ramírez and Camnitzer defined post-1960s Latin American art in terms of linguistic intervention and dematerialization, their insistence on talking about Conceptualism, rather than adopting the common denomination ‘conceptual art’, reflects an ambition to differentiate this production from the works produced in North America and Europe by artists like Joseph Kosuth and the Art & Language group. As Camnitzer would provocatively write: The center […] created the term ‘conceptual art’ to group manifestations that gave primacy to ideas and language, making it an art style, historically speaking. The periphery, however, couldn’t have cared less about style and produced conceptualist strategies instead. (2007, 1–2)

With ‘Conceptualism’ both authors targeted what they perceived as the ‘crass reductionism of metropolitan accounts’ (Ramírez 2004, 425). While these arguments have often been considered ‘revisionist’ – a term Camnitzer wears like a badge of honour (2007, 5) – their most subversive aspect lies in a strategy of insertion into the canon, which may also be equated with a gesture of sabotage. Indeed, Conceptualism did not only plan to shed light on Latin American art as an ‘underestimated project’ (Ramírez 2004, 425). More crucially, it aimed to infiltrate the metropolitan art corpus with arguments subversive enough to unsettle the very convictions constituting the foundations of established art history. In the case of Ramírez, this posture was first adopted with the publication of her ‘Blueprints Circuits’ article as part of the catalogue of Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, an ambitious exhibition organized at MoMA in 1993, in which Camnitzer participated as an artist. 118

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Although the show claimed to ‘[reveal] the complexities and variety of expression that have characterized the art of Latin America throughout the century’ (Museum of Modern Art 1993, 1), its inclusion of just about every genre and trend from early Modernism, Muralism, Surrealism and Geometric Abstraction to Pop Art, assemblage and recent painting and sculpture left many dubious as to the exhibition’s ability to address such complexities. Moreover, the show’s historical justification, the ‘celebration’ of the fifth centenary of the Spanish Conquest, felt rather unsavoury to Latin American artists and commentators. While the participation of Ramírez and Camnitzer in such a conservative enterprise seems surprising at first, it actually reveals their ambition to devise ‘theoretical stratagem[s]’ (Ramírez 2004, 426). Indeed, the critical posture endorsed consisted in exploiting the growing interest in Latin American culture in the USA (an interest which, some have suggested, might have been economically motivated)12 to enter the institution and inject into the tedious generalizations circulating about Latin American art arguments corrosive enough to disrupt both the metropolitan view of this production and the definition of conceptual art as it was conceived within the centre. Moreover, defending Latin American conceptualism in its cultural and political specificities ran much farther than initially suspected as it also inscribed itself within a post-colonial logic, which entailed putting in crisis the binary model of ‘centre-periphery’ upon which art history had built itself. ‘[S]tepping beyond the (synchronic) naïve claims for truth of historicist accounts’, Ramírez called for a reconsideration of the resistant aspect of Latin American culture as a project ‘ “not subordinated” to central, metropolitan canons’ (2004, 425–426). In this sense, Latin American art contained a subversive potential, to the extent that its inclusion in established art history would ultimately lead to the undoing of the canon. Conceptualism turned into a gesture bearing troubling similarity to the avant-garde exercises it defended. These expectations, however, did not take into account the historical limitations of the avant-garde projects themselves, nor – in a model quite similar to the one examined by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello with regard to late capitalism (2005) – the canon’s ability to co-opt antagonist discourses. 119

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The Saboteur Saboté or the Limits of Art as Subversive Practice The End of Mass Media Art and Tucumán Arde In Argentina, the establishment of a military regime in 1966 and its crackdown on intellectuals and trade unions led to political radicalization within the avant-garde. As civil violence and economic hardship further escalated, many artists up to then associated with the Di Tella, rejected institutionality altogether.13 At the time, the Mass Media Art Group was also becoming aware of the limitations entailed by forging a critical message from within mass media art. As Jacoby later recalled, ‘at that time, I started realising that media art did not work, […] it did not have agency; you could not act; you could not enter; you just stayed there’ (quoted in Longoni and Mestman 2000, 295). In 1968, Jacoby participated along with artists from the cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario in the collective project Tucumán Arde (see Figure 29). Although the exhibition (started in support of and in collaboration with sugar factory workers from the northern province of Tucumán) was conceived as an ‘advertising campaign’ (Longoni and Mestman 2000,

Figure 29. Artist Collective, Tucumán Arde, 1968. Performance.

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297), its implementation reflects a return to the frontal involvement of art in politics. As artists gathered information about the situation in Tucumán, then exhibited in a large show held at the Rosario headquarters of the CGT (Confederación General del Trabajo [General Confederation of Labour]) trade union, they sought to counteract the government and media’s lies and omissions with an overwhelming number of irrefutable and documented facts. In other words, it was the content itself and no longer the channels conveying the content that became the action’s main stake. This shift did not escape the notice of the artists involved, who described Tucumán Arde as the first step toward ‘a truly revolutionary art’ (Gramuglio and Rosa 2004, 319). On the back of these events, and faced with the police closing down the sequel to the exhibition in Buenos Aires, many artists, including Jacoby, temporarily abandoned art in order to embrace political activism. Should the aftermath of Tucumán Arde lead one to conclude that the strategies devised by the Mass Media Art Group had reached a point of exhaustion?14 Political engagement had revealed itself to be a praxis that overrode analytical methods of investigation, requiring instead a much more radical stance as to what the artist was ready to give up in order to embrace the utopian horizon outlined by his/her political beliefs. If Argentine artists managed to move beyond the self-referential trap that mass media art had become by partially acknowledging the failure of their project, in Chile, it was perhaps an excess of success that led CADA to its own end.

NO + Despite Nelly Richard’s efforts to incorporate CADA into a narrative that positioned the Avanzada in contradistinction to previous politically engaged art – insisting on its symbolic and ‘interstitial’ nature rather than the material effects of its practice  – for the collective, such rupture was far from evident. As Diamela Eltit notes, CADA’s goal was to ‘operate on the real’, to create works with political agency (quoted in Neustadt 2001, 95). CADA’s best-known intervention NO + (1983) might, in this sense, be their most successful realization. Starting in 1983, the group invited artists to make inscriptions that read ‘NO +’ (No más [No More]) on the city walls, followed by images like that of a pointed gun (referring to violence 121

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Figure  30. CADA, NO+:  Acción de arte CADA/Santiago de Chile, 1983. Photographic register of performance. Photo credit: Jorge Brantmayer.

and police repression) or written messages (‘No +’ hunger, Pinochet, disappearance) (see Figure 30). As the operation gained visibility, passers-by added their own ‘NO +’ on the walls and on banners which appeared at anti-Pinochet demonstrations (see Figure 31). Moreover, the slogan also became a powerful communicative vehicle during the 1988 plebiscite campaign as the coalition that called the country to say ‘no’ to Pinochet’s bid to renew his presidential mandate for another eight years found in NO + a precious visual aid (see Figure 32).15 This last action represented a departure from CADA’s usual patterns. While Para no morir functioned as a subversive strategy set upon destroying the petrified discourses of the hegemonic status quo, NO + went beyond this initial gesture. By fissuring the rigid propagandist channels of the junta, it operated a redistribution of speech: a first step toward democratic transition. Raúl Zurita, another CADA member defined NO + as the collective’s ultimate success: ‘[t]he dissolution of art in a subversive political action was exactly what we had dreamed about’ (quoted in Neustadt 2001, 81). Nevertheless, while this outcome might help to explain the group’s subsequent dissolution, the authorial rejection it entailed, paired with its 122

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Figure 31. Óscar Navarro, No más porque somos más. Día internacional de la mujer, Santiago/No More Because We Are More. International Women’s Day, Santiago. 1986. Photographic print. Courtesy of Óscar Navarro.

Figure 32. Political flyer for the 1988 plebiscite in Chile. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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popular success also contributed to the slogan’s recuperation, starting with Patricio Aylwin’s presidential government in 1990. While NO + unarguably constituted an iconic example of successful avant-garde participation in political action, the détournement of the slogan to new partisan ends also raises questions as to whether the subversive potential of this latter ultimately dissolved and, consequently, whether the avant-garde was able to devise aesthetic strategies immune to cooption.

Conceptualism, Inc. If Ramírez and Camnitzer conceived of Latin American Conceptualism as a strategy set upon perturbing the art historiographic status quo, its efficiency should be assessed by its impact on Euro-American scholarship and curatorial practices. Examining recent writings on the topic, two main tendencies emerge. Some art historians have expressed frustration at the way Latin American Conceptualism resembles an upfront attack on ‘mainstream’ art more than the defence of a neglected scene. Art historian Terry Smith verbalized this unease when he accused Camnitzer of ‘reverse reductivism’. Puzzled by Camnitzer’s belligerent tone toward North American conceptual art, Smith pondered: Given that Conceptual art was the most radical, avant-garde, innovative, and consequential-seeming art of the time and has retained much of that aura since, they [Latin American artists and art historians] wanted to expand its definition to include themselves. On the most obvious level of simple fairness, they want to be seen to have been contemporary. (2011a)

While this perspective episodically verges on the sententious, it also raises a valid question regarding the limitations of Conceptualism’s capacity to function as a historiographic form of sabotage. As we saw previously, the subversive strength of the Argentine and Chilean avant-gardes – in contrast to their militant counterparts  – lay in their articulation of a political critique that relied not on ideology but on using mechanisms of mass diffusion (mass media, the street) against dominant discourses, in order to reveal the bias underlying their so-called ‘objectivity’. To an extent, by brandishing Conceptualism as the anti-conceptual, its advocates returned 124

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to a form of ideological confrontation that risked antagonizing rather than convincing its audience, thus limiting Conceptualism’s agency within art history. A second – and apparently opposite – tendency related to the mainstream reception of Latin American art has been one of enthusiastic inclusion over the past few years. Following a path frayed by iconic initiatives such as Camnitzer’s co-organization of Global Conceptualism:  Points of Origins 1950s–1980s at the Queens Museum of Art (1999), exhibitions like Argentine curator Carlos Basualdo’s The Structure of Survival at the Venice Biennale in 2003 surveyed Latin American art from the past decades through a thoroughly conceptualist framework which emphasized the correlation of aesthetics and politics on local scenes. However, while providing art works with unprecedented visibility abroad  – a visibility also fed by collectors’ eagerness to tap into ‘new markets’  – these shows also contributed to reactivate the stereotype of a region riddled by systemic violence, pairing Latin America with ideas of ‘precariousness’ or ‘crisis’. This phenomenon not only led to a kind of ‘neoprimitivism’ (Gilbert 2009, 14), it also shaped a distorted account of Latin American art, compartmentalizing avant-garde scenes into easily digestible vignettes for a foreign audience and advancing narratives from which any critical tensions had been evacuated. Assessing the success of Latin American art through its late reception by the mainstream, one would therefore be tempted to conclude that if Latin American art finally reached international recognition, it was in the form of an exotic product, a tamed and indexed clog displayed in the name of cultural diversity. Moreover, by becoming the keyword that justified the re-deployment of Latin American art in these terms, Conceptualism seemed to have fallen victim to its over-ambition to speak on behalf of a whole region, thus turning into what Gabriel Peluffo called a ‘meta-style’, oblivious to the ‘variety of language operations, aesthetic formulations, and information strategies’ that characterized each national scene (2011).

Global Art and Local Re-Readings This chapter has attempted to question the extent to which the works produced by Latin American avant-gardes from the 1960s-1980s might be understood as gestures of sabotage set upon infiltrating dominant 125

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discourses. This trajectory has also led us to examine how Conceptualism, a historiographic term advanced both to promote Latin American art abroad and to defend it from misunderstanding and cooption, might be conceived as its own form of subversion specifically targeting Eurocentric art history. As we have seen, while sabotage has helped decipher the complexities inherent to the making of these avant-garde art scenes, it has also revealed the limitations of their subversive potential, which are rendered all the more salient by the increasing ‘globalization’ of art circuits. Indeed, while sabotage functions best when it operates against a centralized form of discourse, the multiplication of narratives that has accompanied the internationalization of art history puts in crisis the contemporary relevance of the term, its polemical valence drowning under a plethora of voices. This conclusion would appear to corroborate the theses advanced by the tenants of a new ‘global art history’, who describe our epoch as one of ‘highly differentiated, multidirectional, and, at times, seemingly incommensurable contemporaneity’ (Smith 2011b, 12). Although this account might seem to inaugurate parameters beneficial to art from ‘peripheral’ art scenes, Hans Belting is right to underline how global art history does not necessarily engender more equal visibility. Rather, ‘[W]estern culture, which once felt up to the task of representing all ethnic cultures via exploration and exploitation as collection, is now proclaiming the future of a world culture in which it again claims the leading position’ (Belting 2003, 70), leading one to suspect that the change produced by global art might be cosmetic at best. While Belting’s account reveals an awareness of the necessity to structurally rethink the bases of art history, he subsequently argues that, in reaction to global art, ‘[n]on-Western cultures, on the other hand, are retreating in a kind of countermovement in their own histories in order to rescue a part of their identity’ (70). This posture is highly problematic for this so-called “non-Western art”, re-iterating an image of cultures whose fear over the loss of structure heralded by post-modernity leads them to retreat into pre-modern shells, re-territorializing art against the increasing erasure of borders and national identities. By contrast, what this chapter would like to suggest by means of conclusion is that the recent attitude hailing from Latin America, especially in regard to retrospective accounts of the 1960s–1980s avant-gardes, has been one of critical re-reading. Weary of the age-old debate defining Latin American art as 126

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either merely derivative of mainstream models or absolutely unadulterated by foreign influences, the research carried out by the curatorial collective Red Conceptualismos del Sur [Conceptualisms of the South Network], for example, has attempted to articulate an alternative view: one which grants pre-eminence to the processes of discussion and transformation of foreign models within the local Latin American context. The risk of examining Latin American conceptualism separately from foreign experiments is not only that it produces a historically incorrect vision of the former, but that it also undermines the ability of artists to account for such influences. Instead, the strategy of returning to the archive deployed by Conceptualismos del Sur attempts to restore a voice to artistic discussions that were taking place at the time, thus reintroducing discordant – and, at times, within themselves contradictory – noises which react against the regional and temporal harmony artificially shaped by the defendants of a pure Conceptualism. As Miguel López, a member of Conceptualismos del Sur puts it, ‘[w]e do not recover the past in order to make it exist as a bundle of skeletons, but to disturb the orders and assurances of the present’ (2010). Ultimately, examining the successes and failures of ‘sabotage’ as a term with which to assess post-1960s Latin American art and art history also represents a crucial endeavour for Latin American artists active today, allowing them to see how the narratives in which they inscribe themselves constitute discursive categories that can be infiltrated and, at times, split open.

References Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. “Requiem for the Media.” For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. London: Telos Press. Belting, Hans. 2003. Art History after Modernism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso. Camnitzer, Luis. 2007. Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss. 2004. Foreword to Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, edited by Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss, vii–xi. New York: Queens Museum of Art. Errázuriz, Luis Hernán, and Gonzalo Leiva. 2012. El golpe estético. Dictadura militar en Chile. 1973–1989. Santiago: Ocho Libros.

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Sabotage Art Galende, Federico. 2014. Vanguardistas, críticos y experimentales. Vida y artes visuales en Chile, 1960–1990. Santiago: Metales Pesados. García Canclini, Néstor. 2001. Culturas híbridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la Modernidad. Buenos Aires: Paidós. Gilbert, Zanna. 2009. “Conceptualism and Latin America: Politics, Neoprimitivism and Consumption.” Re:bus 4:1–15 (Autumn/Winter). Gramuglio, María Teresa, and Nicolás Rosa. 2004. “Tucumán Is Burning (Statement of the exhibition in Rosario).” In Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, edited by Inés Katzsenstein, 319–323. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Hainge, Greg. 2013. Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Huysecom, Robert. No date. En passant par l’Ardenne avec mes sabots. Porcheresse: Musée du Sabot. Ivelic, Milan, and Gaspar Galaz. 1988. Chile:  Arte Actual. Valparaíso:  Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso. Kaminsky, Amy. 1999 After Exile. Writing the Latin American Diaspora. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Longoni, Ana, and Mestman Mariano. 2000. Del Di Tella a ‘Tucumán Arde’. Vanguardia artística y política en el ‘68 argentino. Buenos Aires: El cielo por asalto. ——— and Mestman Mariano. 2004. “After Pop, We Dematerialize: Oscar Masotta, Happenings, and Media Art at the Beginnings of Conceptualism.” In Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, edited by Inés Katzenstein, 208–216. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. López, Miguel. 2010. “How Do We Know What Latin American Conceptualism Looks Like?.” Afterall 23: 5–21. Masotta, Oscar 2004. Revolución en el arte. Pop-art, happenings y arte de los medios en la década del sesenta. Buenos Aires: Edhasa. Mattelart, Michèle. 1974. Mass Media, Idéologies et Mouvement Révolutionnaire. Chili. 1970–1973. Paris: Editions Anthropos. ———1986. Women, Media, Crisis. Femininity and Disorder. London: Comedia. Museum of Modern Art. 1993. Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century. http://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/7103/ releases/MOMA_1993_0010_6-4.pdf?2010. Neustadt, Robert. 2001. CADA día. La creación de un arte social. Santiago: Cuarto Propio. Noé, Luis Felipe. 1993. “Artes Plásticas Argentinas, Sociedad Anónima.” Cuadernos hispanoamericanos. 517–519 (July–September): 245–268. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1988. Bureaucratic Authoritarianism. Argentina, 1966–1973, in Comparative Perspective. Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press.

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Cogs and Clogs Office of Strategic Services. 1944. Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Washington. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/page-images/26184-images.pdf . Accessed: 6 May 2014. Peluffo, Gabriel. 2011. “Salpicón and Compota.” Artnexus 79. http://www.artnexus. com/Notice_View.aspx?DocumentID=22456. Accessed: 4 April 2014. Power, Margaret. 2002. Right-Wing Women in Chile. University Park:  The Pennsylvania University Press. Ramírez, Mari Carmen. 1993. “Blueprint Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America.” In Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, edited by Waldo Rasmussen, Fatima Bercht and Elizabeth Ferrer, 156–167. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. ——— 2004. “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity. Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960–80.” In Inverted Utopias. Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, 425–436. Houston, TX: The Museum of Fine Arts. Richard, Nelly. 1987. “Art in Chile since 1973.” Third Text 1 (2): 13–24. Saul, Ernesto. 1985. “Reconocer su propia cara:  balance de una acción de arte.” Cauce 7 (45): 30–31. Schwartz, Hillel. 2011. Making Noise:  From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. New York: Zone Books. Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Smith, Terry. 2011a. “One and Three Ideas:  Conceptualism Before, During, and After Conceptual Art.” e-flux 29. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/one-and -three-ideas-conceptualism-before-during-and-after-conceptual-art/ . Accessed: 4 March 2014. ———2011b. Contemporary Art. World Currents. London:  Lawrence King Publishing.

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6 Impossible Objects Gabriel Orozco’s Empty Shoe Box and Yielding Stone1 Natasha Adamou What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real. André Breton, ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924) I come from a country where a lot of art is labelled Surrealist. I grew up with it and I  hate that kind of dream-like, evasive, easy, poetic, sexual, cheesy Surrealist practice. I try to be a Realist. Gabriel Orozco (2011)

In a conversation with Benjamin Buchloh, Gabriel Orozco noted ‘most of my actions are done with found objects – it is kind of a rule or a system to bring nothing with me’ (2009 et  al., 194).2 In view of this practice, this chapter looks at two early works by Orozco, Empty Shoe Box (1993) (see Figure 33) and Yielding Stone (1992) (see Figure 34), which were shown at the Venice Biennale in 1993. Both these works were intentionally set up to resist spectacle in the historical and institutional context in which they were exhibited: a global biennial at a time when the art world was dominated by large-scale installations and paintings. Empty Shoe Box and Yielding Stone 130

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Figure 33. Gabriel Orozco, Empty Shoe Box, 1993. Silver dye bleach print. 40.6 x 50.8 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Figure 34. Gabriel Orozco, Yielding Stone, 1992. Plasticine. Approx. 35.6 x 43.2 x 43.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

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display an aspect of sabotage as a disruptive strategy that seeks to break with established narratives in art museums and exhibitions, and which often involves the works’ intentional or accidental obliteration. Art historian Guy Brett argues that there are two historical threads in Orozco’s work:  the reconsideration of the category of sculpture, and the dissolution of the barrier between art and the everyday, although the two threads do not, paradoxically, exclude each other (2009, 51). This chapter, then, examines Orozco’s implementation of readymade and found objects in rethinking the category of sculpture, on the one hand, and in renegotiating the tension between art and everyday life, on the other. It does so in relation to the historical horizon established by Marcel Duchamp’s readymade and André Breton’s found object, which implement the idea of breaking with a definition of art as an autonomous institution (disassociated from the praxis of life) that has been a long-standing imperative among the European historical avant-gardes (Bürger 1974, 255). In order to address the contradictions that arise from the objects’ status as both everyday items and artworks, David Joselit reads Orozco’s works through the Duchampian rendez-vous, as an encounter between the artist and the object (2000, 173). I suggest, however, taking my cue from an analysis by Margaret Iversen (2004), that this encounter is best encapsulated in André Breton’s notion of the chance encounter with the found object, which posits the latter’s intrinsic connection to the unruly and traumatic Lacanian Real. Iversen noting that the two terms, readymade and found object, are ‘often run together and used interchangeably’ in critical literature, seeks to ‘drive a wedge between them’ (2004, 45). For Iversen, calling attention to aspects of the found object in contemporary art breaks the self-critical cycle perpetuated by the readymade and its legacies, which are more concerned ‘with reflecting on and undermining the conventions and institutions of art’ (57). By being situated in the space of the unconscious (48), as the author claims, Breton’s found object opens up the art work to wider issues of life, death and sociality, and reveals the traumatic core of the modern subject (57). Because of their subject matter, the links with the readymade and the found object are entrenched in Orozco’s works. Rather than maintaining, however, the sharp distinction between readymade and found object that Iversen puts forth, this chapter is responsive to the intersections, overlaps 132

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and encounters between them in the work of Orozco, a dialogue that is still active and potent in much object-based contemporary art. It is my view, moreover, that examining Orozco’s pieces in relation to the historical precedents set by the early twentieth-century avant-gardes does not reduce the works to mere repetitions of earlier art, as Bürger held in his criticism of the neo-avant-gardes of the 1950s which, he argues, institutionalized the early avant-gardes by reproducing their gestures and in effect defeating their purpose of eliminating the distance between art and life (1974, 256). On the contrary, situating Orozco’s works in relation to Duchamp’s readymade and Breton’s found object brings into relief some of the perplexing qualities of these objects and the claims they make to being ‘in reality’ (Buchloh et al. 2009, 190). Finally, I address the complexities that arise from reading Orozco’s work in the light of aspects of Surrealist practice given the artist’s own vocal resistance to Surrealism. In particular, I situate Orozco’s position in relation to the historical reception of Surrealism in Mexico.

Empty Shoe Box The fifty-third Venice Biennale in 1993 was the first major international exhibition where Orozco presented his work. The artistic director of the Biennale, entitled Cardinal Points of the Arts, was Achille Bonito Oliva. The event addressed issues of globalization and included art works from ‘peripheral regions’. Empty Shoe Box (see Figure 35) was presented in the Aperto section of the Biennale, a much-anticipated event established in 1980 to showcase emerging artists.3 The work, as the title reveals, comprised an empty open shoebox placed directly on the floor of the exhibition space at Le Corderie dell’ Arsenale, the former rope factory where Aperto was taking place (Bonami 1996, 41). Orozco describes the long corridor and the way the booths were lined up one after another in a space that he found ‘too big and strange’, divided as it was into fragments (Orozco and Morgan 2011). During the installation, Bonami recalls that Orozco casually opened his knapsack, took out the empty shoebox and placed it on the stone floor of the space allocated to him (1996, 41). Because competition for space is not unusual in an exhibition like the Venice Biennale, ‘the idea that such an uneventful object was taking up so 133

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Figure 35. Gabriel Orozco, Empty Shoe Box, 1993. Shoe box. 12.4 x 33 x 21.6 cm. Installation view of 45th International Art Exhibition: The Cardinal Points of Art, Venice Biennale, 1993. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

much real estate caused quite a commotion among many artists’ – Charles Ray, for example, who was installing his 7 1⁄2 Ton Cube 1990 in the same section of the Biennale (Bonami 2011, 92). As a result, Bonami explained how he had to stand his ground to defend the legitimacy of this occupation of space, for, proportionally speaking, the shoebox ‘looked like a caravan in Monument Valley’ (92). In his account of the work on site, Orozco recalls: ‘it disappeared minutes before the exhibition began, carried off because people thought it was trash’ (2009a, 88). Because the work kept disappearing, Bonami suggested 134

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that the box could be glued onto the floor but Orozco objected to the idea as he thought it would cause the object to be more easily ‘destroyed by its own resistance’ (88). Instead the artist suggested, ‘it would be better to let it be kicked and for the container to take the blows and ricochet all over the place […] this way it would be more likely to survive’ (88). Taking into consideration that visitors to this vast exhibition would probably see the work for a few seconds at best, Orozco explains that this almost imperceptible gesture was aimed at testing the potential for impact on visitors’ memories and perception. He further claimed that such a subtle gesture ‘can have a stronger impact on our memory than a skyscraper ever could’ (quoted in Orozco 2007, 98). Moreover, the decision to present the shoebox came as a challenge to the grand gestures of the large-scale paintings and installations of the Eighties: It was the climax of market speculation, and the objects were made to behave in a market of commodities. They were trying to impress with shininess, as products. Obviously Jeff Koons is one of the main characters of this type of art. I was skeptical of art like this, and still am. I also found it really tedious – stiff, dead, not intriguing. So my work started to do something different. (Orozco cited in Sook 2010)

Indeed, Empty Shoe Box stood in stark contrast to the glossy, monumental works by Koons and others at the Aperto, such as Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child (Divided) (1993) (the dissected halves of a cow and a calf in formaldehyde solution, displayed in glass vitrines) or Charles Ray’s heavy solid steel cube painted with white automobile paint to make it appear lighter than it really was (Ray cited in Kontova 1993, 380). In contrast to Ray’s steel cube, Orozco’s modest shoebox turned into an ironic comment on minimal art while also effectively undermining the condition of art as spectacle (Bonami, 1996, 42). Orozco’s ‘slight’ objects attracted substantial criticism because they appeared to undermine an internationally prestigious event. ‘There has sometimes been the complaint (not least at the Venice Biennale in 1993) that Orozco has lowered the tone of a would-be important mixed show by submitting a slight piece of work’, writes Guy Brett (2009, 57). Others, as Gabriel Kuri remarks, criticized the works for being opportunistic, 135

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demonstrating ‘nothing more than a counterpoint to the magnitude of the exhibition by means of their own circumspection and failing to resonate outside the event’s structure of publicity and promotion’ (2000, 48). In addition to the commotion at the Biennale, Brett notes the annoyance Empty Shoe Box has often caused among museum directors who have despaired of insuring as an artwork a nondescript empty box that could easily get destroyed or discarded (2009, 57). For Brett, however, ‘paradoxically, the modest empty box can become in one’s mind the opposite: an expansive figure of receptivity, openness, possibility, especially by contrast with some of the more laboured efforts around’ (57). The artist’s own approach to the controversy caused by the shoebox highlights his strategic implementation of surprise and disappointment. Acknowledging that many people were shocked while others remained indifferent, Orozco observes that for some, the encounter with the box was a special moment in the midst of this massive exhibition (Orozco 2009b, 194). The artist writes in his notebook: Truly new art tends to be disappointing, especially for the public that already has an idea of what art should be. This is because new art shatters the public, forcing it into a crisis based on the simple fact that there can be no public for an art that did not exist before. (Orozco 2009a, 88)

In other words, this kind of art effectively ‘represents a new reality’ and while reality is banal, ‘it is also a space where something marvellous may happen’ (Orozco 2009a, 88–89). This effect is also demonstrated in Orozco’s first solo exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York in 1994, that is, the year after the Biennale, where the artist showed four yogurt lids, each installed on one of the four walls of the gallery space (see Figure 36). Visitors entered the room to find that there was hardly anything there to look at. After the initial disappointment, many left the room but when some of them returned, possibly ‘with a different consciousness, with a new attitude toward what was happening – which was banal, which was real – a new surprise could occur’ (Orozco 2009a, 91). In Orozco’s words, ‘this art cannot be spectacular, since reality is not spectacular, except by accident’ (91). 136

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Figure 36. Gabriel Orozco, Yogurt Caps, 1994. Four yogurt lids. 7.9 cm. Installation view at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

It is worth noting that, somewhat ironically, it was this ‘slight’ work, the modest shoebox, which brought Orozco to international prominence. Buchloh considers the box as one of Orozco’s paradigmatic objects ‘that has gained – with hindsight all the more so – an epistemological authority approaching the status of Duchamp’s first, pure unadulterated readymade’ (2006, 177). Bonami (2011) also describes the box in retrospect as a ‘mythical gesture’ now belonging to ‘the trinity of conceptual art’ alongside Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista (1961). Even if the work is now canonized as part of art history, it still triggers dispute, providing a key example of how an almost imperceptible work can disrupt the art establishment, challenge the limits of art discourse and question the assumptions that sustain it and the bureaucracies that constitute it as an institutional system.

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As a mass-produced object inserted into the museum context, Empty Shoe Box undeniably evokes the Duchampian readymade, while it further resonates with Duchamp’s Box-in-a-Valise (1935–41), Green Box (1934) and White Box (1967), albeit emptied of their contents. Indeed, Duchamp constitutes an important figure for Orozco, and the readymade has been crucial in the reading of Orozco’s work by numerous scholars and art critics. In addition to the Duchampian echoes, Buchloh situates Orozco’s work within a historical framework of sculpture that spans the one hundred years from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century, ranging from Brancusi’s sculpture and Duchamp’s readymade in the 1910s, to Conceptual Art, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and Arte Povera (in Temkin 2009, 34–43). Guy Brett further relates Orozco’s practice to Latin American art, particularly the Argentinian artist Alberto Greco’s Vivo Ditto (1962) and Hélio Oiticica’s Bólides (1963–1964) (2009, 53). Indeed, Empty Shoe Box is a work rich in art historical reverberations, ‘infinitely knowing, art-historically speaking’ (Clark 2011, 32). However, these accounts fail to link the work to Breton’s found object, a link which would connect with Orozco’s investigation of reality.

Yielding Stone … a fact [fait] is always made up of [fait de] discourse. No one has ever seen a received fact. That is not a fact. It’s a lump, something you bump into, all the things that can be said about something that is not already discursively articulated. Jacques Lacan (2008, 72)

At the 1993 Biennale, the shoebox was displayed alongside Orozco’s Yielding Stone (1992), a lump of plasticine the weight of the artist, rolled into a roughly spherical shape and placed on the floor of the Arsenale. Having picked up debris and bearing visible traces of its trajectory, the plasticine ball was situated between two imposing brick pillars. Bonami recounts that the work was handled roughly by visitors to the exhibition and was even stabbed with a plastic fork at some point (1996, 41). He moreover explains that both Yielding Stone and Empty Shoe Box were born to be destroyed, ‘abused without pity’, discarded, thrown away (41). Bonami finally argues 138

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that in their encounter Empty Shoe Box and Yielding Stone bring together the two most common techniques of classical sculpture, by subtracting in one work, and adding in the other (42). Brett has compared Yielding Stone to Alberto Giacometti’s Object to be thrown away (1931) from his set of Disagreeable Objects, ‘a sort of ugly thing that would not fit or function within established, expected protocols’ (2009, 54). Indeed, Yielding Stone is also this kind of ‘disagreeable’ object that absorbs dust and dirt, and fails to set into a permanent form because of its oily, malleable substance in contrast to the hard and shiny surfaces of more spectacular sculpture. The artist explains that he was interested in plasticine because of its ‘constant mutability’ and that he used this quality ‘to shape its appearance:  camouflage, not of stone into sculpture, but of sculpture into stone; modeling a rock which is not a rock, nor a sculpture, but a ball of plasticine, dirty’ (Orozco 2011, 22).4 However, while these objects revisit the histories and redefine the category of sculpture in order to generate a critique of spectacle, they do so in their capacity as found objects.

The Found Object In his book Mad Love (L’Amour fou, 1937), Breton gives a detailed account of his encounter with two found objects while strolling around the Saint-Ouen flea market on the outskirts of Paris with his friend Alberto Giacometti. One of the objects that caught his attention was a curious wooden spoon whose handle was supported by a small, carved shoe (see Figure 37). Breton immediately bought the spoon and soon realized that this unique and unusual object corresponded to a certain pre-existing desire of his: Some months earlier inspired by a fragment of a waking sentence, “the Cinderella ash-tray” and the temptation I had for a long time to put into circulation some oneiric and para-oneiric objects, I had asked Giacometti to sculpt for me, according to his own caprice, a little slipper which was to be in principle Cinderella’s lost slipper. (Breton 1987, 33)

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Figure 37. André Breton, Cinderella Ashtray (Cendrier Cendrillon), 1934. Carved wood. Author’s photograph.

Breton wished to have this object cast in grey glass but Giacometti never realized the project and Breton reports that he felt the pressing lack of this slipper. He further says that even though the flea market wooden spoon is different in all points from what he had planned, its beauty comes precisely from ‘the lack of resemblance between the desired object and the discovery. […] it takes all the beauty that I see in it from what it is not’ (Breton 1978, 42–43). Breton is moreover thrilled to find ‘the marvelous slipper potential in the modest spoon’ (34). By opening up an expansive space of possibility, far from the dominant forms of spectacle, Orozco’s modest shoebox operates in a similar way. Interestingly, the shoe has gone missing from the shoebox in Orozco’s story, further invoking ideas of loss and desire. In addition to these allusions, the origin of the shoebox as the container of the artist’s notes and working objects, as well as the common use of shoeboxes for storing photos, letters and other personal memorabilia, also point to ideas of loss, 140

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memory and desire that counterbalance the work’s status as a readymade, mass-produced object. In one of his notebooks, Orozco quotes Slavoj Žižek’s (1992, 19) discussion of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915): The ‘reality’ (white background surface, the ‘liberated nothingness,’ the open space in which objects can appear) obtains its consistency only by means of the ‘black hole’ in its center (the Lacanian Thing that gives body to the substance of enjoyment) i.e. by the exclusion of the real, by the change of the status of the real into that of a central lack.’ (Quoted in Temkin 1999, 37;

emphasis in original)5 In formulating the psychoanalytic concept of the objet petit a, (formerly the Lacanian Thing), it has been convincingly argued by Iversen (2007) that Lacan had Breton’s found object in mind. Vice-versa, given this relation, the Lacanian objet petit a, as that which partakes of the Real, can tell us something in retrospect about the found object. It becomes apparent from Orozco’s notebook citation, that the idea of lack that constitutes Breton’s found objects, and which retrospectively resonates with the objet petit a and the Lacanian Real, is crucial for Orozco, who often claims that he works ‘in reality’ (cited in Joselit 2000, 173). David Joselit considers the problems of this claim from an art historical perspective, as one informed on the one hand by the readymade, and on the other by (Lacanian) psychoanalytic theory (2000, 173). He argues that, first, in the case of the readymade, there is a danger of simplistically collapsing art into life, and vice-versa. Secondly, in relation to psychoanalytic theory, working ‘in reality’ poses the following paradox:  how can the Lacanian Real, often understood as that which lies outside representation, be incorporated into a system of representation? That is, ‘how can reality be incorporated as an artwork?’ (173). Joselit writes:  ‘From both art-historical and poststructuralist perspectives, […] working in reality calls forth “impossible objects”. Such things must simultaneously emerge as representations and fall back into the unmediated condition that is “reality” ’ (2000, 173). In other words, as Žižek asks in relation to the Real defined as lack: ‘How can nothing beget something?’ (1992, 8). 141

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To address this problem, Joselit reads Orozco’s objects through the Duchampian rendez-vous, an encounter between the artist and the object, which can nevertheless be circumvented by all sorts of delays and where, he suggests, ‘the stain of reality remains pungent’ (2000, 173). By cultivating the dimension of the readymade as an encounter, Joselit proposes that Orozco’s works reach beyond issues of ‘aesthetic validation conferred on ordinary commodities’ (2000, 173). Indeed, aspects of the rendez-vous are present in Yielding Stone, for example, where the artist set a date and time for himself to roll the ball around the streets, much like Duchamp’s instructions to inscribe a readymade on a specific date at a certain time. However, I  suggest that the pungent ‘stain of reality’ in Orozco’s works is more aptly captured by the Surrealist chance encounter with the found object, which engages more fully with the questions Joselit identifies. While the rendez-vous implies intention and choice on the part of the artist, the accidental character of the chance encounter helps bring into relief the precarious state of Orozco’s everyday objects as artworks, and allows us to get a better understanding of the claim they make to being ‘in reality’. The city is the privileged site of the chance encounter in Surrealism.6 Orozco also often finds his objects in the streets and outskirts of cities, which he believes to be rich in such encounters. He sometimes uses film or photography, which he likens to a container as well as a hole, to record his interactions. Describing his films, comprised of unedited sequences of things he encounters in the streets, Orozco admits there may be similarities with John Cage’s recordings, as well as with Surrealist automatic writing. However, he is careful to distinguish his work from these practices because they are about ‘losing control’, while his work entails ‘focusing on concentration and intention’ (Orozco 1998, 115). As he puts it, ‘the flow of images in my work is extremely controlled. I  trace certain intentions with the camera, and then suddenly the tension between my intentions and reality becomes too great and the whole thing breaks down’ (115). Rather than a simplified conception of Surrealist automatism and the corresponding strategy of the chance encounter as ‘losing control,’ it is exactly this tension between intention and chance, the discrepancy between the imagined and the found object demonstrated in Breton’s story of the found wooden spoon that finds expression in Orozco’s work. 142

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Figure  38. Gabriel Orozco, Working Tables, 2000–2005. Mixed media, including unfired clay, straw, egg container, bottle caps, wire mesh screen, string, stones, shells, plaster, bark, polystyrene foam, painted wood elements and pizza dough. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Further addressing Orozco’s interest in reality, Briony Fer (2009) draws our attention to the word REALIA written in capital letters in one of Orozco’s earliest notebooks. The term concerns ‘such items as objects, specimens, samples, relics, artefacts, souvenirs and even models and dioramas. And realia which one uses in construction of exhibition and bulletin boards. Real things, actual facts’ (Fer 2009, 23). Fer maintains that these physical things can be connected with the objects collected in cabinets of curiosity because, like those objects, Orozco’s items, however small and mundane, maintain something ‘immense and mysterious’ (23) (see Figure 38). In her reading, Fer effectively dissociates ‘reality’ from the simple amassing of factual information, highlighting an unresolved tension in Orozco’s engagement with it. There is, then, a difference between ‘reality’ and the Real, which is not clear in Orozco’s statements 143

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and is also obscured in Joselit’s discussion of Orozco’s work. Working with ‘real things, actual facts’ is one thing. Incorporating the concept of the Real, on the other hand, as that which escapes representation, is a different matter. Breton himself is well aware of this distinction when he differentiates the real, from ‘given data’ (2002, 276). Understanding this important distinction is essential if we are to comprehend Orozco’s version of realism. Tracing aspects of Breton’s found object in Orozco’s works provides the necessary theoretical tools with which to answer questions regarding the artist’s ambition to work ‘in reality’. In addition, a central objective of Surrealism was to propose a fundamental reformulation of the notion of reality, which is also Orozco’s proclaimed aim for new art – that it ‘represents a new reality’ (Orozco 2009a, 88). I have thus far suggested that the found object, which in its very conception maintains a dialectical tension between representation and reality, effectively allows us to think through this tension without simplistically collapsing the one into the other, as Joselit was concerned may occur. There is, however, another important dimension to the Lacanian Real that rests beyond longstanding debates on the dichotomy between representation or symbolization and a supposedly unmediated reality. In How to Read Lacan, Žižek emphasizes the complexities of the Lacanian Real which exceed the idea of it as ‘a fixed transhistorical “hard core” that forever eludes symbolization’ (2006, 65).7 The Real, as Lacan insisted, is different from Immanuel Kant’s ‘Thing-in-itself ’, ‘reality the way it is out there, independently of us, prior to being skewed by our perceptions’ (Žižek 2006, 65). To illustrate this elusive concept, Žižek further identifies the Lacanian objet petit a, the marker of the Real, with an example taken from popular culture:  the barely perceptible detail which distinguishes aliens from humans in the films of Ridley Scott. Furthermore, he claims: Are we not dealing with the same in our everyday racism? Although we are ready to accept the Jewish, Arab, Oriental other, there is some detail that bothers us in the West: the way they accentuate a certain word, the way they count money, the way they laugh. This tiny feature renders them aliens, no matter how they try to behave like us. (Žižek 2006, 67)

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On the level of representation and its relation to the Real, Žižek refers to Lacan’s well-known example of the mysterious object depicted in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (1553). When viewed frontally, this object resting at the feet of the Ambassadors is nothing at all, just a void, an indecipherable stain. It is only when we shift our position and look at the object from an oblique angle that the figure of a skull appears. This anamorphic distortion, referring here to death, reveals the objet petit a as a strange object which ‘acquires a definite shape only when looked at from a standpoint slanted by the subject’s desires and fears – as such, as a mere “shadow of what it is not” ’ (Žižek 2006, 68–69). In ‘Refuse and Refuge’ (1993), a discussion regarding Orozco’s implementation of found objects in his early sculptural practice, Buchloh describes the works as silent, muted objects which actively circumvent an explicit political dimension. Their function, however, is to take a stance against the instrumentalisation of art from developing countries, ‘expecting artists of marginalized cultures (both of the urban ghettoes and the non-Western world) to redeem the crisis of the artistic object and reimbue it with a credible auratic dimension, defying as it were the now generally governing principle of simulation and political instrumentalisation of artistic practices in the centers’ (Buchloh 2009a, 4). Buchloh continues: ‘How can an artist escape these projections operative in the process of “othering”?’ (4), suggesting that, in a postcolonial context, Orozco’s work plays out the tensions between the ‘projections of the hegemonic world’ while refusing ‘to be subjected to these expectations, answering in each instance with a precise analysis of the mechanism of othering itself ’ (4). Buchloh describes Yielding Stone, for example, as follows: Orozco’s atavistic object, with its relapse into a primary concept of mere tactility as a participatory mode, appears to prefer muteness over the myth of public speech. But this muteness would be in and of itself merely reprehensible if it was presented emphatically and with the reactionary conviction and minimalist spite, in the manner of Donald Judd, for example. Orozco’s objects exude a silence that is always aware of its inflicted and transitory status, neither ostentatiously displayed as an aesthetic privilege nor internalized as an inescapable condition. It

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Orozco’s stance towards Surrealism is indicative of these concerns, partly due to the perceived exoticisation of Mexican culture through a Surrealist lens. Rather than understanding them as ‘mute’ objects, however, I suggest that reading Orozco’s early sculptures through the lens of Breton’s found object and the Lacanian Real, as I have done in this chapter, enables us to conceive the more complex process of identity construction that goes on in these works. In his book Lacan and the Political, the political theorist Yannis Stavrakakis discusses the fundamental impossibility, in a Lacanian context, of the formation of a stable identity through the notion of the Real as lack. He writes: Symbolisation, that is to say the pursuit of identity, introduces lack and makes identity ultimately impossible… Identity is possible only as a failed identity; it remains desirable exactly because it is essentially impossible…. Thus, it is rather misleading to speak of identities within a Lacanian framework. What we have is only attempts to construct a stable identity, either on the imaginary or the symbolic level, through the image of the signifier. The subject of lack emerges due to the failure of all these attempts. What we have then … is not identities but identifications, a series of failed identifications or rather a play between identification and its failure, a deeply political play. (1999, 29)

I have argued here that Orozco’s ‘impossible objects’ partake of the Real, maintaining ‘the stain of reality’ that Joselit wanted to preserve, but they do so as found objects. These ‘slight’ objects that marked the artist’s entrance into the international art world by reverting to the Real as central lack with its rich connotations of identity and desire, effectively negotiate identity formation and reverberate with all the complexities that this process entails, without reducing the work to an exotic Otherness or seamlessly incorporating it into dominant institutional discourses. In their iconoclastic negotiation of the void, the empty space, they imply a slanted view upon the art object. By effectively sabotaging representation as the premise behind the works, they cause a mild crisis in the museum context and they call into question the status of art as spectacle. 146

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Surrealist Legacies in Latin America In an interview with Briony Fer, Orozco speaks about his relation to the early European avant-gardes, highlighting his preference for the geometric aesthetic of pre-World War II art and the infantile attitude of Dada that, for him, were more connected to reality (2006, 113). In contrast to that, he rejects the ‘self-indulgent, teenage attitude’ that emerged in the Mexican context with the work of Frida Kahlo and Surrealism (113). Elsewhere, Orozco acknowledges the lasting legacies of the Surrealist movement in Mexico fuelled by Breton’s visit to the country in 1938, yet he reads Surrealism through the prism of the ‘fantastic’ as something extraneous to reality that dominated its reception in Latin America, explaining: I got more and more distant from the idea of fantasy or Surrealism in the work of art, which I found [in the end] ornamental or artificial. Surrealism was a very important trend in Mexican art through the twentieth century and I  wanted to break with that. I  wanted to break with the idea of attaching an object with special powers or psychological expression. One way to put it is that I was searching for realism. I was searching for the object as a thing that was real, not Surreal. (Quoted in

Morgan 2011, 9) In the introduction to Surrealism in Latin America, Vivísimo Muerto, the authors address the often negative reception of Surrealism in contemporary Latin American art as amounting to ‘a partial and limited historiography and stereotypical characterizations that aligned it with the gratuitous fantastic and the charge that it appropriated artists such as Frida Kahlo in a neo-colonialist manner’ (Ades, Eder and Speranza 2012, 1). They further suggest that the treatment of Surrealism as ‘a closed historical chapter’ which is met with suspicion, discomfort or silence when discussed in a contemporary context hinders possible readings of unexplored connections and may partly derive from ‘the collateral effect of recent strategic re-readings’ (8). To highlight this point, Ades refers elsewhere to the impact of Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s real maravilloso [magical realism] who sought to distance Surrealism from Latin America in the context of ‘initiatives aiming to stamp a 147

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distinctive, unique cultural identity on Latin America in the second half of the 20th Century’ (Ades 2009, n.p.). For Ades, Carpentier’s real maravilloso sets up a sharp opposition between ‘surrealist fantasy’ and ‘magic reality’ which misleadingly ‘consolidated the identification of Surrealism with “fantasy” and a fantastic divorced from the real world’ (2009, n.p.). Furthermore, the reception of Surrealism in Mexico during the 1940s did not include consideration of Surrealist objects but was focused mainly on painting (Usabiaga 2011, 8).8 This also resulted in a partial reception of Surrealism, one which was lacking an understanding of the complex issues surrounding the fusion of art and politics negotiated by the Surrealists in the form of the Surrealist object in the 1930s (9). As early as 1924, at the beginnings of the movement, Breton declared in the ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’: ‘What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real’ (1969, 15). Even though aspects of Orozco’s work draw on Duchamp’s readymade and its legacies, it is in Breton’s found object that he finds an apt theoretical and aesthetic tool to re-negotiate the position of the art object, by shifting it into an indeterminate status between representation and ‘reality’ and by finding a new vocabulary for a critique of spectacle. Despite Orozco’s proclaimed resistance to the Surrealist legacy, this chapter has identified that he shares with Surrealism an understanding of the Real as not simply a place outside of representation, as Joselit maintains, but as a marker of desire linked to issues of identity and Otherness. For Orozco, the Real understood in this way is a key concept, effectively shaping his ‘impossible objects’.

References Ades, Dawn. 2009. “Surrealism and its Legacies in Latin America.” Lecture presented at the British Academy, 27 May:  http://www.britac.ac.uk/audio.cfm/ assetfileid/11824. Accessed: 12 June 2014. ——— Rita Eder, and Graciela Speranza, 2012. Introduction to Surrealism in Latin America. Vivísimo Muerto, edited by Dawn Ades, Rita Eder, and Graciela Speranza, 1–11. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute. Bonami, Francesco. 1996. “Back in Five Minutes.” Parkett 48 (Spring): 41–47. ———2011. “The Early Adventures: Gabriel Orozco.” Tate Etc., 21: 92–95.

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Impossible Objects Breton, André. 1969. “First Manifesto of Surrealism.” In Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, 3–47. Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press. ———1978. “Beauty Will Be Convulsive.” In What is Surrealism?, edited by Franklin Rosemont, 42–43. New York: Pathfinder Press. ——— 1987. Mad Love, translated by Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. ———1999. Nadja, translated from the French by Richard Howard. London: Penguin Books. ——— 2002. “The Crisis of the Object.” In Surrealism and Painting, 275–280. Boston, MA: MFA. Brett, Guy. 2009. “Between Work and World.” In Gabriel Orozco (October Files 9), 51–58. Boston, MA: The MIT Press. Buchloh, Benjamin. H.  D. 2006. “Sculpture as Recollection.” In Gabriel Orozco, edited by Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Briony Fer, 154–207. London: Thames & Hudson. ——— 2009a [1993]. “Refuse and Refuge.” In Gabriel Orozco (October Files 9), edited by Yve-Alain Bois, 1–15. Boston, MA: The MIT Press. ———2009b. “Sculpture Between Nation-state and Global Commodity Production.” In Gabriel Orozco, edited by Ann Temkin, 34–43. New York, NY:  Museum of Modern Art. ——— Carrie Lambert Beatty, Megan Sullivan, and Gabriel Orozco. 2009. “To Make an Inner Time: a Conversation with Gabriel Orozco.” October 130: 177–196. Bürger, Peter. 1974. Theory of the Avant-garde. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Charles Ray. 1993. “Charles Ray.” In Aperto ‘93: Emergency/Emergenza, edited by Helena Kontova and Achille Bonito Oliva, 380. Milan: Flash Art International/ Giancarlo Politi Editore. Clark, T.J. 2011. “At Tate Modern.” London Review of Books, 33 (4): 32–33. Eyers, Tom. 2012. Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’. Palgrave MacMillan. Fer, Briony. 2006. “Crazy about Saturn.” In Gabriel Orozco, 113. London:  Thames & Hudson. ——— 2009. “Constellations in Dust: Notes on the Notebooks.” In Gabriel Orozco, edited by Ann Temkin, 22–33. New York, NY: MoMA. Iversen, Margaret. 2004. “Readymade, Found Object, Photograph.” Arts Journal 63 (2): 44–57. ———2007. Beyond Pleasure:  Freud, Lacan, Barthes. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Joselit, David. 2000. “Gabriel Orozco.” Artforum (September): 173–74. Kingsley, Patrick. 2011. “Watching Gabriel Orozco’s Box.” The Guardian (7 February): http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/feb/07/ gabriel-orozco-tate-modern. Accessed: 12 June 2014.

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Sabotage Art Kuri, Gabriel. 2000 “General Orozco: By Way of Introduction,” in Gabriel Orozco. edited by Alma Ruiz, 34–65. Los Angeles and Mexico City :  MOCA and the Museo Rufino Tamayo. Lacan, Jacques. 2008. My Teaching, translated by David Macey. London: Verso. Morgan, Jessica, and Gabriel Orozco. 2011. “Gabriel Orozco: In Conversation.” Tate Modern, London, 19 January, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/ gabriel-orozco-conversation. Accessed 6 January 2015. Orozco, Gabriel. 1998. “Gabriel Orozco Talks About his Recent Films,” Artforum (June): 115. ——— 2007. “Gabriel Orozco: Interview with Carmen Boullosa.” Bomb 98:  http:// bombmagazine.org/article/2862/gabriel-orozco. Accessed: 12 June 2014. ——— 2009a [2001]. “Lecture.” In Gabriel Orozco (October Files 9), edited by Yve-Alain Bois, 85–104. Boston, MA: The MIT Press. ——— 2009b [2004]. “Gabriel Orozco in Conversation with Benjamin H.  D. Buchloh,” in Gabriel Orozco (October Files 9), edited by Yve-Alain Bois, 105–120. Boston, MA: The MIT Press. ——— 2011. “An Artist without Frontiers.” The Economist, 12 January:  http:// www.economist.com/node/17899563. Accessed 12 June 2014. Sook, Alastair. 2010. “Gabriel Orozco:  All the Right Moves.” The Telegraph (30 December): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/8207377/ Gabriel-Orozco-all-the-right-moves.html. Accessed 12 June 2014. Stavrakakis, Yannis. 1999. Lacan and the Political. London and New  York: Routledge. Temkin, Ann. 1999. Gabriel Orozco: Photogravity. Philadelphia, PA:  Philadelphia Museum of Art. Usabiaga, Daniel Garza. 2011. “André Breton, Surrealism and Mexico, 1938–1970:  A  Critical Overview.” Arara, 10:  https://www.essex.ac.uk/art history/research/pdfs/arara_issue_10/usabiaga.pdf. Accessed: 12 June 2014. Žižek, Slavoj. 1992. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Boston, MA: The MIT Press. ———1993. “Violations of the Fantasy Space.” In Aperto ‘93: Emergency/Emergenza, edited by Helena Kontova and Achille Bonito Oliva, 110–112. Milan: Flash Art International/Giancarlo Politi Editore. ———2006. How to Read Lacan. New  York and London:  W.W. Norton and Company.

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7 El Museo de la Calle Art, Economy and the Paradoxes of Bartering Olga Fernández López

In past decades, neoliberal policies have produced a strong impact in the art world, as artists and exhibitions worldwide have reflected on a shifting economic environment. This has been characterized by flexible post-Fordist management methods, the deregulation and decentralization of markets and labour, and the integration of financial markets. Exhibitions such as Services:  The Conditions and Relations of Service Provision in Contemporary Project-Oriented Artistic Practice (1994), Exchange-Transform (2002) or Trade Show (2005) and books like What We Want is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art (Purves 2005) reveal how artists and curators tackle the new relationships between art and the economy by looking at cultural industries, art funding, intellectual property, service economies and fictional corporations.1 Either presenting a critique or proposing alternatives, these initiatives were mainly structured around the concepts of generosity, barter and gift.2 Within this framework, this chapter examines El Museo de la Calle (The Museum of the Street), a project that addressed these alternative modes of exchange by starting a process of bartering in 1998 that evolved in unexpected ways until its end in 2001. This project, as we will see, stands at a crossroads between art, anthropology and 151

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economy, if read through the concept of transvaluation, as developed by Arjun Appadurai. El Museo de la Calle was an artistic project set up by Colectivo Cambalache [Barter Collective] that took place primarily in Bogotá, but also travelled to other cities around the world. The project consisted of a pushcart, which was steered by the artists through the streets and served as a site for bartering. The cart and the act of exchange constituted the basis for an ever-changing museum that mimicked, sabotaged and questioned both the circulation of commodities and the stability of the museum institution. Originally conceived of as an intervention in public space, the work represented the unstoppable circulation of goods that characterizes the streets of Bogotá, while its continuous movement contradicted and resisted any kind of conservative museological impulse. However, the artists’ original aims encountered significant criticism; charges ranged from the aestheticization of poverty to the instrumentalization of the Other and the neutralization of his/her potentialities in the exhibition space.

Bartering at El Cartucho Colectivo Cambalache was part of the changing artistic scene that emerged in Colombia at the beginning of the 1990s. At this time, there was a generational takeover in which artists extended their practice, incorporating new issues, media and processes and thus going beyond established canons of modernist painting and sculpture (Fernández 2007; Arcos Palma 2007). According to Carlos Arturo Fernández and Ricardo Arcos Palma, these contemporary artistic languages were already present in the Colombian context, but this new generation of artists was the one which finally abandoned an exhausted modern vocabulary. The international reception of peripheral artists produced by globalization accelerated this diversification. Changes in medium included an expanded use of performance and installation while, in relation to the work’s content, Colombian artists began to look closely at the national socio-political and economic situation.3 There was a specific interest in investigating the country’s conflicted politics and the transformation of its urban environments. Common themes included violence, drugs, migration and displacement (Rojas-Sotelo 2010; Bernal et al. 2007). However, participative artistic practices invoking, examining 152

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and producing a sense of community did not develop fully until the end of the decade. Colectivo Cambalache originated at the University of Los Andes (Bogotá) in 1998, under the impulse of Raimond Chaves and Federico Guzmán, together with a group of young artists, namely Carolina Caycedo, Luisa Clavijo and Adriana García Galán. Colombian-Spanish artist Raimond Chaves spent much of the 1990s in Barcelona, working on drawings, wall installations, posters, archival material, collective projects and workshops that re-interpreted traditional genres and concepts, such as cartography, landscape and portraiture.4 In 1998, he was lecturing at the University of Los Andes and already introducing young artists to collaborative practices (Roca 2003). In the course of that year, Chaves invited Spanish artist Federico Guzmán to give a seminar in Bogotá. Guzmán’s art practice has been based, since the late 1980s, in collective work, public space and pedagogy. Using art as a tool for knowledge, encounter and social transformation, his works construct ‘open’ monuments and copyright-free zones, critically investigating intellectual property through appropriation. Guzman’s seminar at the University of Los Andes was entitled Promote your Everyday Life and it sought to start a conversation that would take students beyond the university classroom (Iregui 2002). Guzmán’s first project with the students was to play Parchís, a popular board game in Latin America, in public spaces including street pavements, train platforms and shopping centres. Through the observation of people’s reactions, the experiment revealed a high degree of control, surveillance and economic stratification at work in public space. Indeed, on more than one occasion, the students were chased by the police and had their game confiscated (Guzmán 2007). This led the group to move into a less controlled part of the city, called El Cartucho. In those years, this barrio (neighbourhood), located near the city centre and the presidential palace, was one of Bogotá’s most dangerous places, due to drug use and trafficking. In the late nineteenth century, the neighbourhood had been a wealthy residential area, inhabited by Bogotá‘s middle classes. In the 1950s, however, the area started to change, first with the establishment of jewellery shops and the settlement of immigrants and then, from the 1970s onwards, with the progressive encroachment of drugs causing middle class residents to leave (Góngora and Suárez 2008, 107–138). The steep reduction in drug 153

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prices attracted a growing number of users, resulting in the degradation of the whole district. Ruined streets and houses were populated by petty thieves, sex workers, underage dealers and corrupt police, along with clerics of all religions trying to the help the impoverished population. An artist working in the area, Rolf Abderhalden Cortés, characterized El Cartucho through Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘state of exception’, a site with its own laws, existing outside of the juridical order and ‘under the blind gaze of the State’ (Cortés 2006).5 In 1998, Bogotá’s mayor decided to demolish the neighbourhood and turn it into the gigantic Third Millennium Park (Parque del Tercer Milenio). This programme of urban regeneration involved house demolition and the eviction of working class residents. It was this situation that convinced Colectivo Cambalache to start working in the neighbourhood (Caycedo, pers. comm. 2010). The collective’s first project in El Cartucho was to set up a three-day free hairdressing salon called A toda mecha (Quick Cut) at the UASI (Unidad de Atención en Salud a Indigentes [Healthcare Service for the Destitute]), which they ironically called a ‘beauty salon’. The aim of the project was to introduce themselves to the neighbourhood, hear people’s stories through ‘hair salon conversations’ and learn how the barrio was organized.6 A few days later, at the suggestion of Luisa Clavijo and Adriana García Galán, El Museo de la Calle was established, seeking to organize a big barter and giveaway in the streets for the exchange of all kinds of artefacts. The idea was to reflect on the everyday social dynamics and economic practices of El Cartucho (see Figures 39 and 40). Due to the different kind of economic transactions, both legal and illegal, that took place in the barrio, the area was open to the existence of a talented and skilful alternative economy, especially of the type commonly called ‘economía del rebusque’ [economics of rummaging], whereby informal recyclers or waste pickers earn their living by collecting, sorting and selling materials such as cardboard, paper, glass or metal. Numerous and very active, these recyclers belong to the most marginalized sectors of the population. The collective decided to mimic the recycler’s mode of action by building a pushcart named El Veloz [The Fast One], embellished with red felt and a set of drawers (see Figure  41).7 The artists then brought together various artefacts from friends and family, including clothing, toys and home appliances that were to be bartered in El Cartucho for other objects 154

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Figure 39. El Museo de la Calle. Installation view in Bogotá, 1998–2001. Courtesy of Federico Guzmán / Cambalache Collective.

Figure 40. El Museo de la Calle (Detail: El Veloz), 1998–2001. Courtesy of Federico Guzmán / Cambalache Collective.

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Figure  41. El Museo de la Calle (Detail:  Technology), 1998–2001. Courtesy of Federico Guzmán / Cambalache Collective.

brought by anyone interested in an exchange. Since no money was involved in the interaction, a different, mainly functional or sentimental, system of value was set in motion.8 With the exchanged objects, the collective set up an ephemeral and portable museum called El Museo de la Calle [The Museum of the Street] whose collection was subject to constant change and reconstruction and hence echoed the way in which the neighbourhood was experienced daily by its inhabitants. As a collection of ‘material culture’, a sort of portrait of El Cartucho, the museum had a representative dimension, which was enriched by the use of exchange as a mechanism 156

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Figure  42. El Museo de la Calle (Detail:  Treasure Box), 1998–2001. Courtesy of Federico Guzmán / Cambalache Collective.

for inviting the ‘public’ to participate. Therefore, the museum could be understood as a paradoxical combination of indexical objects/documents (speaking indirectly from and for the barrio’s inhabitants while avoiding relaying a static or essentialized self-portrait) and a performative core (expressing the human, social and economic relations of a particular space, including its rules, languages and clothing) (Colectivo Cambalache 2007) (see Figures  42 and 43). For a year and a half, once a week, the collective brought El Museo de la Calle to El Cartucho. The project’s extended temporality allowed for a regular audience to build up and compensated for its ephemerality and continuous mobility. The artists also visited other neighbourhoods so that the items they had obtained in El Cartucho were spread around the city. Since ‘cartucho’ is the name of a flower growing in the area, this dissemination of local objects outside their place of origin could be read as a sort of pollination, a political gesture allowing artists to plant cartucho seeds throughout the city (Caycedo pers comm 2010). The tension between the fixity of the making of a ‘collection’ and the circulation of its objects introduced an oscillation between the museum’s 157

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Figure 43. El Museo de la Calle. Installation view. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2001. Photo credit: Federico Guzmán / Cambalache Collective.

material practices and its symbolic value. El Museo de la Calle brought into the streets items that still had a modicum of usability while taking away or keeping apparently useless objects. In a street context, however, the latter gained meaning, becoming telling documents of how that space was inhabited. El Museo de la Calle tried to grasp both a material culture that could eventually represent not only El Cartucho but also Bogotá, and work practices that accompanied this material expressivity. In this way, the 158

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project and its homemade museography could be understood as a contemporary interpretation of an ethnographic museum whose very architecture embodies this intentionality. When the museum started to grow, the collective began to classify the objects according to categories: jewellery, toys, books, clothes, radios, pieces of wire and so on. According to Caycedo, a broad range of objects entered and left the circuit, including objects related to the specific subculture of the criminal and drug scene, such as handmade guns and crack pipes. Caycedo highlights the handcrafted creativity of some of these objects, which could be considered quasi-sculptures, customized as they were by the user’s personal taste. The cart’s drawers served to catalogue objects, as in a store, but also suggested the custody mission of a museum. In fact, El Museo contained a smaller museum within itself: a box holding objects that were not bartered. Some were notably dangerous, such as guns or pipes for smoking crack. In this case, the logic of removal was ethical as well as legal, highlighting the taboo position occupied by these objects. They spoke of social restrictions that contradicted the actual economic flows characteristic of the neighbourhood. By hiding them, the artists both represented the neighbourhood’s ‘ecosystem’ and offered an ethical point of view which endorsed the place’s potential for transformation. Interestingly, when El Museo was circulating in the streets, these dangerous objects were kept apart, whereas when, later on, the project was exhibited in art centres and museums, they were displayed in a glass vitrine. Other objects were kept because of their sentimental value, their representation of the affective bonds between people. Finally, some objects, such as poems, were reserved because they were gifts to the museum, a condition which invalidated the bartering rationale.9

From the Aesthetics of Hunger to the Aestheticization of Poverty In 1999, El Museo de la Calle travelled to several cities, inscribing its practice into the art circuit. In that year, it was shown in the 3rd Bienal de Venecia, organized by Franklin Aguirre in the neighbourhood of Venecia in South Bogotá. In 2000, it travelled to the Modern Gallery of Ljubljana in Slovenia for the show Worthless (Invaluable): The Concept of Value in Contemporary Art and, in 2001, it participated in the exhibition Da adversidade vivemos 159

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[We Thrive on Adversity] at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, both organized by the Argentine curator Carlos Basualdo (2000b and 2002) (see Figure  44). In 2000, the show looked at the question of the value of artworks and presented work by some 40 artists and collectives from various periods of the twentieth century and from different parts of the world.10 The exhibition in 2001, which took its title from a work by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, presented Latin American artists of different generations and dealt with the relationship between artistic practice and the South American social context (Arcos-Palma 2001).11 For Basualdo, these shows reflected a specifically leftist political consciousness in Latin American art, which he continued to explore in The Structure of Survival at the 2003 Venice Biennale.12 These shows indicate the dominant ways in which El Museo de la Calle has been read: firstly, in relation to a wider economic environment and, secondly, in relation to the idea that (all) Latin American art is politically loaded. Following a long tradition in Latin American art and cinema, both discourses intersect with the debate about poverty, art and the spectacularization of deprivation. An exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (2001), which ran concurrently to Da adversidade vivemos and was curated by Carlos Basualdo and Octavio Zaya, rescued another related expression from the 1960s: a estética da fome [the aesthetics of hunger] as first discussed by Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha in 1965.13 Rocha’s manifesto stated that ‘our originality is our hunger’, a political reworking of Oswald de Andrade’s concept of antropofagia, which played on the idea of a Western or Westernized ‘digestive cinema’ (Andrade 1928 and Rocha 1965). Rocha wanted to abandon a discourse of poverty based on denunciation and victimization, which he deemed too connected to ‘developmentalist’ politics searching to accelerate the pace of modernization at any cost, and instead imbue hunger and misery with an affirmative, political meaning. Statements by other contemporaneous Brazilian artists, especially Hélio Oiticica and Artur Barrio, were no less politicized (Aznar and Iñigo 2006). Barrio’s 1969 text Estética del Tercer Mundo [Third World Aesthetics] advocated for a place of enunciation able to speak from/of the economic underdevelopment in Latin America, and proposed working with ephemeral, precarious and cheap materials in order to reflect upon the economic 160

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inscription of art production. Paulo Herkenhoff observes that Barrio radicalized the paradox between productive and non-productive labour in relation to artworks and the market, asking how artists could produce use value from an art made of waste (2001, 70). In this context the ‘povera’ of Arte Povera became radically politicized and the notion of ‘dematerialization’ designated lack instead of subtraction (Ramírez 1999, 53–73). For artists who during the 1960s and 1970s pursued economic independence and social justice with a shared spirit of Latinamericanism, hunger provided a metaphor to give an active sense to suffering and even bestow upon it the feeling of desire (a desire also directed towards the advent of a social revolution). Influenced by Frantz Fanon, the aesthetics of hunger was intimately linked to an aesthetics of violence. The ‘anarchic unconscious’, as Ivana Bentes describes it, was a destabilizing force that could be reversed into a revolutionary one (2001, 47–64). In the aftermath of various Latin American armed conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s, however, the Reina Sofía Museum exhibition seemed to reflect on how the option of violence had vanished from artistic discourses. Instead, the pervasive violence generated by dictatorships, guerrilla warfare, counter-terrorism and drug cartels had been transformed from a means of action into a recurring artistic theme, identifying and stereotyping the Latin American imaginary. In this sense, the aesthetics of hunger, cleansed of its politically violent side and transformed into an aesthetics of poverty, became an unexpected signifier of resistance to neoliberal economic policies in the 1990s. Furthermore, the political aspect of an anarchic unconscious of deprivation had been turned into a romanticized expression of informal economies in the artistic realm, one that has been readily swallowed by Western art institutions, markets and discourses. The relationship between these informal modes of economic production and distribution and El Museo de la Calle has been addressed by several critics, including Catalina Lozano and Michèle Faguet. In her text ‘Recycling Bogotá’, Lozano uses Félix Guattari’s notion of ecology to understand recycling as an itinerant, multiple and molecular economic process that is not opposed to capitalist society, but fully participates in it (Lozano 2005). In her view, recycling is not only an economic practice, but also a form of social organization that ‘allows for the emergence of new physical or/and subjective spaces of co-belonging which call into being a 161

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revolutionary potential’.14 Recycling is not only a way of living, but also an ‘expression of life’. Its ‘expressiveness’ can be marked out in the collection of objects that the recyclers deal with. For Lozano, creativity is related to Do It Yourself (DIY), the crafty and random transformation of matter and the city, and redefined as both the ‘production of a collective inter-subjectivity which constitutes the creative emergence of a community’ and a channel of empowerment (Lozano 2005). She understands creativity as the creation of difference and explores the political potential of this differentiation, affirming that these ‘tactics of survival, creative and precarious’ come about ‘without mediation’. A similar celebration of adversity as a creativity trigger – an aesthetization of precariousness – is present in Basualdo’s projects, as Anna Dezeuze argues (2006).15 Lozano (2005) states that, as curator and critic, she is not interested ‘in some kind of politically committed art’ and circumvents several questions that usually arise in relation to political art, such as effectiveness and the artists’ instrumentalization of others. Instead, she relies on the automatic potency of words, such as communality and co-belonging, which she connects uncritically to this artistic project. However, recyclers are determined by a logic of subsistence on a day-to-day basis, with no social rights, working in the open air, using physical strength and dealing with waste. It is a socially stigmatized activity that takes place in an already stigmatized neighbourhood. It is certainly a creative adaptation to an existent reality but it is precisely the reality that produces these modes of ‘making a living’ that must be questioned. With the increase of globalization, informality has tended to accelerate, to the extent of becoming a topos of its own (García Canclini 2006, 17–25). An informal economy not only produces but also reproduces outsider ways of considering labour and of determining subjectivities and social alliances. Parallel to the labour of recycling in Latin America cities, and counter to what Lozano states, El Museo de la Calle does not create any kind of communality and the discursive edulcoration of these practices does not produce social or political agency. Michèle Faguet, by contrast, in ‘Je est un autre: la estetización de la miseria’ [Je est un autre: aestheticizing misery], questions this valorization of alterity as a subversive element (2008, 69). She references Hal Foster’s essay ‘The artist as ethnographer’ (1996) and Joshua Decter’s use of the concepts of ‘slumming’ and ‘schmoozing’ (1996) to question contemporary artists’ 162

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‘ethnographic mapping’ of the Other.16 In this article, she argues that ‘slumming is highly problematic because it too is all about empowering oneself but through the dis-empowering of another while pretending to do the exact opposite’ (Faguet 2008, 69). She focuses on the consumption of images of marginality by First World audiences and connects this phenomenon to the notion of ‘pornomiseria’ [poverty porn], a concept that comes from the Colombian film industry in the 1970s (Faguet 2009).17 Furthermore, Faguet is highly critical of an ethnographic position that is not only complicit with the structures of domination, but which especially benefits artists. In her view, ‘slumming in Colombia is a useful method of schmoozing internationally’ (Faguet 2008, 69). Furthermore, she mentions that Colectivo Cambalache was invited to ‘quite high profile exhibitions in Europe, most notably Carlos Basualdo’s From Adversity We Live, a sort of who’s who of rising young Latin American art stars’ (Faguet 2010, emphasis in original). While Faguet concentrates her critique on the representation of poverty in art, she pays no attention to informal creativity, which I believe is at the core of the First World’s current fascination with art from impoverished regions. It must be said that El Museo de la Calle was not trying to speak on behalf of the recyclers or attempting to empower them. The collective’s intention was not to represent a situation, but rather to create one. Their main tactic was the mimicry and appropriation of a practice that was itself already ‘appropriative’ of leftovers. El Museo de la Calle’s strategy of bartering can best be seen as a counter-appropriative technique. Instead of subtracting objects to reframe them in the art world, Colectivo Cambalache inserted new objects into the economic scene. This new factor altered the usual nature of recycling (dealing with waste) and introduced fairly usable middle class objects whose price was not to be measured in money but by the buyer’s personal choice. It also subverted the nature of bartering as the value commensurability was distorted. The original providers of the exchanged commodities (family, friends) were not given anything in return: ‘We collected from our family and friends and a lot of things were brought in. Clothing, toys and home appliances were given away for anything useful or useless that people wanted to give in exchange’ (Basualdo 2000a, 88–91). The process was in fact a hybrid of bartering and recycling. Barter can be defined as an exchange without money, which is also characterized by a reduction of transaction costs. Moreover, by being relatively 163

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impersonal in relation to the gift, the gesture implies a larger degree of reciprocity and sociability. Even if barter functions without actual money, it, as any other commodity exchange, involves a calculative dimension, since the value of the exchanged goods is less an inherent property of the objects than a judgement made about them by subjects. Therefore, following Arjun Appadurai’s study on commodities and the politics of value, we can say that it is economic exchange that creates value. That is to say, value does not precede economic exchange (Appadurai 1986, 3–64). For that reason, Appadurai understands the exchange of commodities as a situation where exchange takes place in a framework conditioned by standards of set criteria (symbolic, classificatory and moral) that define the exchangeability of things in particular social and historical contexts. It is this exchangeability which ensures that objects can eventually move in and out of their commodity status. In El Museo de la Calle, bartering did not pursue monetary equivalence but involved respect, consent and legitimacy, so that the collective could stay in the community without problems. From the Colectivo’s point of view, it was sociability that was at stake in the process of exchange. In this sense, the museum could be considered also as an exchange of gifts, since not only pure economic exchange, but also social protocols necessarily inhered therein.18

Collecting, Representing: Paths and Diversions Colectivo Cambalache played two different roles in El Museo de la Calle: it acted as an intermediary and it produced a ‘museum’. Its first task was related to the provision of the conditions of exchange, to gather commodities and make them accessible. Moreover, as a commodity exchange situation, El Museo conflated two different regimes of value, the lucrative and the artistic, proper to the same object in relation to its location in the market or in the museum respectively. Arjun Appadurai asserts that in order to fully understand the exchange of commodities, we need to rethink the relationship between the paths and diversions that characterize the circulation of objects. For him, following the anthropologist Nancy Munn, paths are defined by the laws of supply and demand, which organize socially regulated paths for the flow of commodities. In parallel, objects can be diverted from culturally conventionalized paths and these diversions can 164

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also become institutionalized. Diversions serve different purposes. They can be used, for instance, to open new paths of exchange. They also operate to remove or protect objects and place them beyond a demarcated zone of commodification. This process of decommodification is known as transvaluation. Appadurai points out that this type of transvaluation is typical of aesthetic objects and ‘sacra’ (1986, 3–64). For transvalued objects, the commodity phase is ideally brief and its movement restricted as these objects are not ‘priced’ in the way other things might be. El Museo thus played two contrasting roles: the path (opening the flux) and the diversion (collecting the objects), an economic model and an aesthetic one, revealing their interdependency while, at the same time, disrupting or sabotaging both. Value was not only linked to the supply and demand logic operating on the streets, it also underwent a transformation, a transvaluation during which objects were ‘museified’ and removed from this logic. Being at the same time a museum, a storefront, and an exhibition, its condition was basically situational and unstable. Placed in a double bind (between co-optation and romanticization), El Museo was burdened with its own contradictions, reaching a final step of self-sabotage. Back in Colombia, it was presented for the last time at the Museo de la Universidad Nacional (October 2000) before fading in the economic flux. Empty of its goods, the recycling cart was returned to the neighbourhood in a free raffle, shortly before El Cartucho disappeared to make space for the Third Millennium Park.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press. Andrade, Oswaldo de. 1928. “Manifesto antropófago”. Revista de antropofagia 1 (May): 3 and 7. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. “Introduction:  Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things:  Commodities in Cultural Perspective, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arcos Palma, Ricardo. 2001. “De adversidades vivimos.” Vistazos críticos, June 7. http:// criticosvistazos.blogspot.com/2001/06/vistazo-critico-12-de-adversidades.html. ——— 2007. “El performance en Colombia a finales del siglo XX. Apuntes sobre una investigación de una generación olvidada.” Reflector. http://www.reflector. unal.edu.co/elperformanceencolombia_palma.html.

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Sabotage Art Aznar, Yayo, and Iñigo, María, 2006. “Arte activista en Brasil durante el AI-5 (1968–1979).” http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00104007. Barriendos, Joaquín. 2009. “Desconquistas (políticas) y redescubrimentos (estéticos).” Desbordes 0 (June). http://des-bordes.net/des-bordes/joaquin_barriendos .php. Basualdo, Carlos. 2000a. “Interview with Colectivo Cambalache.” Flash Art 214 (October): 88–91. ——— 2000b. Worthless (Invaluable) The Concept of Value in Contemporary Art (exh. cat.). Ljubljiana:  Moderna Galerjia Ljubljiana and Museum of Modern Art. ——— 2001. Da adversidade vivemos (exh. cat.). Paris:  Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Bentes, Ivana. 2001. “Apocalipsis estético:  ameryka del hambre, del sueño y del trance.” In Eztetyka del Sueño (exh. cat.), 47–64. Madrid:  Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Bernal, María Clara, Fernando Escobar, and Karen MacKinno. 2007. Displaced: Contemporary Art from Colombia (exh. cat.). Swansea:  Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. Caycedo, Carolina, ed. 2009a. Daytoday 2002–2009:  A  Publication on the Occasion of Daytoday in LA at g727. Los Angeles. http://www.lulu.com/items/ volume_66/7698000/7698078/2/print/daytoday_new1.pdf. ——— 2009b. “Seven Years of Chaos.” Art Work (September). http://www .artandwork.us/2009/11/seven-years-of-chaos/. ———2010. Interview with the author, July 12. Colectivo Cambalache. 2007. Untitled. http://museodelacalle.blogspot.com/. Cortés, Rolf Abderhalden. 2006. El artista como testigo:  testimonio de un artista. Paper presented at the Academia Superior de Artes de Bogotá, December. http://artesescenicas.uclm.es/archivos_subidos/textos/304/El_artista_como_ testigo_RolfAbderhalden.pdf. Decter, Joshua. 1996. “Schmoozing and Slumming.” TRANS>arts.cultures.media 2. http://transmag.org/nuevo_transmag/contents/vols.php?vista=issue&tipoproy =Critical%20Trance&proyeccion=63. Dezeuze, Anna. 2006. “Thriving on Adversity: The Art of Precariousness.” Mute 2 (September). http://www.metamute.org/en/Thriving-On-Adversity. Faguet, Michèle. 2008. “Je est un autre: la estetización de la miseria.” In Ensayos sobre arte contemporáneo en Colombia, 2007–2008. Bogotá:  Ediciones Uniandes. http://premionalcritica.uniandes.edu.co/wp-content/uploads/PNC-IV.pdf. ———2009. “Pornomiseria Or How Not to Make a Documentary Film.” Afterall 21 (Spring):  http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.21/pornomiseria.or.how.not .make.documentary.film. Fernández, Carlos Arturo. 2007. Arte en Colombia 1981–2006. Medellín: Universidad de Antioquia.

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El Museo de la Calle Foster, Hal. 1996. “The Artist as Ethnographer?.” In The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century. Massachusetts: MIT Press. García Canclini, Néstor. 2006. “Desórdenes:  chatarra e informalidad.” In Geografías del desorden:  migración, alteridad y nueva esfera social, 17–24. Valencia: Universidad de Valencia. Góngora, Andrés, and Carlos José Suárez. 2008. “Por una Bogotá sin mugre: violencia, vida y muerte en la cloaca urbana.” Universitas humanística 66: 107–138. Grant, Catherine, and Tahini Nadim. 2003. “Working Things out Together:  the Joys of Bootlegging, Bartering and Collectivity.” Parachute: Contemporary Art Magazine, July: 52–57. Guzmán, Federico. 2007a. Untitled. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omNTR xwx-YY. ——— 2007b. “Entrevista con Federico Guzmán.” Esfera pública, May 21. http:// esferapublica.org/nfblog/?p=846. Herkenhoff, Paulo. 2001. “Libertad, igualdad e ira.” Eztetyka del Sueño (exh. cat.): 70. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Iregui, Jaime 2002. “Modos de operar.” Esfera pública, November 16. http://esferapublica.org/portal/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=617&Ite mid=79. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1968. The Savage Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lozano, Catalina. 2005. “Recycling Bogotá.” Drain Magazine, November. http://www.drainmag.com/contentNOVEMBER/RELATED_ESSAYS/ Recycling_Bogota.htm. Mosquera, Gerardo. 1992. “The Marco Polo Syndrome: Some Problems around Art and Eurocentrism.” Third Text 21: 35–41. Purves, Ted, ed. 2005. What we Want is Free. Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art. Albany : State University of New York Press. Ramírez, Mari Carmen. 1999. “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity. Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960–1980.” In Global Conceptualism:  Points of Origins. 1950s-1980s (exh. cat), edited by Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss, 53–71. New York: Queens Museum of Art. Roca, José. 2003. “Entrevista a Raimond Chaves.” La Columna de Arena 63. http:// www.universes-in-universe.de/columna/col63/entrevista.htm. Rocha, Glauber. 1965. La estética del hambre http://70.32.114.117/gsdl/collect/ revista/index/assoc/HASH0655/a0523bfd.dir/r41_14nota.pdf. Rojas-Sotelo, Miguel. 2010. “Postales de un territorio excéntrico.” Calle 14 Revista de investigación en campo del Arte 4 (5): 118–133. Rueda Fajardo, Santiago. 2009. Una línea de polvo. Arte y drogas en Colombia. Bogotá: Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño. Yúdice, George. 1989. “Marginality and the Ethics of Survival.” Social Text 21: 214–236.

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8 Stay at Your Own Risk Disturbing Ideas of Community in Two Projects by Elkin Calderón Carla Macchiavello Since 2013, passengers on Avianca planes awaiting take-off are almost forced to watch on their individual screens a short, looped video showing young tourists from different parts of the world being surprised by the magical wonders of Colombian landscapes, towns, people and carnivals. Colombian coffee beans fall and reproduce magically, creating a red version of The Wizard of Oz’s Yellow Brick Road amidst the coffee region’s green hills while turquoise colours rising from the sea stain the façades of rustic houses along the coast. This new campaign, entitled ‘Colombia, el realismo mágico’ [Colombia, magical realism], is the latest in a string of government efforts to promote the nation, which began when former President Álvaro Uribe came to power in 2002. Other such films include ‘Vive Colombia, viaja por ella’ [Live Colombia, travel through it] and ‘Colombia es pasión’ [Colombia is passion], launched in 2003 and 2005 respectively. All of the campaigns aim to revive interest in travelling to and within Colombia by assuring its residents and potential foreign visitors of their safety. To date, the most successful international campaign has been ‘Colombia, the only risk is wanting to stay’. Developed by the design agency Sancho BBDO and the Colombian government’s 168

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Figure 44. Elkin Calderón, Colombia, el riesgo es que te quieras quedar…/Colombia, the Risk is Wanting to Stay…, 2013. Book cover. Photo credit: Francisco Toquica. Courtesy of Elkin Calderón.

export agency, Proexport, and launched in 2008, the slogan aimed to promote the nation internationally as an attractive tourist destination. By referring to ‘risk’, the marketing campaign directly used a term tied to the history of the country and to international perceptions of it as a dangerous destination, reorienting the word’s meaning towards the would-be tourist’s inevitable desire to remain in a nation replete with 169

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lush jungles, paradisiacal beaches, a fertile and tranquil coffee region and picturesque colonial towns, having ‘fallen in love’ with its people, music or handicrafts. By means of the testimony of nine foreigners who had travelled to Colombia and decided to stay, the campaign attempted to offer a different vantage point on the potential dangers of visiting the country, whether as a tourist or an investor. The campaign’s success in selling the image of a nation that had cleansed itself of its violent past was reflected in the exponential growth in international tourism following the launch of the advert. In 2013, Colombian artist Elkin Calderón published the book Colombia, the Risk is Wanting to Stay... (see Figure  44). The work appropriated the official campaign’s slogan but modified it in an almost imperceptible way: a series of suspension points were added that lent an unfinished quality to the original claim. Each of the book’s chapters filled this ambiguous space with personal stories from 13 Colombian artists who had been shot, stabbed, mugged, raped or whose family members had been abducted or even murdered, replicating in an inverted manner the government’s campaign and its use of testimonies. Thus, the phrase became:  the only risk is wanting to stay… without a leg, without a lung, without a sister. In this sense, the book acted as the specular underside of a spectacular marketing strategy, a reminder of the persistence of the very violence and fear that the publicity attempted to dispel. This chapter argues that Calderón’s work operated as a form of sabotage, a minor or ‘humble’ revolt aimed at disrupting the images of safety circulated by the export agency and its economic interests. Though the book did not have access to Avianca airplanes to disseminate its counter-narratives worldwide, it was conceived as a bilingual Spanish-English publication and has been promoted by the artist, his friends (including curators and art historians) and its small-scale publisher on the internet, as well as through Colombian bookstores and at artistic events. While Calderón’s appropriation might, at first, seem to be a clever reuse of pre-existing propaganda in order to critique this latter’s contents, the work goes beyond an inversion of values or points of view.1 As the book explores different connotations of risk – from peril to possibility, from loss to investment and chance  – it simultaneously contests the government’s appropriation of the term for economic purposes and makes visible the 170

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borderline territory in which ethical claims might be made in art. In this sense, the publication brings a variety of artists’ voices together to create a common front of disruptive action and resistance, which purports to be something more than what Calderón calls a ‘selfish and narcissistic act’ coming from a singular artist while also exposing each participant’s actions and personal stories to public scrutiny and judgment (2013, 143). This chapter will delve into how Calderón’s book reconceptualizes the notion of risk and questions collaborative practices even as it performs them, engaging in a form of self-sabotage that incorporates failure, the accidental and even a conscious degree of maliciousness into the project. An examination of the covert tactics employed in the artist’s book, as well as in a participatory action organized by the artist in a dangerous neighbourhood in Bogotá, will reveal how Calderón, in his attempt to create small fissures in existing systems (economical, political, artistic), also recognizes the difficulty of destabilizing these systems and consequently resorts to an ambiguous form of critique that problematizes any clear-cut definition of the work as political art. As he orchestrates heterogeneous actors into strategic communities, Calderón leaves room for uncertainty regarding his own actions and motivations as well as those of the art world more broadly, for instance, questioning the self-interest involved in ‘community’ work and the often unspoken relations between art and tourism. Calderón’s book project emerged as he transformed the personal trauma caused by a life-threatening event into a collaborative critique of a larger system linked to violence. The idea for Colombia, the Risk is Wanting to Stay... originated in 2012, ten years after Calderón was shot in the leg and robbed while trying to buy a car in Bogotá. The event prompted Calderón to emigrate to the UK, where he met another Colombian artist, Wilson Díaz, with whom he worked delivering sandwiches among other odd jobs, and who was a fellow member of a migration-inspired music band. After he returned to Colombia, Díaz suffered a violent family loss that prompted Calderón to share with him a short story he had written about his experience in 2002 (Calderón 2014). After this testimony motivated Díaz to write his own story, the two artists met with publisher Francisco Toquica from Caín Press, whose younger sibling had also been murdered (an event alluded to in 171

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the name of the publishing house). The idea of collecting similar stories from other Colombian artists began to take shape. Two ideas merged in the project: writing as a way of working through traumatic experiences usually kept private and publishing as a way of reusing that personal process by transforming it into a collective and public critique of ‘official’ denial of the persistence of violence in Colombia. In the end, Calderón selected 13 stories from friends (artists, curators and Toquica, the publisher), even though everyone he met knew someone with a personal experience of violence. By remaining within the limits of a ‘closed’ environment, the book would highlight how violence permeates all social levels and spaces in Colombia, including the art world. The book deals with the problem of representing violence in a place where it is both a daily, visible issue and an invisible presence.2 This tension is manifested in the government’s slogan where any form of violence or real risk of injury is displaced by the use of reassuring words (the ‘only’ risk is wanting to stay). Although violence is a recurring motif in recent Colombian art, Calderón’s approach to its representation of violence differs from the metaphorical manner in which other contemporary artists, such as Doris Salcedo and Oscar Muñoz, have treated it. As María Margarita Malagón-Kurka argues, the works of Salcedo and Muñoz present materialities (for example, the beaten surface of a chair or ashes) which, by suggesting some kind of forceful action performed in the past (a beating or a fire), indirectly bear witness to these past actions. Since the traces displayed are incomplete, the works do not specify what kind of violence they respond to, instead inviting viewers to reflect upon the origins of the marks (Malagón-Kurka 2010, 6).3 By contrast, Calderón’s strategy imitates in a covert manner what is being suppressed (an imposed injustice or violence) in order to expose it and thus comes closer to an act of sabotage. His book plays at a disguised disruption of the normal workings of a large-scale advertising campaign, mimicking its forms so as to camouflage a different message regarding violence. Moreover, contrary to the distance that Salcedo assumes regarding the testimonies of victims of political violence in Colombia which she employs when creating her work, Calderón’s book offers a glimpse into 13 extremely private stories that deal in a blunt and often sparse manner with the authors’ direct encounters with violence in the country. The personal 172

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tragedies include robberies at home, in taxis and in the streets that ended in physical injury and psychological trauma, as well as murder by fire, stabbing and random shootings. Though the artists are victims, they do not emerge as wholly innocent; some acknowledge their own mistakes (including taking the notoriously strange taxi and being at the wrong place at the wrong time) and one of them even recognizes how a series of contextual factors (such as growing up in a difficult neighbourhood) and personal decisions (like getting into fights and dealing drugs) resulted in a jail term. But while their individual actions may be deemed ‘risky’ in a colloquial sense because of their naivety (which opens them up to the possibility of being harmed), the act of revealing the details of a private, intimate matter, and even the carelessness which led to it, involves another form of risk entirely – exposure to the judgement of friends, colleagues and other readers. The deliberate act of disclosing a personal event is further transformed through the collective nature of the effort, one that aims to confront the ‘missing’ information in the government’s slogan and undermine the reassuring semblance that this latter promotes. By resorting to the first person, the book also replicates the advertising agency’s reliance on testimonial accounts, bestowing upon the narrations a ‘character of verisimilitude’ (Calderón 2013, 144). Yet if the book’s first person accounts involve reliving trauma through writing and become ‘a kind of cathartic exorcism’, the advert turns shock into wonder (144). The advertisements appeal to love, rapture and desire, an affective language accompanied by images of natural and fabricated beauties that inspire a corporeal connection with Colombia: moisture turns into magical shafts of mysterious light in the jungle, ripe fruits are sold by smiling people, pristine and dreamlike beaches stretch out before the viewer and lightly clad bodies dance salsa. The documentary mode adopted invests heavily in theatrical recreations of the nine foreigners’ motives for staying in Colombia, mixing the exceptional with the ordinary: the biologist is casually found walking ‘alone’ in the jungle captivated by its magic but everyone always ends the day at a party. While the age group varies, the chosen foreigners all share ‘European’ ancestry and present a success story of fluid integration into the country. By contrast, in Calderón’s book, affection is mixed with disaffection and identity is presented as fraught with discomfort, anger and frustration (for example, a curator’s indirect reference to being rejected by 173

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the local art world when she decided to leave the country). Furthermore, little context is offered, making recollection murky, possibly dubious and sometimes even consciously incomplete. What lies beyond each case of violence  – the social landscape that frames it with its history of forced displacement, internal war, territorial disputes linked to national and international interests and drug trafficking – remains inscrutable or indescribable, yet simultaneously present, dense and unavoidable. Although the book’s contributors could be considered to be part of a privileged group involved with art, their different social backgrounds (in terms of class and education) provide a glimpse into the gaps and frictions between and within diverse layers of Colombian society and contradict the stereotypical images of Colombians as fun, kind and happy, which are promoted by the publicity campaigns. No matter the personal affections binding them or how much they identify as part of the same artistic environment or even as a community, the artists’ experiences of the country’s violence offer little grounds for comparison or connection. Their diversity points to the difficulty of measuring different types of violence or judging their effects, for instance, the problematic nature of comparisons between rape and murder or other forms of assault. By highlighting differences within a specific art scene, the book understands this particular ‘community’ of contributors as a set of relations to diverse categories such as gender or class, as well as identities, spaces or institutions (Kester 1995), rather than as a group with fixed or essential common traits. In this sense, the book suggests that communities may form strategically to produce counter-narratives and that commonalities may cohere unexpectedly through processes of identification and empathy, as shifting articulations of differences and singularities. In recent years, authors from fields as varied as political theory, architecture and contemporary art have emphasized the need to think about social conflict when discussing community, participation and democracy. Chantal Mouffe, Markus Miessen and Claire Bishop critique from different standpoints the idea that inclusive participation (or the widening of participation to more actors) is the ideal form of democracy. The authors also question romantic notions of participation as ‘a consensus-based, deliberately positive, and politically correct means of innocently taking part in societal structures’ (Miessen 2010, 52). Miessen, for example, understands 174

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participation as a manifestation of conflict, since every field (social or physical) is made up of forces contending, pushing and changing one another. Yet the equation drawn by Miessen between conflict and war, and his comparison between the latter and participation (however metaphoric), acquires other resonances in the realm of lived experience, especially in a social field marked by territorial and armed disputes that have lasted several decades, as has been the case of Colombia.4 Calderón’s book shares with Miessen a general view of conflict as a productive zone of exchange when dealing with communities. Nevertheless, its understanding of critical art seems closer to that of Mouffe, as articulated in her essay ‘Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces’, where she questions whether artistic practices can still offer critical perception ‘in a society where the difference between art and advertisement have become blurred and cultural workers have become a necessary part of capitalist production [sic]’ (2007, 1). For Mouffe, the threat of cooption does not eradicate critical artistic practices but challenges them to expand ‘the field of artistic intervention, by intervening directly in a multiplicity of social spaces in order to oppose the program of total social mobilization of capitalism’ (1). Mouffe advocates a critical form of art that undermines hegemonic discourses which seek consensus as the ideal form of democracy, an ‘art that foments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate. It is constituted by a manifold of artistic practices aiming at giving voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony’ (4). Calderón’s book seems to occupy a curious position in relation to this widening of the field of action of critical art, as it gives voice to and acts as a platform for members of a small community (an artistic one) that in general terms appears removed from everyday violence. But the work also consciously ‘uses’ this group to point to a larger web of relations that may connect the particular (individuals especially affected by violence) to other possible groups of individuals undergoing similar experiences in Colombia and even beyond. In a way, it can be said that the book creates a community that is contingent on a particular problem, while simultaneously addressing various potential publics that may find intersubjective connections or commonalities with this community. Still, Calderón’s project complicates the notion that there is a unique truth to be revealed 175

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regarding violence. While deliberately opposing the mercantile interests of the Proexport campaign, Calderón’s project seems to acknowledge its own murky, mediated character and its limited potential to subvert the existing order. This acknowledgement is possibly a form of self-preservation (an attempt to avoid the law’s punishment) but also forms part of the artist’s method. In this sense, it is interesting to compare how the image used by Mouffe on the cover of her 2013 book Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, which is Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (2007) – a large-scale, spectacular approach to political critique  – differs from Calderón’s working process, which the artist himself conceives of in terms of creating minor crevices in existing systems, breaches which are easily overlooked. While Salcedo’s monumental yet anonymous gesture of altering the appearance of objects and spaces, such as Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, seeks to speak metaphorically and physically of violence in almost universal terms (violence past and present, here and there, natural and man-made), Calderón’s sensibility for the minor, intimate and localized suggests a different way of building consciousness and manifesting dissent or disobedience. It does so through projects that, while seeking to create attachments and coherent agencies, also give room to the unexpected, to risk in the sense of the uncertain or the accidental, whether this is interpreted as felicitous or catastrophic.5 Calderón’s covert agenda of collective critique is further underlined by the book’s cover which, as it plays with disguised disclosure, offers potential for misunderstandings or inconspicuousness, replicating the ambiguous form of occultation regarding risk enacted by the government’s advertisement. Drawing on Michael Taussig’s notion of ‘public secret’ – a particular form of repression in which what is secret is given visibility so that it may be pushed back into oblivion, ‘that which is generally known but cannot be articulated’ (Taussig 1999, 5, emphasis in original) – Robert Fletcher argues that the slogan promoted by the government presents a paradoxical recognition and denial of Colombia’s sustained history of violence and current problems, insofar as ‘tourists appear to be asked to accept that they are both safe and at risk simultaneously’ (2011, emphasis in original). By negating risk and yet mentioning it in the same phrase as it assures people that there is nothing to be afraid of, the slogan plays with desire, arousing an exciting sense of fear(lessness) that might actually push some visitors to take 176

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certain risks, all the while immersed within a protective tourist blanket. In Calderón’s book cover – its most public and visible component – this open secrecy is played with through a game of optical illusions. At first sight, the book looks like a blank surface strewn with decorative elements in playful colours. Nevertheless, a closer inspection reveals outlines of fragmented bones floating repeatedly in an undefined space. As this becomes clear, the illustrations’ decorative aspect, their reiteration as a motif and the drawings’ partial transparency, makes them even more sinister, a ghostly reminder of what might also be risked by being in Colombia.6 The cover thus points to the mode of perceiving reality promoted by the slogan, where although the country’s violent reality might be recognized (by Colombians, foreigners or the government), it remains covered by a colourful façade constructed through persuasive repetition and strategic marketing. Who and what is considered a risk, what gets demonized, obliterated, or receives an image improvement, was addressed in the promotional video made by Calderón for the launch of his book at the Valenzuela Klenner Gallery in Bogotá in May 2013. The ‘video flyer’ (a name given by the artist to his video advertisements) consisted of a still camera shot of young men and women dancing in cargo pants, black shirts and boots to the upbeat rhythms of electronic music. The scenery was not a club’s dark interior or an outdoor music festival, but a small clearing in the midst of the jungle where a few tents had been quickly set up. In fact, upon closer inspection, the group’s clothes seemed less a fashionable statement than a uniform, making the context change quickly from under-populated rave party to that of the guerrilla hideout and of everyday life, which also invariably includes its moments of relaxation and entertainment. Calderón’s video flyer was a direct appropriation of a video uploaded in March 2013 by the periodical Semana in connection with the article ‘Tanja, la bailarina exótica de las FARC’ [Tanja, the exotic dancer of the FARC]. The title referred to Tanja Nijmeijer, a Dutch woman who joined the FARC around 2004 and became known through a diary found during a military operation against the guerrilla force. The revelation of Nijmeijer’s presence among the FARC caused public uproar in Colombia about the role of foreigners in what was considered an internal conflict. Nijmeijer has emerged as one of the FARC’s public faces in the peace talks taking place in Cuba and the Colombian press has exaggerated the contradiction between her 177

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serious demeanour and ideological commitment and the playful sensuality of her dancing, as shown in the video, as well as her own ‘exotic’ character in the Colombian jungle. The figure of Tanja points to some of the underlying prejudices of the advertising campaign and to the polarized discourses permeating Colombian politics. While also representing the foreigner of the slogan, falling in love with Colombia and taking the risk of staying, Tanja does so for what the press has continually labelled as all the wrong reasons. The underlying risk that Calderón points to by recontextualizing the video for the book launch is that the very identification to which the government appeals can occur on different terms: through ideological affinity or perhaps a desire for the exoticism of living in the jungle, engaging in battle and taking part in an active conflict. Calderón’s reuse of the periodical’s video therefore highlights the fact that not all foreigners are as welcome in Colombia as those featured in the publicity campaign, especially where they deviate from the imagined norm. The video flyer was one of several promotional offshoots of Calderón’s project, which also included an official launch at a two-day book fair at the 43rd Salón (Inter)Nacional. But the event at Valenzuela Klenner Gallery was slightly more notorious. The latter was part of a double bill opening that included an exhibition of video works on the Colombian conflict by Alberto de Michele and a performance by Edinson Quiñones (who also featured in Calderón’s book). During the performance, Quiñones traced the words of the performance’s title (Cocayán) and made drawings with cocaine (which viewers were invited to consume) on a glass plate sustained by the naked torso and pelvis of a young woman lying on her back on a wooden platform. Despite its provocative agenda, the work received few, mostly polarized comments on public platforms. While José Antonio Covo called the work a ‘tumour’ on the website Esfera pública and Breyner Huertas claimed in the magazine Arte en Colombia that this was ‘one of the most interesting performances in the history of Colombian art’ (Huertas, 2009), no one related the work to a specific social or artistic context. For example, no connection was made with the stories gathered in Calderón’s book regarding quotidian violence against women as evinced in rape, with drug dealing as in Quiñones’ narration or with Tania Bruguera’s performance involving three performers representing the Colombian conflict 178

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while a tray of cocaine was offered to (and consumed by) the public during the VII Encuentro Hemisférico de Performance y Política in Bogotá on 26 August 2009, which caused much local uproar. In a way, the lack of spectacle led to a relative public invisibility in Calderón’s case, making his intended crevice less noticeable. Nevertheless, it still fulfilled its function: the book launch occurred in the gallery’s backyard, its usual gathering space and where people met to talk about varied topics.

A Participative Community Can Be Risky as Well… The notion of risk was reinterpreted by Calderón in a participatory project presented in November 2013 for La Otra Bienal 2013, the first edition of a biennial created by Valenzuela Klenner Gallery. Since 2007, the gallery has organized an art fair that runs parallel to and in open competition with ArtBo, the official commercial art fair of Colombia. Though both events act as alternative forms of tourism, ArtBo is amply publicized with hanging banners in the streets of Bogotá weeks prior to its occurrence. The organizers of La Otra sought to distinguish their fair from ArtBo not only through their contents (offering a counter-narrative or ‘an-other’ option of Colombian art), but also in the formats chosen for exhibiting and conceiving projects during this time of international exposure. For its 2013 edition, the organizers decided to change the fair into a Biennial and work on projects dealing with public space and community in their locality, specifically the gallery’s three neighbouring areas of La Perseverancia, La Macarena and Bosque Izquierdo, located on the edges of the city’s hills. Calderón’s project started as a commission to do a short promotional video for the Biennial based on a reflection on the three neighbourhood’s commonalities. Different in terms of architecture, inhabitants, social classes and histories, Calderón was faced with the problem of giving a fictive coherence to a diverse space or re-imagining the location as a ‘community’. The artist realized that, at a basic level, what the neighbourhoods shared was the topological gradient provided by the hills and the inclined streets. Research into the place’s history led the artist to small wooden carts called ‘balineras’ (see Figure 45). Made of a wooden board, four wheels, and a precarious chain with which to steer, these carts were used in organized downhill races, a popular form of entertainment in different parts of 179

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Figure  45. Elkin Calderón, Pola (balinera), 2013. Painted wooden board with wheels. Courtesy of Elkin Calderón.

the country, including La Perseverancia (see Figure 46). Calderón became interested in the possibility of recuperating the risky game in the context of a neighbourhood historically known by the refrain: ‘La Perseverancia, donde usted sube a pie y baja en ambulancia’ [‘Perseverance, where you go up by foot and come back down in an ambulance’]. Calderón’s project would thus involve a four-wheel cart race down one of the most dangerous streets of La Perseverancia, bringing together different forms of physical and psychological risk:  falling from a moving cart on an extremely steep street and/or being assaulted in the neighbourhood. If the slogan ‘Colombia, the risk is wanting to stay’ worked with danger in a veiled manner, alluding as Fletcher argued to a form of exciting ecotourism, the cart race  directly  addressed the stereotypes connected to the neighbourhood (like the real danger of being mugged), while linking them to an extreme sport, making risk a palpable reality for those who wanted to participate in the event. 180

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Figure  46. Elkin Calderón, Photograph of a balinera race participant, 2013. Participatory action at La Otra Bienal, Bogotá, Colombia. Courtesy of Elkin Calderón.

Several problems regarding preconceived notions of community, dialogue and conflict began to emerge as the project developed, starting with the outsider artist becoming accepted by neighbours. Though there were conversations with the Biennial’s organizers about meeting the neighbours and mounting workshops to engage them with the project, Calderón was not interested in instrumentalizing the neighbourhood and making an exemplary work of community building. The artist started his immersion into this familiar yet unknown territory by going to a local carpenter to begin work on the wooden boards. What Calderón had not imagined was 181

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Figure 47. The artist Elkin Calderón working on the balineras at La Perseverancia, Bogotá, Colombia. Photograph of participatory action at La Otra Bienal, Bogotá, Colombia. Courtesy of Elkin Calderón.

that Don Humberto’s carpentry shop was so small and narrow that the owner actually worked on the street, taking all of his materials outside and thus making public (or inadvertently advertising) whatever he was making (see Figure 47). Calderón’s insertion strategy was enhanced by this serendipity. As artist and carpenter began labouring on the boards, young men approached and asked Calderón what he was doing. As they became interested, Calderón invited them to work on particular chores, cutting a piece of wood for example. Yet unlike projects like Huit Facettes7 that have aimed at helping a community recuperate, develop and pass on its knowledge of craft techniques, there were no carpentry lessons involved in Calderón’s action nor were the kids interested in finishing the minor tasks assigned to them. Calderón was forced by the dynamics of the community’s members to rethink his own methodologies and assumptions regarding what the artist could ‘offer’ (such as the workshop as ‘community inducer’), simultaneously exposing the self-serving nature of some of community art projects. 182

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Nevertheless, this type of approach, which Calderón had described as an ‘egocentric and narcissistic act’ in his book, was also replicated by the artist as he became involved in the Biennial. Calderón (2014) later recognized that carpentry was more of a personal challenge (he had recently taken up carpentry lessons at a technical school) and an excuse to start a conversation with some of the neighbours. The latter can be connected to Grant Kester’s description and defence of what he calls ‘dialogical’ works, ‘projects organized around conversational exchange and interaction’ (2011, 8). In practice, these projects’ modes of production ‘deviate’ and are transformed by the responses of collaborators involved in them. Calderón’s project’s unexpected turn could thus be related to the risks of participation, since it involved opening up the work to unexpected forms of collaboration and critique, leading in turn to the piece’s transformation. On the assigned date of the race, which had been organized to take place during a day of the Biennial, several young men showed up to participate, some bringing their own carts (see Figure 48). The races took place in a state of ‘organized chaos’ as the participants themselves took over the event. Because of the street’s steep slopes and its final merging into a traffic-dense avenue, the absence of brakes on the carts and wet pavement caused by unexpected rain, the race ended in a barricade of car tyres, adding a political motif of resistance to the event (see Figures 49 and 50). Literal risk was taken in more than one way. While the Biennial’s organizers, worried about safety and legality, insisted on having the participants use the safety equipment they had bought for the race, Calderón knew from experience that the neighbours would not necessarily abide by this rule and, indeed, most of them raced without any protection. The adrenaline of not being able to fully control the cart, the speeds reached, the view of the city in the background (as captured in some of the videos made with a GoPro camera by Calderón) made the rush of a precariously set up extreme sport and the possibility of being injured fuse with the neighbourhood’s own history of violence. Though Calderón’s project seems to share with other socially committed art practices the aim of fostering a spirit of conviviality as a possible basis for increasing agency within a community or recuperating its history, it also revelled in how that conviviality was made up of a certain degree of maliciousness. As Calderón (2014) says, the races were characterized by a 183

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Figure 48. Elkin Calderón, Start of balinera race, 2013. Photograph of participatory action at La Otra Bienal, Bogotá, Colombia. Courtesy of Elkin Calderón.

Figure 49. Elkin Calderón, Balinera race, 2013. Photograph of participatory action at La Otra Bienal, Bogotá, Colombia. Courtesy of Elkin Calderón.

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Figure 50. Elkin Calderón, Balinera race, 2013. Photograph of participatory action at La Otra Bienal, Bogotá, Colombia. Courtesy of Elkin Calderón.

combination of laughter and cruelty, the latter a spontaneous response to a participant’s accident or fall (and maybe a way to work through one’s own frustrations). Rather than sympathizing with a community member or the artist, what prevailed was the discovery of mirth in the unexpected, even if this latter took the form of a real accident. Derived from the Latin ‘malitia’ or wrongdoing, maliciousness was not understood only as the basis of criminality or spite, as has been the common assumption in relation to the neighbourhood and its continuing history of violence that still makes the mentioned refrain a daily reality. Rather, maliciousness was also taken as an attitude of strategic suspicion, a penetrating sagacity, a propensity for the satirical and even a creative potential, though what that creativity could lead to was left unanswered. In this sense, the work did not attempt to transform the neighbourhood’s reputation, offer a solution to its youth or turn the artist into a heroic adventurer. On the contrary, risk was a real problem the artist had to face. When Calderón decided to make a night video and try out a different version of the carts outside the protection offered by the institutional status of the Biennial, he had to go into the neighbourhood accompanied and could not take his camera due to the high probability of being robbed. Calderón’s artistic credentials and relationship with some of 185

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the neighbours offered him limited security, highlighting the fact that participatory artistic actions can only offer mildly or momentarily palliative ‘solutions’ to larger social problems. When considering an artist’s involvement with a community, little is often said with regards to the pragmatic aspects of such collaborative projects, in particular, the personal risk they entail. Similarly, ‘antagonism’ often remains an abstract notion in theoretical reflections about participation today, running the risk of becoming oversimplified. Calderón’s book and the participatory project in La Perseverancia suggest that antagonisms need to be thought out in particular and localized ways, activating their potential not just for critique but for strategic forms of agency and change. In this sense, Calderón’s two works recuperate risk in literal, metaphoric and deeply personal ways, from the risk of telling a story of violence such as a rape to the risk of being exposed and judged (by peers, by strangers, by existing legal systems) and the risk of allowing others to dissent in a participatory work and to change its anticipated outcomes. These projects also motivate discussion regarding what is meant by community and participation, and the supposed benefits and dangers of each. Rather than solutions, Calderón’s works act as suspension points, carving spaces of doubt into definitions of the nation, stereotypes about risk and images of specific communities, while not completely giving up on these definitions, stereotypes and images and hence leaving open the gap added to ‘Colombia, the only risk is wanting to stay…’

References Anon. 2013. “Tanja, la bailarina exótica de las FARC,” Semana (21 March), http:// www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/tanja-bailarina-exotica-farc/337579-3. Bishop, Claire. 2006. “The Social Turn:  Collaboration and its Discontents.” Artforum 44: 178–183. Calderón, Elkin, ed. 2013. Colombia, el riesgo es que te quieras quedar…/Colombia, the Risk is Wanting to Stay… Bogotá: Caín Press. ———2014. Interview with the author, 3 February. Fletcher, Robert. 2011. “ ‘The Only Risk is Wanting to Stay’:  Mediating Risk in Colombian Tourism Development,” RASAALA:  Recreation and Society in Africa, Asia and Latin America, https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/ rasaala/article/view/1510/2105.

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Stay at Your Own Risk Huertas, Breyner. 2013. “Edinson Quiñones.” Arte en Colombia (September–November): 104. Kester, Grant. 1995 “Aesthetic Evangelists:  Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art.” Afterimage 22: 5–11. ——— 2011. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in the Global Context. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Malagón-Kurka, María Margarita. 2010. Arte como presencia indéxica. La obra de tres artistas colombianos en tiempos de violencia: Beatriz González, Oscar Muñoz y Doris Salcedo en la década de los noventa. Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes. Miessen, Markus. 2010. The Nightmare of Participation. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 2007. “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces.” Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts, and Methods 1 (2): 1–5. Salcedo, Doris. 2014. “Doris Salcedo/Plegaria Musa,” Lecture, Programa de Artes Plásticas, Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Bogotá, 10 March. Taussig, Michael. 1999. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Standford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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9 ‘The Space of Appearance’ Performativity and Aesthetics in the Politicization of Mexico’s Public Sphere1 Robin Adele Greeley “We are all Ayotzinapa”

– protest banner, November 2014

On 26 September, 2014, a group of students from a rural teachertraining school in Aytozinapa, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, was attacked by local and federal police while en route to the neighboring town of Iguala to protest state discrimination in educational resources. Several students were killed outright, and the police rounded up 43 others at gunpoint, handing them over to a local drug cartel who purportedly assassinated them and burned their bodies.2 Although just one incident among many in the rampant violence unleashed in recent years by Mexico’s drug wars, for vast swaths of the Mexican citizenry the disappearances have proven to be the final straw that broke the camel’s back.3 Continued state refusal to accept responsibility regarding the Ayotzinapa tragedy, along with government failure to implement effective rule of law, has sparked massive popular demonstrations condemning the Mexican state’s rampant corruption and impunity, unchecked drug war carnage, and skyrocketing levels of social inequality.4 In the months following the 26 September, hundreds of thousands 188

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of protestors, organized through social media sites such as #Ayotzinapa, #FueraPeña [#OustPeña] and #YaMeCansé [#I’mFedUp], have repeatedly taken to the streets across the country and the world to demand justice and adherence to rule of law in Mexico. Led by university students and the families of the Ayotzinapa disappeared, protesters have deployed a “synergetic relationship” between their canny use of digital media and their collective bodily presence in the streets and plazas of Mexico that exploits a model of the public sphere anchored simultaneously in the territorial spaces of the nation and in the virtual spaces of global information technologies (Fuentes 2015, 26; Castells 2008, 90).5 In response, President Enrique Peña Nieto has characterized the protesters as an ‘organized plot’ to ‘generate instability, social disorder and above all attacks against the national project’ of his government, and protests have met with harsh police repression (cited in Rodríguez García 2014). This reckless reversion to the increasingly outmoded tactics of media control, brute repression and continued impunity for state crimes remains blind to the massive crisis of legitimacy now afflicting not simply Peña Nieto’s government but the whole of Mexico’s political class.6 With regard to the politicization of public venues for debate in Mexico, two things are striking about this action: first, we have a set of manoeuvres around the idea of ‘sabotage’ ranging from the government’s (false) claim that the agitators were ‘anarchist’ thugs obstructing a legitimate political process, to, on the other end of the scale, the students’ rejection of that assertion via another act of sabotage – the combined use of social media and public protest to rupture the state’s hegemonic control of information and public space. The protesters effectively co-opted the definition of sabotage, turning it from the state’s characterization of it as an unlawful threat against public order and the established political system, to one of legitimate subversion of an authoritarian and exclusionary regime. Sabotage can therefore be a starting point for confronting entrenched power, especially as it turns around contestations over the nation as a space of public order, versus the nation as a space of free expression and inclusionary citizenship.7 But we also see an immediate recognition that, in order for such acts of rupture to be politically effective, they must be affiliated with a further act of collective mobilization.8 This, I think, is a crucial point to be made about sabotage. And what I will be tracing here is how – and to what 189

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degree  – aesthetics can catalyze that move from a politics of rupture to a politics of collectivity mobilized in the service of an operational public sphere. Thus the second thing to point out regarding the Ayotzinapa protests is the nature of those collective mobilizations. We have congregations of people coming together to claim the streets and plazas of the city as public space, as arenas in which to congregate and speak freely, apart from and against hegemonic control of those material spaces. But while it is tempting to say that the Ayotzinapa demonstrations made their claim in public spaces such as the Zócalo (the historical seat of public, religious and political power in Mexico City), that explication assumes that public space is already a given, is already designated as public. As Judith Butler has argued, however, ‘We miss something of the point of public demonstrations, if we fail to see that the very public character of the space is being disputed, and even fought over, when these crowds gather’: Though these movements have depended on the prior existence of pavement, street, and square, and have often enough gathered in squares […] whose political history is potent, it is equally true that the collective actions collect the space itself, gather the pavement, and animate and organize the architecture. As much as we must insist on there being material conditions for public assembly and public speech, we have also to ask how it is that assembly and speech reconfigure the materiality of public space, and produce, or reproduce, the public character of that material environment. (2012, 117)

My interest, therefore, is to explore how performative aesthetics might underwrite a politics of collectivity that insists on the interaction between the collective performative claim to public space and the materiality of that space in the service of building an inclusive participatory politics. I will look specifically at one space, the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in the Tlatelolco neighbourhood of Mexico City, as a space that has formed – and been formed by  – a long series of performative disputes over its public character. I traverse the history of those conflicts from the 1968 student movement, through the aftermath of its infamous repression by the state in what is known as the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, up to the current Ayotzinapa actions. I  examine one response in particular  – artist Rafael 190

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Figure 51. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Voz Alta. Relational Architecture #15, Mexico City, 2008. Photograph of performance. Courtesy of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VEGAP, Madrid.

Lozano-Hemmer’s performance-installation project, Voz Alta, commissioned in 2008 on the fortieth anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre – for what it can tell us about the intersections between performative aesthetics, contemporary civil collectivities such as the Ayotzinapa movement and how they might be politically activated in the public realm (see Figures 51–53).9 My analysis moves along two principal axes: first is Hannah Arendt’s theory of political action as necessitating what she calls the ‘space of appearance’ (1958, 199). This well-known model posits the collective interaction of bodies as that which defines the space of political citizenship. For Arendt, therefore, it is not material location that brings about political alliances but the reverse: political association between individuals engenders its own locality. This is a powerful argument about collective action creating its own, self-determined space of political operation and effect. Yet as Judith Butler has noted, Arendt’s view ignores the way in which such actions are always materially supported, are always fundamentally intertwined with the materiality of the space in which they physically occur (2012, 117). 191

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Figure 52. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Voz Alta. Relational Architecture #15, Mexico City, 2008. Photograph of performance. Courtesy of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VEGAP, Madrid.

Whereas Arendt disregards the material setting of politics, postcolonial writer-activist Ngugi wa Thiong’o explicitly focuses on it in his model of public space as the physical site of contestation between state and non-state collectivities. It is the ‘definition, delimitation, and regulation’ of public space, he argues, that is a principle ‘arena of struggle’ between the state and civil society (Ngugi 1997, 12). Thus my second axis relies on Ngugi’s model of performative determinations of public space to examine how the very ‘publicness’ of that material location is contested when people congregate. Voz Alta, it seems to me, brings together Ngugi’s attention to the materiality of public space with Arendt’s model of the ‘space of appearance’ to redefine the nature of the political. In so doing, it opens profound questions regarding: the nature of collectivity (for instance, the relationship between public and private, or the role of memory); how collective actions create the space of politics; and the material effects of space and architecture on how those collective political identities are continually constructed and reconstructed. This opens further queries about how to 192

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Figure 53. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Voz Alta. Relational Architecture #15, Mexico City, 2008. Photograph of performance. Courtesy of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VEGAP, Madrid.

translate collective civil society to the public sphere, how the social conditions of memory are linked to generating political communities, and how the enactment in public space of those political communities creates in turn the potential for transforming civil identities. ‘I’m fed up’ – Jesús Murillo Karam, Attorney General of Mexico, terminating public questions regarding Ayotzinapa, 7 November 2014 ‘Mexico is fed up too! It was the state!’ – #YaMeCansé, November 2014 ‘Ayotzinapa is a Tlatelolco in Guerrero’ – Enrique Krauze, 10 November 2014 The Ayotzinapa protests have regularly been compared to Mexico’s 1968 student movement which, as many have argued, marked an irreversible 193

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turning point in the political climate of the country (Talavera 2014).10 Like their 1968 counterparts, student-led groups such as #Ayotzinapa, #YaMeCansé and #AyotzinapaSomosTodos [#WeAreAllAyotzinapa] have mounted a powerful anti-systemic call for a renewed politics from below, to counteract the long-standing autocratic cronyism and corruption of the nation’s political leadership. The Ayotzinapa protesters have done this by conceptually unhinging the idea of the “state,” a political system, from that of the “nation,” a collective socio-cultural entity. Whereas Peña Nieto’s government has insisted on equating “state” with “nation” (a long-standing habit in Mexican political life), thus positioning the Ayotzinapa demonstrators as a threat to the latter, the protesters have been able to seize the concept of “nation,” reformulating it not around issues of public order, but around the rights of citizenship and justice: “Por el Rescate de la Nación” [“For the Rescue of the Nation”] read one huge banner; another read: “México no está de luto. ¡¡México está encabronado!!” [“Mexico isn’t in mourning. Mexico is enraged!!]. In this definition, it is not the dissidents but the corruption-riddled, authoritarian state, which is the threat to the nation.11 “Fue el estado!!” [“It was the state!!” i.e. a state crime against the Mexican citizenry] has become the protesters’ battle cry.12 Yet while the Ayotzinapa protest marchers have been able to out-manoeuvre the state’s attempts at drastic repression, their 1968 predecessors experienced violent government attacks ending in tragedy.13 On 2 October, just ten days before the opening of the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, a large student demonstration had gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas to demand a democratization of Mexico’s political system that would match the country’s rapid industrialization under the so-called ‘Mexican Miracle’.14 On orders from Interior Minister Luis Echeverría and President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, government troops opened fire on the rally, killing several hundred people and wounding many more.15 The government instituted an immediate information blackout, and mobilized its corporatized support networks to reassert very effective control over the public sphere, characterizing the student movement as a treasonous act of sabotage against the nation (see Figures 54–55). This act of state terrorism marked an abrupt end to the 194

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Figure 54. Photograph of 2 October 1968 rally in Plaza de las Tres Culturas, reproduced in La Jornada, Mexico City, 2 October 2008. Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Nacional de México.

1968 movement’s powerful challenge to the political order imposed by the Mexican state, and initiated a level of political polarization not seen since the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20. Under the subsequent guerra sucia [dirty war] imposed by the state, hundreds ‘disappeared’ or were forced into clandestinity and exile. In the aftermath of 1968, the combined use of repressive and ideological state apparatuses proved remarkably effective in the state’s reassertion of control over the public sphere. Despite state pledges to prosecute those responsible for the massacre, no convictions have ever been handed down.16 But the state’s open use of brute force in 1968 plunged what has famously been called ‘the perfect dictatorship’ into a crisis of legitimacy that even the election in the year 2000 of the first non-PRI president in more than seven decades could not overcome. 17 More than any other event in the twentieth century, the Tlatelolco massacre ruptured the state’s claim to be the self-declared heir to the Mexican Revolution’s promise of social justice and political inclusion, to represent the nation’s citizenry. Since 1968, the Tlatelolco killings 195

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Figure 55. La Prensa, Mexico City, 2 October 1968. Courtesy of the Hemeroteca Nacional de México.

have festered as an unhealed trauma in Mexico’s public psyche.18 But they have also prompted numerous responses from civil society aimed at consolidating an operative democratic public sphere, including the Ayotzinapa demonstrations and Voz Alta. It was through the latter that the artist Lozano-Hemmer sought to bring together these public assertions into a concentrated articulation that could set in motion a further democratic expansion of Mexico’s public sphere. 196

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‘Voices become light; enlightened thought becomes words’. – participant, Voz Alta, 2008 A simple proposal:  for several hours over the course of ten nights in 2008, to transform the uncensored voice of the public into powerful light beams that would shine across the vast metropolis of Mexico City (see Figures 51–53). Installed in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the site of the Tlatelolco massacre, Lozano-Hemmer’s interactive light-sound project invited anyone to speak into a microphone on any topic, completely free of monitoring or censorship. The voices of participants stimulated a searchlight which flashed in response to their frequency and volume, beaming those illuminated voice patterns to the top of the former Ministry of Foreign affairs building (now Centro Cultural Tlatelolco). Further anti-aircraft searchlights relayed the flashing light beams to three other significant public locations, vastly increasing the project’s visibility to the scale of the entire city: the Zócalo, the traditional political and social heart of the city and nation, the Basilica of the Guadalupe Virgin, patron saint of Mexico, and the Monument to the Revolution, commemorating the violent upheaval that launched the nation into twentieth-century modernity. The light flashes were then retransformed into sound, transmitted live by radio waves to a listening public via the National University’s radio station. In the pauses between live presentations were transmitted archival recordings of 1968 music, as well as archival testimonials from 1968 survivors, intellectuals and public figures. Thousands from all ranks of society participated, commenting on everything from their memories of the massacre, to calls for political action in the name of freedom and democracy, to poetry and sound art, to marriage proposals. Many called for the prosecution of those responsible for the massacre; many also spoke on the relationship between everyday life and politics. Others pointed to the long-term and consistent state censorship and repression, and to the collusion between the news media and the government in controlling access to information.19 Voz Alta’s use of Tlatelolco’s plaza as the site of an unscripted performative appropriation of public space  – a locale deeply imbued with centuries of historical memory from the pre-conquest and colonial periods to the present  – conjures up Arendt and Ngugi regarding the relationship 197

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between the public sphere, collective political action and performative aesthetics.20 By defining political action as occurring in the space between bodies, Arendt articulates the political as fluid and contingent rather than regimented and policed. Political power necessitates not only entering into a space of appearance, she argues, but actively actualizing that space through action and speech:  ‘The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action’, she writes, but the power of those politicized spaces ‘exist only in its actualization’, disappearing once that activity subsides (Arendt 1958, 199–200). It is for this reason that Arendt leans to the side of performance over specific material locality as that which produces politics:  ‘action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost anywhere and anytime’ (1958, 198). Political subjectivities are thus the result of social action, yet the effects of material space on that action are discounted in Arendt’s model. By contrast, Voz Alta was staged as a direct and profound engagement with the physical fabric of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, mobilizing that substantive space for its ability to disgorge a set of memories that had been forced out of the public realm by state repression in the aftermath of 1968; in the process, these private memories were reinstantiated in the collective popular memory in newly politicized form. Participants’ repeated focus in Voz Alta on the nexus of art, politics, public space and the state therefore also recalls Ngugi’s arguments regarding the artist and the state as rivals over public space. Analysing Plato’s characterization of the agora, Ngugi invokes this conflict in terms of stagings of power: ‘the war between art and the state is really a struggle between the power of performance in the arts and the performance of power by the state – in short, enactments of power’ (1997, 12). Central to the idea of performance understood in these terms are issues of time, content and especially place. Struggles over the control of access to spaces of performance, argues Ngugi, must be seen in relationship to time – what precedes (i.e. history) and what could potentially follow (i.e. the future). ‘What memories does the space carry?’, he asks, ‘and what longings might it generate?’ (1997, 13). Crucially, whoever controls spatialized memory also controls how political and social discourses are framed in the present and how those discourses shape a collective future. 198

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Voz Alta clearly sought to reappropriate Tlatelolco, turning it from a site whose history had been carefully managed by a single voice of authoritative power – the Mexican state – into a public space whose history was the result of a multitude of citizen voices.21 Against the state’s production of Tlatelolco as a space of spectacle and truncated historical memory aimed at bolstering its own power, Lozano-Hemmer’s sound-light piece provided an expanding sensorial forum specifically aimed at bridging temporally and spatially between disparate private thoughts and a collective public discourse that would activate historical memory in the present in all its complexity. As person after person spoke into the microphone, individual soliloquies interwove with each other to produce an ever-thickening web of collective testimonial – a collective witnessing in the public sphere that shattered hegemonic state narratives blaming others – the students, ‘communists’, foreign terrorists, rogue political elements  – for the Tlatelolco massacre. Individual memories lost their isolated, idiosyncratic character, to become nodal points for drawing the past into the present and for marking experiential connections across previously segregated arenas of civil society. Historical memory became a collective affair, such that even children could testify as community witnesses to events long past. ‘From that day onward, Mexico was another country’. – Julio Scherer García and Carlos Monsiváis22 Voz Alta’s performative address to the question of spatialized memory grew out of both the history of 1968 and its effects on cultural production. The Mexican state’s violent repression of the 1968 democratic movement prompted a sudden and total redefinition of the relationship between culture and the hegemonic political order, turning cultural production sharply from being primarily a state monopoly aimed at institutionalizing official ideologies, to being a form of resistance.23 This returns us to our model of sabotage as a legitimate confrontation with entrenched power over definitions of the nation. As Cuauhtémoc Medina has argued, the state’s attack against the intellectual and middle classes – classes that had previously remained relatively immune to its systematic repression of peasants, indigenous peoples and workers  – induced a wide range of aesthetic productions aimed at turning ‘the violent imposition of power 199

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[into] a cultural defeat’ for the government (2009). Aesthetics became the means of sabotaging the state’s ‘propaganda machine’ that equated state with nation, and public order with public citizenship (Medina 2009). Post’68 responses, from intellectuals such as Elena Poniatowska, Octavio Paz, Carlos Monsiváis and José Revueltas, to renegade exhibition practices such as the Salón Independiente, to oppositional artistic actions by collectives such as Fotógrafos Independientes and the Grupos movement, managed to wrest the idea of culture away from restrictive official notions of citizenship and to begin the arduous process of separating the cultural concept of ‘nation’ from the political concept of ‘state’, even as they largely could not do so on any other terms except the extremely local and marginalized.24 Artworks such as Victor Muñoz’s 1973 installation, 2 de octubre, contravened Mexico’s long-standing tradition of figurative political art, to evoke the aftermath of the 1968 massacre.25 Using black cloth curtains and screens, Muñoz fabricated an enclosed, darkened space within the state-sponsored Galería José María Velasco. Upon entering the space through a rip in the cloth, the viewer encountered a white floor completely encrusted with cast-off personal artefacts, reimagining the detritus left by the panic-stricken Tlatelolco crowds through a conceptual paradigm that dismantled Mexico’s conventional categories of both sculpture and political art. The shock of this aesthetic confrontation forcibly ruptured the veneer of social inclusion proffered by the urbane institutional spaces of the gallery – a rupture that Muñoz carried over to a subsequent installation in the hallowed icon of Mexican high culture, the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Both installations, linking Mexico’s guerra sucia to other Latin American incidents of state terrorism, registered a violent attack on important symbolic spaces of national identity controlled by the state, and a breach of the state’s production of a nationalist discourse that for decades had positioned the state as the ‘caretaker’ of Mexico’s citizens. But the task facing non-official culture after 1968 was not simply the sabotage of state discourse. It was also that of constructing a national subjectivity along non-hegemonic lines, a citizen-subject outside and against an entrenched state rhetoric of revolutionary nationalism. After 1968, to be an intellectual or cultural producer meant recognizing culture as a category of resistance, even as Echeverría, during his presidency (1970–76), sought to woo leftist intellectuals back into the fold of state patronage; 200

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it had become ethically inconceivable to endorse the state while engaging in artistic production (Medina 2009).26 Yet while literature, graphics and photography were able productively to grapple with the crisis in the hegemonic cultural order, for the visual arts more generally this proved to be a very difficult, slow and often very negative process (Medina 2009).27 In the immediate aftermath of the killings, the state instantly and effectively moved to incorporate the massacre into its own national historical teleology, presenting it as a ‘communist’ or ‘terrorist plot’ against the nation, and repressing all other versions (see Figure 55).28 Precisely because of the repressive bases of that national teleology, implemented through a long history of state cooptation of the visual arts, it proved impossible for contemporary artists to rely on those discourses or institutions that had once given the visual arts their representative authority. In rejecting that teleology, contemporary artists found that until the late 1990s alternative models of national subjectivity could not be articulated through official channels at the level of the nation.29 Although artists were occasionally able to insert works such as 2 de octubre into official institutions, their critical purchase was limited at the time by the lack of a developed basis from which to oppose the institutionalized rhetoric of cultural nationalism. Thus at this historical moment in the aftermath of 1968, ‘sabotage’ was the only way to move forward, but it could not yet be linked to the second stage of collective mobilizations around public space that is the necessary step for transforming the negative energies of rupture inherent in sabotage into the positive energies of a radically democratic citizenship. Nevertheless, it provided crucial historical grounding for future projects, such as Voz Alta and the Ayotzinapa protests, which would articulate a collective, non-hierarchical assertion over public space. ‘A failure of monumentality’. - Cuauhtémoc Medina This long schism after 1968, between official culture and artistic production that placed itself in opposition to the state, forms the context out of which Lozano-Hemmer produced Voz Alta. Indeed, this divide has circled for decades around what Medina has called ‘a failure of monumentality’ (2009).30 Tlatelolco is full of failed 201

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monumentalities:  its plaza is delineated by works of great ambition that have singularly failed to live up to their aspirations. On the one hand, Voz Alta stands in deliberate contrast to the square’s sole monument to the 1968 massacre: a stone slab erected in 1993 carrying the few names of those officially confirmed dead. Whereas Voz Alta mobilized sound, ephemeral luminosity and the active involvement of the spectator, the 1993 memorial clings to heavy sculptural anachronisms and a rigid separation of object and viewer (see Figure 56). An inert monolith reiterating the outmoded tenets of commemorative statues and plaques, it has proved unable to rejuvenate the plaza as a symbolic public space. A much more spectacular failure of monumentality, however, is that embodied architecturally in the Corbusier-inspired housing complexes of Tlatelolco designed by Mario Pani and built in the early 1960s as shining examples of the Mexican Miracle’s purported economic transformation of Mexico into a fully modernized nation. Pani’s Nonoalco-Tlatelolco urban development reads as an architectural icon to the Mexican regime’s ever more threadbare claim to being the official guardian of the Mexican Revolution’s promise of social justice and democratic integration into modernity. A  deliberate mix of massive functionalist modernism and architectonic references to the monumental imperial architecture of the Aztec, it spectacularized the glories of Mexico’s past as part of a nationalist mythology used to underwrite the state’s own grasp on political culture.31 As sociologist Roger Bartra has argued, ‘government bureaucracy gives the seal of approval to artistic and literary creation, so as to restructure [that creation] in accordance with established canons’ of national cultural identity (1993, 32 and 102). Generated principally from state mandates, cultural productions such as Pani’s thereby served ‘an enormously important function in regulating the [national] consensus on which the state is based’. This was sharply evident when, during the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, the military used the high-rise housing complexes that border three sides of the plaza to trap the students and carry out their wholesale killing (Figures 54–55). The sleek modernist buildings designed by Pani instantly dropped any semblance of being

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Figure  56. Monument to the Fallen at Tlatelolco, Mexico City, 1993. Photo credit: Thelma Datter. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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architecture for the masses to reveal their coercive role in authoritarian modernization.32 By contrast, Voz Alta presented a deliberately anti-monumental ‘architecture’ that countered the authoritarian spectacle of Pani’s complex with a deliberately impermanent play of light and sound generated by popular participation.33 Against Pani’s use of monumental architecture to underwrite a state-sponsored social order aimed at channelling and neutralizing popular power, Voz Alta offered an egalitarian model of civic association structured through unscripted collective engagement in public space that articulated the conditions of contemporary civic engagement in the public sphere without monumentalizing them. Light and sound formed a principle measure and structure of that engagement, displacing the tectonic solidity of Pani’s architecture of containment in favour of a spatial demarcation that turned spectacle into ephemeral critique. Voz Alta revealed the surreptitious investment in the semiotics of state-sponsored nationalist spectacle upon which the value of the Tlatelolco housing project was based. It undid, if only momentarily, the authoritarian nature of that state nationalism through postulating a reversal of the state’s conception of Mexico’s civic masses as passive receivers of the state’s wisdom. Luminosity translated from sound and beamed across the city’s sky became the means through which citizens activated their participation in social space. Lozano-Hemmer, in speaking about his consistent use of light, has invoked scientific models, particularly contemporary quantum physics, that have a ‘flexible understanding of the phenomenon of light’ in which ‘observation is complicit with what is observed’. He correlates this with Duchamp’s maxim, ‘le regard fait le tableau’ [the look makes the picture], to posit an explicitly interactive art that foregrounds the ‘performative role of the observer’ (Lozano-Hemmer cited in Lovink 2002, 305).34 This sets his work in sharp contrast to precedents such as Krzysztof Wodiczko, who focuses purely on deconstructing the authoritative power narratives of specific monuments and buildings, or to the ‘cathartic intimidation’ of coercive political spectacle embodied in Albert Speer’s Nuremberg ‘cathedral of light’, even as Lozano-Hemmer uses similar technologies such as powerful anti-aircraft searchlights. Rather, argues Lozano-Hemmer, ‘personal interactivity [transforms] intimidation into “intimacy”: the possibility for people to constitute 204

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new relationships with the urban landscape and therefore to reestablish a context for a building’s social performance’ (cited in Lovink 2002, 306). Spaces of social control historically engineered through the aestheticization of scientific technological regimes are inverted in Voz Alta: opened outward versus closed-in; fragile, ephemeral pulses of light and sound versus monumental concrete, glass and steel; performative versus static; anti-hierarchical, inclusive and collective versus coercive models of mass society. The choice to situate Voz Alta in Tlatelolco while simultaneously transforming that situatedness into waves of light and sound that transcendentally enveloped the whole of Mexico City, positions the work within what Lozano-Hemmer calls his ‘relational architecture’ series. In contrast to Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of ‘relational aesthetics’ (2002), however, which focuses principally on interpersonal relations, Lozano-Hemmer underscores the effects of place on interpersonal interactions  – and vice versa  – arguing that his works serve as ‘platforms for participation where the relationship to the political history of the site is as important as the microrelational event between two people who meet in the space’ (Lozano-Hemmer, with Boucher and Harrop 2012, 150).35 Voz Alta thus links the material transformation of physical space to the political transformation of social space. ‘In relational architecture’, Lozano-Hemmer continues, ‘buildings are activated so that the input of the people in the street can provide narrative implications apart from those envisioned by the architects, developers, or dwellers’ (150). In the case of Voz Alta, this ‘technological actualization of buildings with alien memory’ positioned it in unmistakable opposition to Pani’s architecture, to generate public engagements that differed dramatically from the encounters traditionally authorized within the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Lovink 2002, 306). Recalling such utopian aesthetic gestures as Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–20) or Gustav Klucis’s Radio-Announcer (1922), Voz Alta nevertheless separates those gestures from the propaganda apparatus of the centralized state, precisely in order to reassert the collective access to technologies of mass communication so fundamental to democracy (Medina 2008). Medina has called Voz Alta the ‘belated realization of a constructivist utopia: the transference of the publicity apparatus to the citizen, and the production of an industrial-age agora’ (2008). 205

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‘The sewers of the PRI are still intact’. –Anonymous donor of newly uncovered photographs of the 1968 massacre, 200136 ‘The system has not disappeared; nevertheless, yes, there has been a partial democratization of the State’. –Gilberto Guevara Niebla, 200837 Medina’s comparison of Voz Alta to the utopian production of the Russian constructivists brings us back to the issue with which I began this essay and with which I  want to conclude:  that is, the relationship between aesthetic sabotage and the building of an emancipatory collective public sphere. If we think of sabotage as a high-volatility term for ideology critique, and of emancipatory collectivity as a utopian enterprise aimed at producing new, egalitarian forms of subjectivity, then what we have in their relationship is in many ways a reformulation of the twin trajectories of the historical avant-garde. The question faced by the avant-garde then remains urgent now: how do we relate the attack model of ideology critique performed by many artworks to the utopian program of a radically democratic politics? What is the relationship between the intent to incapacitate, destroy, disrupt  – in a word ‘sabotage’ – existing structures of hegemonic power, and the effort to imagine and implement new, non-hierarchical forms of sociality? Too often, the ‘sabotage’ side of this equation is uncritically presumed to lead directly and transparently to the emancipatory politics side. The mechanisms through which the critical purchase of the former might be supported, nurtured and translated into the latter, the way in which those critical gestures might open paths that can effectively generate an operative public sphere out of civil society, are too often left uncharted by both artists and critics. Let us return to Ngugi and Arendt once more to think through this problem. Both take issue with the classic model of the polis that defines the space of political appearance through exclusion. Those excluded  – slaves, women, foreigners  – exist by definition outside the given structures of the political. Arendt and Ngugi, by contrast, propose models in which the right to politics is not contingent on political institutions for its legitimacy.38 ‘The polis’, writes Arendt, ‘is not the city-state in its physical 206

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location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be’ (1958, 198). The space of the political emerges wherever people come together in ‘speech and action’, and as such does not depend on the authority of the state but in fact precedes it. ‘The space of appearance’, argues Arendt, ‘predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government’ (1958, 199). Yet lacking here is a theory of how such actions depend on the prior existence of specific spaces and material infrastructure:  the street and public square (or, if virtual, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter) and, importantly, how those material spaces are transformed in turn through action. For Ngugi, however, city streets and plazas are not simply the physical props for political action; rather, they are foundational to any proposal for public mobilization that might be advanced. Regulating public space is, for Ngugi, fundamentally a question of power, and he cites Plato’s dialogue, The Laws, to make his point: ‘Do not suppose that we [the Athenian state] shall […] allow you [the tragic poet] to erect your stage in the agora, or introduce the fair voices of your actors, speaking above our own’. Ngugi contends that rival ‘enactments of power’ struggle over the performance space of politics, over its character, demarcation and control; he points to the aesthetically determined, performative activation of language, and to the spatialization of historical memory, as key to this struggle over the nature of those material spaces of public discourse (Ngugi 1997, 12). The contest over definitions of the national polity and politicized space, therefore, depends intimately on the spatialization and materialities of those tactics of rupture used by those confronting entrenched power (1997, 13).39 All this is evident in Voz Alta, which specifically deployed the space of Tlatelolco – extended across Mexico City through light and sound – to bring disparate fields of social existence together. In particular, private spaces of experience and memory were brought into the plaza, reshaping the nature of that public space in the process. Voz Alta thus transformed what for decades had been a clandestine political memory, and more recently the open subject of journalistic exposés and academic interpretations (but not of legal declarations of guilt), into a larger interrogation of the struggle between state and non-state actors over Mexico’s public sphere. 207

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Yet unlike Arendt, Ngugi’s actors in the public sphere appear into the agora preformed, fully constituted, even as they transform that agora through their actions. That is, they appear free to shape that space, but are not themselves shaped by it. Ngugi tends to ascribe established, fixed identities to the various protagonists in these state/non-state conflicts over public space  – identities that position state and non-state actors as implacable ‘rivals in articulating the laws, moral or formal, that regulate life in society’ (Ngugi 1997, 11).40 In this characterization, Ngugi harks more to his well-known, fiercely combative, anti-elitist post-colonial analysis of politics and power than to Arendt’s insistence that politics is lodged, not in predetermined subjectivities, but in the flexible, shifting interactions between individuals.41 Voz Alta, by contrast, lodged the formation of political identities precisely in the fluid, contingent nature of interchanges between people in specific material surroundings, as these material interactions underpinned the development of new subjectivities. And while ‘implacable rivals’ sounds like an appropriate characterization of the 1968 clashes between state and students, Voz Alta approached the space of Tlateoloco’s plaza differently, refusing to posit the identities of protagonists as entrenched. The work also interrogated the larger issue of the private/public divide itself. This is the importance, for instance, of the marriage proposals made by a number of participants. Ostensibly they had nothing to do with revitalizing the memory of the Tlatelolco massacre, but they did effectively contradict (if only temporarily) hegemonic exclusions of the private and domestic from the public-political.42 In this way, by linking Arendt’s ‘space of appearance’ with Ngugi’s ‘enactments of power’, Voz Alta was also, perhaps even primarily, an investigation into how to translate civil society into what sociologist Craig Calhoun calls an ‘operative public sphere’ (1993, 278), how the social conditions of memory are linked to generating political communities, and how the enactment in the public sphere of those political communities creates in turn the potential for transforming civil identities. Lozano-Hemmer’s work assumed neither the existence of civil society groups with predetermined identities nor a direct equivalence between civil society and the public sphere. Rather, it tapped into latent potential communities, unlocking possibilities for those communities to articulate themselves in public space, transforming that space in turn. By opening the microphone to anyone and refusing to script who could speak on what topics, Voz Alta posited a non-hierarchical 208

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enactment of political community in the public sphere ‘not simply [as] a precondition’, of action in the public sphere, but also as a ‘product’ of that action (Calhoun 1993, 280). Political identities, in this model, are created out of the performative action between bodies and in relation to material environments that allowed Voz Alta to hypothesize systemic questions concerning the definition, formation, and correspondence between civil society and the public sphere, embodying the potential for civil groups to transform their own identities and conditions of existence (Calhoun 1993, 279). Therefore, on the one hand, Medina’s characterization of Voz Alta as a ‘belated’ transference of the publicity apparatus to the citizen is appropriate, in the sense of an engagement with the past through a long-awaited productive memorializing of the particular history of the Tlatelolco massacre. But on the other hand, Voz Alta was not simply a recuperative enactment of older utopian models of public intervention; it also overtly positioned itself precisely at the crux of current transformations in the notion of the public sphere both in Mexico and more generally, from a ‘public sphere anchored around the national institutions of territorially bounded societies to a public sphere constituted around the media system’ (Castells 2008, 90).43 As Manuel Castells has argued, this points us towards a new concept of the public sphere generated out of the fraught emergence of a global civil society in relation to profound changes in the nature of the nation-state prompted by our unprecedented planetary unification (2008). Voz Alta thus recognized the critical role of culture in providing an arena for the formation, deformation and reformation of civil society’s imaginaries vis-à-vis such new contexts, even as the arts often produce those imaginaries and subjectivities at a different pace than other types of intervention in the public sphere. Although Voz Alta did not in itself prompt radical changes in Mexico’s existing political structures, it nevertheless sharply framed the terms of the debate over public space and representational politics so as to provide groundwork for further endeavours such as the Ayotzinapa protests. Actions such as Voz Alta thus not only ‘produce a space of appearance, they also seize upon an already established space permeated by existing power, seeking to sever the relation between the public space […] and the existing regime’, writes Judith Butler (2012, 119). In this way, ‘the limits of the political are exposed, and the link between the theatre of legitimacy and public space is severed; that theatre is no longer unproblematically 209

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housed in public space, since public space now occurs in the midst of another action, one that displaces the power that claims legitimacy precisely by taking over the field of its effects’ (119–120).44 In this regard, all the performative interventions in Tlatelolco’s plaza, from the 1968 student demonstrations to Voz Alta and the Ayotzinapa movement, tapped into the energies of popular unrest in the face of government manipulation, providing those energies with a conduit to a generative presence in the public sphere. And as much as this process is about popular voices struggling against the state to enact a public political identity, so too is it about the changes the state must undergo. Like civil society, the state is neither monolithic nor conflict-free, despite all its efforts to present itself as such. Nor is its hegemony ever fully or irrevocably consolidated. Even as Peña Nieto’s regime signals a triumphantly resurgent PRI that shows every sign of reinstituting its form of ‘politics as usual’ with a vengeance, movements like the Ayotzinapa protests have opened new – if fragile – parameters for contemporary civic engagement in public space. Voz Alta, in plumbing such on-going dilemmas around social justice and political democratization, reveals the dialectical conditions of performative social engagement as an imperative for mounting a non-spectacularized citizen reclamation of public space.

References Ackerman, John M. 2014. “A Call for Authentic Democracy in Mexico.” Los Angeles Times, 29 October. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oeackerman-mexico-democracy-20141031-story.html. ———“El bienio de Peña.” Hechos y derechos. Revista electrónica de opinión académica, 24 (November-December). http://biblio.juridicas.unam.mx/revista/ HechosyDerechos/indice.htm?n=24. Aguayo, Sergio. 2014. “Las masacres de Tlatelolco y Ayotzinapa. Similtudes, diferencias y consecuencias.” Unpublished talk at El Colegio de México, 17 October. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs1u4m9ny_o. Anon. 2001. “Las promesas incumplidas del presidente Fox.” El Mundo, 9 December: 28. Anon. 2012. “Televisa y su candidato atrapados.” Proceso 1858, 10 June. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Babb, Sarah. 2001. “The Mexican Miracle.” In Managing Mexico. Economists from Nationalism to Neoliberalism. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press: 75–105.

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‘The Space of Appearance’ Bartra, Roger. 1993. Oficio mexicano. Mexico City : Grijalbo. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du réel. Butler, Judith. 2012. “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street.” In Sensible Politics. The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, edited by Meg McLagan and Yates McKee. New York: Zone Books: 117–137. Calhoun, Craig. 1993. “Civil Society and the Public Sphere,” Public Culture, 5: 267–280. Castañeda, Luis. 2014. Spectacular Mexico:  Design, Propaganda and the 1968 Olympics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Castells, Manuel, 2008. “The New Public Sphere:  Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 616: 78–93. Del Castillo Troncoso, Alberto. 2008. “El movimiento estudiantil de 1968 narrado en imágenes,” Sociología, 23, 68: 63–114. Flaherty, George. 2014. “Uncanny Tlatelolco, Uncomfortable Juxtapositions.” In Desafío a la estabilidad: procesos artísticos en México/Defying Stability: Artistic Processes in Mexico, 1952–1967, edited by Rita Eder. Mexico City : UNAM and Turner: 401–417. Fuentes, Marcela A. 2015. “Performance Constellations:  Memory and Event in Digitally Enable Protests in the Americas,” Text and Performance Quarterly, 35, 1: 24–42. Gallo, Rubén. 2009. “Modernist Ruins:  The Case Study of Tlatelolco.” In Telling Ruins in Latin America, edited by Michael Lazzara and Vicky Unruh. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 107–118. González-Aréchiga, Bernardo, Deisy Hernández Moreno, Jesús David Pérez Esparza, and Eugenio Weigend Vargas. 2012. Pronunciamiento y propuestas del Tecnológico de Monterrey para mejorar la Seguridad Pública en México: informe de avances y retrocesos. Monterrey :  Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. González de Bustamante, Celeste. 2010. “1968 Olympic Dreams and Tlatelolco Nightmares:  Imagining and Imaging Modernity on Television,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 26, 1: 1–30. Greeley, Robin Adèle. 2012. “Muralism and the State in Post-Revolution Mexico, 1920–1970.” In Mexican Muralism:  A  Critical History, edited by Alejandro Anreus, Leonard Folgarait, and Robin Adèle Greeley. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: 31–54. 2022 (forthcoming). “Cold War Conceptualism: Mexico’s Grupos Movement”. In A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art, edited by Alejandro Anreus, Robin Adèle Greeley, and Megan Sullivan. Hoboken NJ: Wiley-Blackwell Press. Grupo Mira, ed. 1981. La gráfica del ‘68. Homenaje al movimiento estudiantil. Mexico City : Ediciones Zurda, Claves Latinoamericanas, and El Juglar.

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Sabotage Art Guevara Niebla, Gilberto. 2008. La Libertad nunca se olvida. Memoria del 68. Mexico City : Ediciones Cal y Arena. Gutmann, Matthew. 2002. The Romance of Democracy. Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Head, Michael. 2011. Crimes Against the State. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hernández, Anabel, and Steve Fisher. 2014. “Iguala: la historia no oficial,” Proceso, 13 December. http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=390560. Hernández Navarro, Luis. 2012. “Televisa should apologise to Mexicans for its Peña Nieto election bias,” The Guardian, 12 June, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2012/jun/12/televisa-mexicans-tv-bias-pena-nieto. Híjar, Cristina. 2008. Siete grupos de artistas visuals de los sesenta. Mexico City : Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, and Conaculta. Kaiser, David A. 1999. Introduction to Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kesby, Alison. 2012. The Right to Have Rights:  Citizenship, Humanity, and International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lovink, Geert. 2002. “Real and Virtual Light of Relational Architecture. An Interview with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.” In Uncanny Networks. Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 304–313. Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael, with Marie-Pier Boucher and Patrick Harrop. 2012. “Alien Media.” Inflexions 5: 148–159. ———2013. Presentation for the Casa Daros’s Meridianos program, Rio de Janeiro, 8 November, http://vimeo.com/79316. Martínez, Paris. 2014. “En México solo se investiga 1% de las desapariciones reportadas, según registros oficiales,” Animal Político, 2 September 2014, http://www.animalpolitico.com/2014/09/en-mexico-solo-se-investiga-1de-las-desapariciones-reportadas-segun-registros-oficiales-parte-2/#axzz3 CFbXBdmN. Medina, Cuauhtémoc. 2008. “Producir/gozar lo público,” Reforma, 1 October. http://images.reforma.com/editoriales/cultura/464/927044/default.shtm. ——— 2009. “A Ghost Wanders About Mexico: Tlatelolco 1968–2008.” Unpublished talk, Harvard University, February. Méndez, Alfredo. 2008. “Echeverría ni siquiera ha sido llevado ante un juez federal de primera instancia,” La Jornada, 2 October: 9. Monsiváis, Carlos. 2008. El 68. La tradición de la Resistencia. Mexico City : Editorial Era. Montero, Daniel. 2013. El cubo de Rubik, arte mexicano en los años 90. Mexico City : Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. 1981. Decolonising the Mind. The Politics of Language in African Literature. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers.

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‘The Space of Appearance’ ———1997. “Enactments of Power:  The Politics of Performance Space.” TDR 41(3): 11–30. ———1998. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams. Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (The Clarendon Lectures). Oxford:  Oxford University Press. Noble, Andrea. 2012. “Recognizing Historical Injustice through Photography: Mexico 1968.” Theory, Culture and Society 27 (7–8): 184–213. Parish Flannery, Nathaniel. 2012. “Mexico’s Revolution Will Not be Televised.” GlobalPost, 21 June. http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/ americas/mexico/120620/televisa-yosoy132-protest-presidential-debatemexican-election. Paterson, Kent. 2012. “Mexico Remembers the Massacre of Tlatelolco.” The Cutting Edge, 4 October, http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php? article=76359. Rodda, John. 1972. “The Killer Olympics.” The Guardian, 18 August. Rodríguez García, Arturo. 2014. “Peña denuncia complot, ‘quieren desestabilizar a mi gobierno’, acusa.” Proceso, 18 November, http://www.proceso.com. mx/?p=388117. Romero Vadillo, Jorge Javier. 2014. “La crisis política y la guerra contra las drogas.” Sinembargo, 19 December. http://www.sinembargo.mx/opinion/ 19-12-2014/30130. Said, Edward. 1981. Foreword to Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, v–x. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salas, Alexis. 2007. “Official Rebels: Los Grupos (Suma, Proceso Pentágono, Taller de Arte e Ideología and Tetraedro) at the 1977 Tenth International Paris Youth Biennial.” Unpublished Masters thesis, University of Chicago. Sánchez, Arturo. 2014. “Marchan jóvenes en defensa de Internet.” La Jornada, 23 April: 5. Scherer García, Julio, and Carlos Monsiváis. 1999. Parte de guerra:  tomo I: Tlatelolco 1968: documentos del general Marcelino García Barragán. Los hechos y la historia. Mexico City : Nuevo Siglo and Aguilar. Talavera, Juan Carlos. 2014. “Pasa México por ‘momento crucial’: Enrique Krauze.” Excelsior, 11 November. http://www.excelsior.com.mx/expresiones/2014/11/ 11/991734. Torres, Mauricio. 2014. “La discusión de las leyes de telecom se retrasa en el Senado.” CNN México, 22 April. http://mexico.cnn.com/nacional/2014/04/22/ senadores-de-oposicion-fuerzan-un-nuevo-predictamen-en-telecom. Vargas, Rosa Elvira. 2008. “Los líderes del 68.” La Jornada [special supplement on 2 October 1968], 2 October.

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Afterword On 9 October 2019, in an interview with a national news channel, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera described his country as ‘a true oasis’ in the midst of a ‘convulsed Latin America’.1 Nine days later, Chile exploded in a social uprising that, while initially triggered by an increase in the metro fare, also reflected a deep-seated discontent with a neoliberal model, originally implemented by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, that thirty years of so-called democratic transition had done little to correct. ‘It isn’t thirty pesos, it is thirty years’, a popular slogan during the demonstrations noted.2 Piñera’s oasis turned out to be a mirage abruptly dispelled during this tempestuous month of October, which revealed the systemic injustices affecting working- and middle-class Chileans in their access to health, education, basic pensions and decent living conditions (Sánchez 2020). The 18-0, as the uprising came to be known, triggered a process of national reconstruction, including the formation of a Constitutional Convention that respects gender parity and provides representation to Indigenous communities. While the convention’s task of writing a new legal road map for the country is still under way, questions pertaining to social justice, the protection of the environment and gender equality have surfaced as central concerns among its members. In April 2021, in Colombia, civilian groups also took to the streets, protesting the tax increase project defended by President Iván Duque, which would have disproportionally impacted a middle-class already affected by the COVID-19 sanitary crisis. In defiance of health restrictions and police brutality, including several cases of sexual violence, tens of thousands of demonstrators reclaimed the streets to utter a loud and clear ‘no’ to the tax reform, their cazerolas recalling the sabots – wooden shoes – of previous centuries. Meanwhile, citizen movements throughout the region have breathed a new energy into the feminist struggle, protesting against femicide, gender and reproductive violence as well as working towards long-lasting changes in institutional cultures and law. In Argentina, the movement led to the legalization of abortion by the Senate at the end of 2020, a key milestone in a region where the Catholic Church stills casts 214

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a long shadow on political decisions and where the growing influence of Evangelist groups has, at times, turned into direct lobbying for the restriction of women and sexual minorities’ rights.3 This new wave of protests and political activism in Latin America has been accompanied by the carefully orchestrated and often spectacular defacement of national monuments and renaming of public plazas. In Chile, the image of the protester Mauricio Lepin flying the Wenüfoye (Mapuche flag) from the top of the equestrian monument of General Manuel Baquedano became the symbol of the country’s political awakening.4 In the months that followed, the sculpture would also be adorned with the green and purple colours of the feminist movement and the LGBTQI+ rainbow, spray-painted red to draw attention to the violent repression conducted by the military police against protesters and, in a last act of collective wrath, partially burnt and unhinged. Even if ephemeral and, at times, potentially dangerous, these gestures came to undermine the value system of a patriarchal official history that has ignored and repressed Indigenous and sexual minorities for centuries. Additionally, the roundabout of Plaza Italia – or ‘ground zero’ as it was known during the climactic weeks of the protests, where the Baquedano monument had been situated – was collectively rebaptized Plaza Dignidad (Dignity Square). Defacement as an act of iconoclasm was thus accompanied by a process of renaming and resignification that not only revealed the colonial worldview that permeates public spaces and national monuments but also proposed new guiding values for the country. A similarly dramatic intervention on national symbols occurred in September 2020 in Mexico City, as feminist collectives, including several relatives of victims of femicide and forced disappearance, seized the offices of the National Commission of Human Rights (Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, CNDH) and spray-painted anarchist symbols and other graphic signs on the commission’s collection of official portraits – including paintings of, among others, Independence leaders Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos y Pavón. Dismissed by current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador as ‘vandals’, the feminist collectives then displayed the damaged portraits upside down outside the CNDH’s offices and put them up for auction (Cerdeira 2020). The motive for this courageous siege grew out of the collective pain resulting from years of government inaction in the face of the ongoing pandemic of femicides in the country, where on average ten women are murdered daily, a tendency which is also on the rise (Xantomila 2020). Yet the direct attack on the 215

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paintings also revealed a desire to go beyond the immediate demand for justice to initiate a profound revision of patriarchal official narratives and their visual and spatial expressions – a history in which women have been systematically ignored when not directly attacked, their bodies both petrified and transformed into empty vessels upon which idealized images of the nation-state are produced.5 These conjoined processes of attack, defacement and renaming are still unfolding as we write this afterword. In Mexico City, the former monument to Christopher Columbus located in Paseo de la Reforma since 1877 has been removed by the government, after increasingly vocal pressure to decolonize public symbols led to direct threats to destroy it. The plinth remains empty as a national debate unfolds as to what would be an appropriate substitute, if any.6 In Santiago, the by now infamous sculpture of Baquedano was finally removed by the government, officially to restore it, although it is unlikely to return to its original site of display. When we started editing this book back in 2014, we were interested in examining the ways in which acts of sabotage unfold and manifest themselves as politics of representation. Our pairing of the term with the notion of ‘iconoclasm’ led us to argue that ‘sabotage strategies assault those systems of representation that constitute the canon at a given time and place’. Yet, in the aesthetic and political contexts addressed in this book, these interventions are more than acts of destruction per se or crude displays of violence. They entail, by contrast, forms of critical reflexibility that seemed absent in previous avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements. In the specific case of post-1960s ‘Latin America’ – a category that we also invite the reader to critique and that we deploy in the spirit of Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ – sabotage and self-sabotage strategies are co-constitutive and may be seen as both acts of resistance and propositional gestures oriented towards political transformation. As our contributors describe, these strategies, ranging from the occupation of public spaces with light and sound to the sending of letters and the engulfing of bodies, through to the distortion of communication channels and institutional apparatuses, harbour in all their complexity the prospect of their own demise. The challenges faced by saboteur artists therefore point to the aporia that destruction may become and the need to carve out more dialogic and inclusive modes of affective communication, representation and exchange. 216

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These questions have found vivid expression in the political and social events that followed the original publication of this book in 2016. As people rose, the (often performative) fall of nationalist and colonial monuments became the foundational scenes for renewed forms of collective organization and public debate. Additionally, as people took to marching and chanting together, innumerable artistic and creative gestures blurred the boundaries between the street and the gallery, art and politics, in ways that the historical avant-gardes only dreamt of achieving. Indeed, in Santiago, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Mexico City and multiple other cities throughout the subcontinent, demonstrations were accompanied by the production of elaborate performances and graphic interventions, a case in point being the action ‘A Rapist in Your Path’ (Un violador en tu camino) by the Valparaiso-based collective Las Tesis that became an international rallying cry against systemic gender violence and the complicity of inefficient and often corrupt state bureaucracy in upholding it (Martin and Shaw 2021).7 If these new artistic forms and their global reach ought to be acknowledged and appreciated in their own right, they also shed new light on the risks of institutional recuperation and mercantile co-option of so-called Latin American art that some of the chapters warn against. Indeed, while the aestheticization of violence, precariousness and civil unrest that has accompanied the ‘boom’ in art from the region in foreign markets is still very much in existence, a certain weariness towards the exotic lure of such narratives has begun to manifest, and critical perspectives have opened up in both academic and institutional circles.8 Even more so, in our age of ecologic urgency and pandemic futures, the metropolises of the global North have been made aware of their own fragility. And yet, one ought to be wary of triumphalist tales. If it is true that in some countries of the region the mirages associated with the lure of market-driven agendas and modernizing projects have begun to dissipate, other forms of state and economic violence have turned more pernicious. In Brazil, right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro maintains a firm hold on power despite growing popular discontent and a disastrous management of the sanitary crisis, while thousands of Venezuelan people have been forced into exile, seeking to escape growing insecurity and economic precarity. Meanwhile, in countries like Chile, where significant progressive changes have occurred in recent years, uncertainty remains as to the outcomes of the civilian movements and their transformation into lasting measures. The question of the conversion of popular protests and acts of artistic resistance 217

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into enduring projects is also an open-ended one, as is the recognition of the political and cultural agency granted to minorities and non-human actors in the crafting of new forms of community. Nevertheless, if the events of the past years have taught us anything, it is that sabotage is as much an act of political and economic resistance as a (artistic) strategy to form new collective and affective bonds. It is thus in a spirit of hope that we publish this paperback issue: the hope that dissent and kinship may indeed go hand in hand and that iconoclasm, activated the right way, may lead, not to new mirages, but to forms of creation attuned to collective ways of thinking and feeling. Sophie Halart and Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra

References Barriendos Rodríguez, Joaquín. 2013. ‘La idea del arte latinoamericano’. PhD, University of Barcelona. Cerdeira, Pamela. 2020. ‘La toma de la CNDH en México, vista desde adentro’. The Washington Post, September. https://www.washingtonpost.com/es/postopinion/2020/09/13/la-toma-de-la-cndh-vista-desde-adentro/. Corrêa, Sonia, ed. 2020. Anti-Gender Politics in Latin America. Translated by Joyce Dickey. Rio de Janeiro: Género & Política en América Latina. https:// sxpolitics.org/GPAL/uploads/E-book-Resumos-completo.pdf. Dragnic, Mia. 2020. ‘Crisis of Wellbeing and Popular Uprising: The Logic of Care as a Path to Social Emancipation in Chile’. Travesía. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 29: 311–23. Garcés, Mario. 2019. ‘October 2019: Social Uprising in Neoliberal Chile’. Travesía. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 28: 483–91. Martin, Deborah, and Deborah Shaw. 2021. ‘Chilean and Transnational Performances of Disobedience: LasTesis and the Phenomenon of “Un Violador En Tu Camino”’. Bulletin of Latin American Research. Meganoticias. 2019. ‘Piñera y Chile en Latinoamérica: “Es un verdadero oasis, con una democracia estable”’. 8 October 2019. https://www.meganoticias. cl/nacional/278153-sebastian-pinera-chile-oasis-latinoamerica-democracia. html. Pinochet Cobos, Carla. 2021. ‘Disrupting Normalcy. Artistic Interventions and Political Mobilisation Against the Neoliberal City (Santiago, Chile, 2019)’. Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 27 (5): 538–54. Sánchez, Ángeles. 2020. ‘El oasis chileno era un espejismo’. El País, 14 January 2020. https://elpais.com/economia/2020/01/07/alternativas/1578393108_326863. html.

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Afterword Stewart, Danielle. 2021. ‘Transatlantic/Transnational/Transcultural: How Do We Talk About “Latin American” Art on the Move?’ Paper presented as part of the CAA 2021 panel ‘The Impact of Recent Latin American Art Publications in the Field of Art History’. Warner, Marina. 1985. Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Xantomila, Jessica. 2020. ‘ONU: Feminicidios en México crecieron diariamente de 7 a 10 en tres años’. La Jornada, March. https://www.jornada.com.mx/ ultimas/sociedad/2020/03/05/onu-feminicidios-en-mexico-crecieron-de-7a-10-diarios-en-tres-anos-8647.html.

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Notes Introduction 1 Autosabotaje was part of the exhibition The Fear Society curated by Peruvian artist Jota Castro in the Emergency Pavilion during the Venice Art Biennale. The text that Bruguera read had been initially written for her participation in the seminar La Culture comme stratégie de survie [Culture as a Strategy to Survive] organized at the Galeries Nationales du Jeu de Paume in Paris by Maria Inés Rodriguez in March 2009. 2 An early inception of the French verb saboter gives it the meaning of ‘shaking’ [secouer] and ‘maltreat’ [maltraiter], forecasting the more psychological and symbolic readings that may be made of (self-)sabotage (Le Robert). 3 The latter attitude would come close to the economist Thorstein Veblen’s definition of sabotage as the ‘conscious withdrawal of efficiency’ (2006, 1). 4 Even in the face of this strategic use of ‘Latin America’, as one considers the plurality of local and national histories, it is easy to fall into misconceived generalizations. In an attempt to avoid cultural essentialism, some writers have begun to speak of art ‘in’ or ‘from’ Latin America, instead of referring to Latin American art, thus underlining, ‘on the very level of language’, the ‘suspicious construction of an integral, emblematic, and homogeneous cultural region’ (Mosquera 2010, 21). This slight modification, however, remains linguistically constraining and leaves unresolved what coming from Latin America in a highly globalized contemporary era may entail.

1. Entrap, Engulf, Overwhelm: From Existentialism to Counterculture in the Work of Marta Minujín 1 The Impasse Ronsin is a thoroughfare in the Necker area of Paris’s 15th arrondissement, which has historically been popular with artists and intellectuals. The mattress constructions had been exhibited together with works by Lourdes Castro and Alejandro Otero at Minujín’s 22 Rue Delambre studio from May 30 to June 6 just prior to the happening. A critic in the French newspaper Combat similarly characterized La destrucción as an ‘autodafé’ (Pierre 1963, 2). 2 In existentialist terms nihilism signifies a rejection of any intrinsic meaning other than that of destruction. 3 Paez’s essay appeared in a collection of essays edited by the writer, critic and psychoanalyst Oscar Masotta under the title Happenings, which sought to grapple with the transposition of the North American term into the Argentine context. Masotta himself described how Allan Kaprow, one of the key progenitors of happenings in the US, had referred to Argentina as a country of ‘happenistas’, but that very few happenings had actually taken place there (1967c, 9).

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Notes to Pages 17–29 4 The Argentine critic Marta Traba, for example, argued that rather than achieving their ostensible aim of transforming ‘all human life into a work of art’, happenings and environments such as La Menesunda (1965) devised by Minujín and Rubén Santantonín, failed to achieve anything more than ‘collective therapy’ (2005, 195). 5 The Arte Destructivo exhibition, in which Kemble played a key role, went on display at the Galería Lirolay in 1961. 6 El batacazo was first shown at the 1965 iteration of the Premio Internacional Torcuato Di Tella, held at the Centro de Artes Visuales at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella. Minujín then transported the work to the US, where it was shown at the Bianchini Gallery in New York from 8–19 February 1966, before being destroyed after storage payments were not met. 7 Minujín’s immolation of her own works – and her prioritization of the ephemeral moment of spectacular performance over the tangible ‘art object’ – has affinities with the use of ritual destruction explored by Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra in Chapter 2, in relation to the work of Marcos Kurtycz. 8 La destrucción occurred in a lot that was part-owned by Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint-Phalle, in which the latter had already executed a Tir [Shoot] performance in 1963. This physical overlap parallels the comparable self-stylization pursued by both Minujín and Saint-Phalle in their performances. 9 Minujín’s use of the mass media to create complex participatory performances like Suceso plástico and Simultaneidad en simultaneidad also involved elements of infiltration and sabotage, particularly in the latter piece during which Minujín attempted to interrupt radio and television broadcasts with transmissions from her happening. Although Minujín was not a member of El grupo de las artes de los medios de comunicación de masa addressed by Sophie Halart in Chapter 5, there are significant correspondences between Minujín’s work and that of the artists belonging to this group such as Roberto Jacoby and Eduardo Costa. There are further methodological overlaps – in terms of a desire to rupture and provoke established social constructs and information exchange systems – with the mail art exchanges traced by Zanna Gilbert in Chapter 4. 10 Masotta described his happenings as involving ‘social sadism made explicit’ (2004, 200). 11 Minujín also released live rabbits and birds at the end of the happening, increasing the frenetic atmosphere. 12 The Instituto Torcuato Di Tella was an important hub for artistic activity in Buenos Aires, situated on Calle Florida, home to a number of commercial galleries and fashion boutiques. For a discussion of the national and international prizes organized by the institute and their impact, see Andrea Giunta (2007, 189–291). 13 Nadja Rottner (2014) explores the metaphor of ‘softness’ in Minujín’s work in relation to her development of an inter-media approach. 14 Lucy Lippard coined the phrase ‘Eccentric Abstraction’ in relation to her 1966 exhibition of that name which featured works by Bruce Nauman and Louise Bourgeois, among others (1966, 28, 34–40). The ambivalent bodily nature of Minujín’s mattress works shares some affinities with Lippard’s concept. 15 Later in 1969, Minujín visited the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood and Golden Gate Park (see Noorthoorn 2010, 145). 16 The Minuphone was an adapted telephone booth, created with assistance from the Danish engineer Per Biorn, which released a range of different sensory stimuli when the viewer entered and dialled a number. These included a colour organ, water walls and an automatic Polaroid photograph. For a comprehensive account of the Minuphone’s design and development, see Longoni and Carvajal (2010). 17 Bonnie Tucker, reporting for the Buenos Aires Herald, recorded the incongruous experience whereby, ‘passing through the empty, darkened first salon of the gallery – where

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Notes to Pages 30–39 a policeman is still guarding Roberto Plate’s banned bathroom exhibit kept over from the May “Experiences 1968” exhibition due to impending court decision – the public can pass into the “Strobo Room” where fast-flickering projected light and aluminium reflector walls create an unreal atmosphere where the visitor can go mad because the room and the other people seem to be moving, and the moving light is too bright and giddy to blink away’ (1968, 9). Tucker’s vivid description also highlights the overwhelming sensory assault on the viewer created by the environment. 18 In order to protest the censorship of Plate, several artists withdrew their work from the exhibition. See ‘Final Statement of the Participants in Experiences 68, Buenos Aires, 23 May 1968 (Katzenstein 2004, 291–294). 19 The term ‘Dirty War’ is employed in Argentina to describe a period of state terrorism which spanned 1976–83, and which saw the imprisonment, torture and murder of thousands of political dissidents, journalists and civilians.

2. Shaman, Thespian, Saboteur: Marcos Kurtycz and the Ritual Poetics of Institutional Profanation 1 The exact number of murdered students in 1968 remains unknown (Rodda 2012, 18). As Alexander Aviña points out, in 2002, ‘the Mexican government created a special office to investigate human rights violations committed by the PRI regime from 1960s to 1980s.’ However, the final report on the ‘Dirty War’, released in 2006 by the Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado [Special Prosecutor’s Office for Past Social and Political Movements] ‘proved to have been censored’ (Aviña 2014, 184). As I conclude this chapter in March 2015, the Mexican government has also declared all documentation about this episode confidential, and therefore unavailable for research or legal purposes. For further discussion of this event and its political and artistic resonances, see Robin Greeley’s chapter in this volume. 2 The PRI rose to power at the end of the 1910 revolution. Deeply entrenched in the structure of the Mexican state, the party was responsible for the country’s modernization, undertaking major social reforms over the course of the twentieth century, such as land reform and the nationalization of the oil industry. Its rule, however, was characterized by clientelism and authoritarianism (Camp 1999). Having stayed in office for more than 70 years, from 1929 to 2000 (only to return to power in 2012), the official revolutionary rhetoric became increasingly empty over the years (Monsiváis 2005, 12). Further attention to the relationship between the PRI regime and art is given in Erica Segre’s, Zanna Gilbert’s and Robin Greeley’s chapters in this volume. 3 See Alvaro Vázquez Mantecón (2014, 196). 4 Marcos Kurtycz, ‘Texto sobre el evento en el Foro el día 1 de noviembre de 1979’, Kurtycz Archive. It was not Bataille but Elizondo who included Bataille’s comments on Aztec sacrifices in the prologue to his translation of Bataille’s erotic novella Madame Edwarda, published under the pseudonym Pierre Angélique in 1937. 5 Petate (from the Nahuatl petlatl) is a bedroll made of natural fibres, often used in Mexico and Central America to rest or sleep on the floor. 6 Kurtycz, ‘Texto sobre el evento en el Foro’, Kurtycz Archive (hereafter KA). 7 I am using the term ‘expose’ with explicit reference to Bataille’s notion of déchirement, which Patrick ffrench translates as ‘absolute exposure’ (2007, 78). 8 Kurtycz, ‘Texto sobre el evento en el Foro’, KA.

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Notes to Pages 40–59 9 The Lettrist International information bulletin, published between 1954 and 1957, was also entitled Potlatch. 10 ‘Arte Facto Kurtycz’, 26 February 1982, self-publication, KA. 11 Stefan Morawski, ‘De los recuerdos sobre Marcos Kurtycz’, 1999, KA. 12 Quoting the Roman jurist Trebatius, Agamben writes: ‘profane is the term for something that was once sacred or religious and is returned to the use and property of men’ (2007, 73). In a similar vein, profanation in Levinas has been described as ‘the contrary of any act or process of sanctification, or sacralization’ (Bergo 1999, 112). The term pro-fanare derives from the Latin word for temple, fanum. ‘The pro-fane is that which comes to pass before, and by extension outside of, the temple. Thus the profane is outside of the space of the holy’ (112). 13 According to Biles, ‘for Bataille, the concept of monstrosity is itself a monstrous concept, bearing the distinctive marks of what it designates – that which is ambiguous, contradictory, impure, dangerous, fearful, and often ridiculous’ (2007, 63). 14 Each of these attributes comes respectively from Mariotte (1985, 3), Appi (1985,6), Mariotte (1985, 3) and Cortés (1985, n.p.). 15 Groys’ discussion focuses on post-9/11 use of video and film techniques by presumed members of al-Qaeda, in which it becomes especially difficult to distinguish between a staged violent act, such as a mock beheading, and a real one. 16 Letter dated ‘Prima Aprilis 1987’ (sic), KA. 17 The exhibition not only included a vitrine with Kurtycz’s letter bombs but also an entire wall covered by mail kept by Santiago Rebolledo, for which the caption read: ‘corresponded/matched lives: mail art collection 70s–90s’. 18 Kurtycz circulated the leaflet as part of his letter bombing projects. 19 In 1929 Bataille founded the review Documents in an attempt to develop a ‘war machine against received ideas’ (Bradley and Ades 2006, 11). Central to this symbolic struggle was the review’s ‘Critical Dictionary’, aimed at providing ‘not the meaning but the tasks of words (12) – claiming, for instance, that ‘formless is not only an adjective with a given meaning but a term which declassifies’ (Bataille 1992, 92). 20 For Agamben profanation does not entail an attitude of indifference or disbelief, but the possibility of disregarding normativized or disciplining distances, that is, of challenging separations and divisions between objects and people and exploring profane forms of intimacy and proximity. He also describes this form of ‘distracted’ or negligent engagement in profanation as a form of play, or put differently, as the practice of rites without myths, a practice which disrupts the consubstantial unity between myth and rite that founds the sacred (2007, 75). 21 Agamben posits that corporeal contact (contagione) and physical touch have often been understood as able to return to use what sacrificial rituals had rendered sacred or separate (2007, 74).

3. Pictorial Eviscerations, Emblems and Self-Immolation in Mexico: Dissensus in the Work of Enrique Guzmán and Nahum B. Zenil 1 2 3 4 5

Adorno (2005, 100). Pacheco (1969, 14). Villoro (1986, 18–19). Rodríguez Araujo (1978, 5). García Canclini (2009, 16–37).

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Notes to Pages 59–78 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

García Terres (1988, 27). Ibargüengoitia (2012, 62). Montes de Oca (1973, 13). Ibid (1973, 21). Anon (2003, 21). Paintings discussed in this chapter are reproduced in Blas Galindo (1992). See Elliot (1980, 82–83). Reproduced in Craven (2002, 48). Reproduced in Anon (2011) and Emerich (1999). Further attention to the Tlatelolco Massacre is given in the chapters written by Mara Polgovsky, Zanna Gilbert and Robin Greeley. For the symbolism of the hare in art see Carnell (2010, 125–177). See Debroise and Medina (2006). See Duplaix (2012, 102–117). The Party of the Poor was a radical socialist political movement and militant group under the leadership of rural school teacher Lucio Cabañas which was active between 1967 and 1974. Through its armed wing, the Peasants’ Justice Brigade, it waged guerrilla warfare against the Mexican government under the monopoly of the PRI (the Revolutionary Institutional Party). Cabañas was killed by government forces on the 2 December 1974 and the party was dissolved in the midst of renewed repression. The Homosexual Liberation Front was founded in 1974 and in 1978 the first Gay Pride March converged on the capital’s Monument to the Revolution. See Escobedo and Gori (1989). See Florescano (1999). See Segre (2007). Zamora’s oeuvre includes over 2,600 black paintings. A  retrospective of her work and public tribute, Black: Origin and End of the World, was held in the Museo del Chopo in 2004 and Beatriz Zamora: Forty Years of Creativity was held in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana. See Eduardo Rubio’s eulogizing Beatriz Zamora:  History of an Exceptional Artist (2003). The UNAM’s contemporary art collections include work by Guzmán and Zamora. For recent curatorial inclusions, see Delgado Massé (2010, 59). Zamora claimed to have been forced into exile by the Guzmán affair and to have been the subject of persecution by artists after his suicide while living in New York. Guzmán is cited in Siller (1978, 19). See Anon (1978, 21). See Villa Lever (2009). See Widdifield (1996, plate 3). On body-centred art, disillusion and Zenil, see Gonzálo Velez (1997, 31–42). See Emerich (1992). Exhibition held in the Gallery of the Art School of the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico. On the fairground freak show, the Mexican picturesque and genitalia, see Zenil (1994). Reproduced in Sullivan et al. (1996, plate 17). Exhibited works are reproduced in Del Conde (1999). On revisions of cultural myths see Florescano (1995). On Mexican cultural nationalisms and gender archetypes, see Pérez Montfort (2007). For his queering tributes to Velásquez, Rivera, Kahlo and colonial genres, see del Conde (1982?) and Debroise (1985). For the Neo-Mexicanist phenomenon and Zenil, see Emerich (1995). For a critique regarding its aesthetic conservatism, see Benítez D. (1996, 10–14).

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Notes to Pages 78–96 39 See Jiménez (2000, 5). 40 See Palacios (2013). 41 Alfonso Reyes (1889–59) was a renowned public intellectual and teacher generally considered one of the most distinguished Mexican men of letters of the twentieth century at home and abroad. He was an influential and prolific writer, poet and critic but also a senior diplomat and academic. His erudition was legendary and at the end of his life attracted official deference turning him into an equivocal ‘maestro’ for the new rebellious generations. Despite his status and prestige, Reyes was prone to be irreverent about official decorum in public life. 42 For his related project on the disappeared see Mejía Sánchez et al. (2009). 43 Testimonial poem by Eduardo Garduño, in Grupo Mira (1993, 6).

4. Bureaucratic Sabotage: Knocking at the Door of the ‘Big Monster’ 1 This quotation is taken from Image Bank’s ‘There are those…’ (1975) (quoted in Bonin & Thériault 2010). 2 Ogaz referred in Spanish to mail art as ‘una bomba de fabricación casera’ (home-made bomb) and Carlos Ginzburg’s Atomic Poems were published in Edgardo Antonio Vigo’s magazine Diagonal Cero in 1966. Artists have been more or less explicit about this, but the frequency of the appearance of the term ‘bomb’ in relation to mail art alone gives pause for thought. 3 Nobert Weiner’s 1950 text The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society had become a reference point for artists. Germon Alfonso Adais has tracked the influence of cybernetics, noting that ‘despite its technical and military origins, it would find a home not in America but everywhere else, from the Soviet Union to Brazil’ (2010). 4 According to Cristóbal Kay desarollismo was ‘anti-feudal, anti-oligarchical, reformist and technocratic,’ and ‘swept through most of Latin America in the early 1970s’ (2010, 28). Based on increased government spending on development, it foregrounded the role of the state in industrialization and the implementation of capitalist economic policies. Further, according to Legé Harris and Nef ‘it provided ideological justification for the Cold War policies and practices’ of the United States and its allies (2008, 78). 5 Anthony Pereira points out that guerrilla resistance differs in each of the Southern Cone countries and ascribes this to the differences between their authoritarian models (2005). 6 Guillermo Deisler (1940–95) was born in Chile but he went into exile when Augusto Pinochet came to power in 1973, moving first to France, then to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), from where he was sent to Bulgaria, only returning to the GDR in 1986. In the 1960s, Deisler exchanged publications through visual poetry networks. 7 For an account of events see Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco (1971) and Jorge Fons’s film Rojo amanecer (1989). The number of dead has not been unequivocally stated, the official figure being around 40, but groups such as Comité 68 who continue to campaign for transparency estimate the death toll to be over three hundred. In 2006, Echeverría was arrested on charges of genocide, but the charges were eventually dismissed. Robin Greeley’s chapter in the following section takes a closer look at this event. 8 The measurements, according to Cristiana Tejo, are 1.8 by 0.9 metres, which corresponds with the photo documentation. 9 Paulo Bruscky and his collaborator Daniel Santiago were imprisoned for 3 days in 1976 after organizing an international exhibition of mail art. Ironically, the reason for the escalation of the initially fairly casual response from the local police to federal level was

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Notes to Pages 98–114 because the communication centre for the National Intelligence Service (Serviço Nacional de Informações [SNI]) was located in the exhibition space: the central post office in Recife. 10 The use of string can also connect the work to Duchamp, who Vigo fervently admired. Sven Spieker argues that Duchamp’s use of string was connected to filing and archiving systems (2008, 57).

5. Cogs and Clogs: Sabotage as Noise in Post-1960s Chilean and Argentine Art and Art History 1 Notorious cacerolazos include the mass protests staged by the Argentine middle class in the midst of the 2001 economic crisis and, more recently, the Chilean student demonstrations in 2011. For more on the Chilean origins of the cacerolazo and the role that right-wing women played in stirring the popular discontent that led to the 1973 military coup, see Mattelart (1986) and Power (2002). 2 Military strategies also exploited the auditory properties of sabotage. The U.S. Simple Sabotage Field Manual, for instance, described how ‘audiences can ruin enemy propaganda films by applauding to drown the words of the speaker, by coughing loudly, and by talking’ (Office of Strategic Services 1944, 26). 3 See the now classic Shannon-Weaver mathematical model of communication (1949). 4 Unless otherwise indicated, translations of quotations from Spanish are mine. 5 If in 1960, Carpani exhibited works alongside Marta Minujín and Roberto Jacoby at the Galería Van Riel in a show criticizing US military involvement in Vietnam, it did not stop each group of accusing the other of being reactionary: ‘some artistically and others politically’ (Noé 1993, 260). Meanwhile, in 1971 Chile, the Brigada Ramona Parra collaborated with Surrealist artist Roberto Matta in making a mural in the Santiago working-class neighbourhood of La Granja. However, as Federico Galende argues in a recent publication, Matta – a close friend of Allende – continued to advocate (at least during his visits to Chile) the idea of a ‘utopian art that must completely eliminate any distance from life’ (2014, 13). By contrast, Galende introduces the figure of the Informalist painter José Balmes who, while a committed leftist, ‘belongs to an academically-oriented political scene that continues to object to the [artistic resort to] popular graphic and muralism’ (2014, 13). 6 Beyond the mere idea of ‘de-objectualization’ commonly associated with Lucy Lippard’s seminal text, ‘dematerialization’ for Masotta also entailed a ‘declustering’ gesture that broke down categories between genres and audiences (2004). 7 This dictatorial regime, characterized by Argentine sociologist Guillermo O’Donnell as one of ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ (1988), lasted from 1966 until 1973. 8 CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) was a multidisciplinary collective loosely made out of sociologist Fernando Balcells, writer Diamela Eltit, visual artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo and poet Raúl Zurita active between 1979 and 1985. For more of CADA, see Neustadt (2001). 9 Lotty Rosenfeld, a visual artist who belonged to CADA, followed a similar strategy in her performance series Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (1979). 10 For sociologist Michèle Mattelart, the upper class’ control over the mass media already constituted an important field of ideological confrontation during the days of Allende’s Unidad Popular. ‘The conditions of opposition with the proletariat forced the dominant class to change its communication models and align them with the alternatives at its disposal in order to recover political power. […] The bourgeoisie made its communication apparatus work alongside its “mass strategy” while, at the same time, it also activated all

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Notes to Pages 116–148

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the other superstructural instances it had control over (the judiciary, the Parliament as well as other ideological apparatuses)’ (1974, 11). See also the polemical documentary El Diario de Augustín (2008) by Ignacio Agüero, revealing the ideological support that the Chilean media corporation El Mercurio, S.A.P. that owns the newspapers El Mercurio, La Segunda and Las Ultimas Noticias lent to the junta. Mattelart, who also looks into the case of El Mercurio, claims that the newspaper, in its opposition to Allende’s nationalization programme collaborated with the Right and not only misinformed its readers but also ‘organised the sabotage of its distribution’ (1986, 58. My emphasis). Chilean writer Rodrigo Cánovas refers to the control over language implemented by the junta in terms of ‘aphasia’, the loss of one’s ability to understand language. ‘At the level of culture, aphasia implies speech that says nothing, an amorphous weave of signifiers that is the equivalent of what linguists call, simply “noise” ’ (in Kaminsky 1999, xii). This emission of disparate ‘noises’ as a strategy to eradicate meaning constitutes an element of parody in CADA’s actions. For Miguel López, the exhibition’s co-temporality with the ratification of the Washington Consensus in 1989 (a series of measures which encouraged the ‘liberalisation of trade and investment, deregulation and a general withdrawal of the state from economic matters’ in Latin America) was anything but coincidental (2010). In 1968, a group of artists interrupted a lecture that was being given by the Di Tella director Romero Brest. That same year, Jacoby was briefly imprisoned for his involvement in the interruption of the 1968 Premio Braque ceremony, an annual art award granted to an Argentine artist by the French government. Jean Baudrillard reaches a similar conclusion as to the impossibility of beating the mass media at its own game in his article ‘Requiem for the Media’ (1981). The television ads produced by the anti-Pinochet coalition’s communication team (rendered famous by Pablo Larraín’s 2013 film NO) made more than a passing reference to CADA’s slogan.

6. Impossible Objects: Gabriel Orozco’s Empty Shoe Box and Yielding Stone 1 The author would like to thank Catherine Belloy at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York for images and copyright permission, as well as Mara Polgovsky, Sophie Halart, Margaret Iversen, Zanna Gilbert, Rebecca Breen and the editors of the volume. 2 This public conversation took place at the Sackler Museum at Harvard University, April 18, 2007, under the auspices of the M. Victor Leventritt Lectures on Latin American Art. 3 Aperto ‘93, entitled Emergency/Emergenze, was organized by Helena Kontova who invited thirteen emerging curators to select and present artists. Among them was Francesco Bonami, who in turn invited Orozco to participate in his exhibition, The Mere Interchange, alongside Matthew Barney, Maurizio Cattelan, Paul McCarthy, Charles Ray, Rudolf Stingel and others. 4 This work was first shown in Monterrey, Mexico. 5 An excerpt from Zižek’s essay was reproduced in the Aperto 93 exhibition catalogue. 6 See André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1937). 7 For a discussion of the complexities of the Real in Lacan, see Tom Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’ (2012). 8 Consider, for example, the International Exhibition of Surrealism, held at the Galería de Arte Mexicano, in Mexico City, in January 1940.

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Notes to Pages 151–160

7. El Museo de la Calle: Art, Economy and the Paradoxes of Bartering 1 Services was organized by Helmut Draxler and Andrea Fraser at the invitation of Beatrice von Bismarck, Diethelm Stoller and Ulf Wuggenig and took place at the Kunstraum der Universitat Lüneburg in 1994. Exchange-Transform was an exhibition curated by Maria Lind in 2002 at the Kunstverein München. Trade Show took place in MOCA, Massachusetts, 2005. What We Want is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art is a compilation documenting more than 50 artistic projects produced worldwide in the 1990s and 2000s. 2 To name but a few, Minerva Cuevas, Maria Eichorn, Carey Young, Ursula Biemann, Allan Sekula, Santiago Sierra, Andrea Fraser and Bik Van der Pol. 3 In addition to the Salón Nacional de Artistas [National Artists’ Salon], landmarks in Colombian contemporary art history are the 1960s Medellín Biennials (1968–1972), the IV Medellín Biennal and the Coloquio de Arte No Objetual y de Arte Urbano [Symposium of Non-Object and Urban Art] in 1981. In 1990, the first prize of the Salón Nacional de Artistas was awarded to a performance by María Teresa Hincapié that had a significant influence on the new generation of artists which graduated from the universities of Medellín, Cali and Bogotá at the beginning of the 1990s. Artists such as Constanza Camelo, Rubén Naranjo or Fernando Pertuz or groups such as Casa Guillermo, A-Clon, Helena Producciones started producing performances. In 1998, the Festival of Performance was established in Cali. Artists dealing with social issues include Miguel Ángel Rojas, Doris Salcedo, Jaime Ávila, Óscar Muñoz, François Bucher and Wilson Díaz. 4 For insight into Chaves’ work, see his webpage: www.puiqui.com. 5 Agamben describes the state of exception to designate a ‘space devoid of law, a zone of anomie in which all legal determinations are deactivated’ (2005, 50). 6 The salon’s director was Carolina Caycedo, who acted as an amateur hairdresser throughout the duration of the collective’s work in the area. 7 Federico Guzmán filmed an interview with a recycler in which the latter explained how to construct a cart (Guzmán 2007b). 8 During the process, there was transference from relatively well-off, middle-class households to a socially deprived area. 9 For instance, Caycedo spoke of a local poet who, every time he went to El Cartucho, wrote a poem and made a rhyme for El Museo de la Calle. 10 This exhibition included artists such as Joseph Beuys, Ashley Bickerton, Oscar Bony, Marcel Broodthaers, Chris Burden, Luis Camnitzer, Plamen Dejanov & Swetlana Heger, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Sylvie Fleury, Meschac Gaba, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Ideal Copy, Emily Jacir, Roberto Jacoby, Lee Mingwei, Les Levine, Lee Lozano, Cildo Meireles, OHO, Tadej Pogacar & PARASITE Museum, Joe Scanlan and Mladen Stilinovic. 11 The show included artists such as Minerva Cuevas, Francis Alÿs, Cildo Meireles, Víctor Grippo, Hélio Oiticica and Artur Barrio. The expression was taken from a 1967 Hélio Oiticica text written for the show Nueva Objetividad Brasileña, held at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Río de Janeiro. It has been translated as ‘We thrive on adversity’ or ‘On adversity we thrive’. 12 Carlos Basualdo, who was invited to curate an exhibition by Francisco Bonami, the artistic director of the fiftieth Venice Biennale (2003), put together The Structure of Survival. It was based on how artists and architects react to the consequences of the political, economic and social crises in developing countries, and on the aesthetic forms of survival and resistance they develop. Carolina Caycedo was also included in this show.

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Notes to Pages 160–172 13 A Estética da Fome was the title of a 1965 manifesto by Glauber Rocha presented at the Seminário do Terceiro Mundo in Genoa. A  second manifesto A Estética do sonho was presented by Rocha in 1971. The exhibition Estética del sueño was one of the five shows included in the wider project Versiones del sur (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2001). 14 Lozano opposes this experience to Jeremy Deller’s demonstration in Manifesta 5 (San Sebastian 2004), in which different local associations marched together and showed the difficulty of forcing a generation of communal experience. For her, ‘Deller’s attempt was rather clumsy and oblivious of what the city really experiences, and of other conflicts that were being confronted’ (Lozano 2005). 15 In the same years, Mari Carmen Ramírez was also using the notion of ‘tactics’ in relation to adversity, referring to Michel de Certeau’s theorization of the invention of the everyday, a vision of subversion that was later criticized by George Yúdice (Dezeuze 2006; Yúdice 1989). 16 Faguet affirms: ‘I’d like to connect this valorization of alterity as a subversive element in culture to the practice of cultural slumming – an activity that can be traced as far back as Victorian London when the East End became a sort of tourist attraction for the wealthy classes’ (Faguet 2008, 69). 17 The local cinema vérité was accused of exploiting social issues to gain international recognition and prestige. In Faguet’s words: ‘However, a desire to produce critical consciousness through the transparency or visibility of marginality always carries the risk of producing the opposite effect: that of cynical indifference which comes from a saturation and fetishization of this visibility in the absence of proper analysis or even a basic code of ethics. In Colombia, the most significant cultural historical aspect of Mayolo and Ospina’s legacy may very well be the term they invented – “pornomiseria”, or “poverty porn” – to articulate a problem that became endemic to Colombian film-making in the 1970s, but that continues to haunt any discussion (historical or contemporary) about the representation of socio-economic hardship’ (Faguet 2009). 18 Not by chance, just when El Museo de la Calle ended, Carolina Caycedo started an individual practice based on an expanded version of barter, which included services and time banking (Caycedo 2009b). She also started to see her own bartering practice as gift (Caycedo 2009a).

8. Stay at Your Own Risk: Disturbing Ideas of Community in Two Projects by Elkin Calderón 1 During a workshop for the 2009 exhibition Palabras que nos cambiaron:  lenguaje y poder en la independencia [Words that Changed us:  Language and Power during the Independence], at the Banco de la República, Bogotá artist Humberto Junca used this strategy in Colombia = Pasión, a poster that translated the government’s advert into a series of logical deductions that concluded: Colombia ≠ reason. 2 Calderón notes that few contemporary artists make works starting from their own experience of violence, no matter how many have been affected by it, perhaps due to its regularity or the impossibility of representing violence without making it spectacular, aesthetic or banal (2013, 142). 3 Salcedo argued in a lecture on 10 March 2014 at Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Bogotá, that her work addresses the problem of how to represent violence without reproducing it by rejecting its ‘hyper-representation’.

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Notes to Pages 175–188 4 Miessen states that ‘participation is war. Just look at most situations in the workplace, in academia, or in cultural institutions. Any form of participation is already a form of conflict’ (2010, 53). 5 Another case of accidental coincidence: Calderón was briefly employed by Salcedo for the installation of Neither (2004) at the White Cube Gallery in London. The artist quit after being reprimanded by Salcedo for incorrectly layering a particular rhombus pattern onto lime-based walls and for accidently tipping over, from the top of a ladder, a bucket full of lime. The anecdote became part of a large wall text by Calderón in 2011. 6 The cover’s display of body parts and the book’s five illustrations depicting condors could allude to what is known in Colombia as ‘La violencia’ [The Violence], a period characterized by politically motivated violence (mostly in the countryside) and near civil war between approximately 1948–1965. 7 Huit Facettes is a Dakar-based collaborative group that started the ‘Hamdallaye Project’ in a village in Southern Senegal in 1998. Through a series of workshops with international artists, the local community was encouraged to re-engage with its own knowledge of crafts, so as to transmit and expand that knowledge. For more on Huit Facettes, see Kester (2011).

9. ‘The Space of Appearance’: Performativity and Aesthetics in the Politicization of Mexico’s Public Sphere 1 A different version of this essay was published as “The Performative Politicization of Public Space: Mexico, 1968-2008-2012,” Thresholds 41 (2013): 18–31. All translations from Spanish are mine unless otherwise noted. My thanks to Michael Orwicz, Ana María León Crespo and Briony Fer for their critical comments on this material. 2 At the time of this writing, the facts of the Ayotzinapa events remain unclear. On 26 September 2014, 43 male students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College of Ayotzinapa were abducted in Iguala, Guerrero. According to official reports, the students had commandeered several buses and travelled to Iguala that day to protest at a speech by the mayor’s wife. During the journey local and federal police forced a confrontation in which several students and bystanders were killed. The official investigation – much contested by the families of the disappeared – concluded that the students were handed over to the local Guerreros Unidos crime syndicate and presumably killed. Iguala’s mayor, José Luis Abarca, and his wife María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa are believed to have masterminded the kidnapping. On 7 November 2014, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam claimed that several plastic bags containing human remains, possibly those of the missing students, had been found by a river in Cocula, Guerrero. One student was confirmed dead after his remains were identified by Austrian forensic scientists in early December. As of this writing, Murillo Karam continues to deny any involvement of the federal police or the military, despite investigative reports to the contrary. See note 12 below. 3 Enrique Peña Nieto’s regime has continued the policy of the previous regime, headed by Felipe Calderón of the PAN party, postponing penal reform in favor of what law professor Ana Laura Magaloni has termed ‘the model of authoritarian criminal prosecution’. Magloni writes that this has meant ‘diluting … the line that separates public force and criminal violence. With this, the violence simply multiplied: abuse of power and criminal violence together generate spirals of violence that fracture the pact of civility’ (Magaloni cited in Romero Vadillo 2014).

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Notes to Pages 188–194 4 A staggering 98.5% of crimes in Mexico go unpunished, while only 1% of reported disappearances is investigated. Martínez (2014); González-Aréchiga et al (2012, 7). 5 In so doing, the Ayotzinapa demonstrators have capitalized on the previous experience of #YoSoy132 [#Iam132]. In May 2012, just weeks before the presidential elections in Mexico, a group of students at the Universidad Iberoamericana challenged Enrique Peña Nieto, the presidential candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), during his campaign stop at the university. Peremptorily dismissed as being mob infiltrators hired by Peña Nieto’s political opponents, 131 Ibero students responded with what might be considered a sabotage riposte: they posted a video on YouTube displaying their university IDs and reiterating their outrage at the PRI’s persistent autocratic spurning of everyday citizens. The video sparked a spontaneous new grassroots political movement, #YoSoy132, that rejected the PRI’s authoritarian neoliberalist platform and, in particular, its long history of collusion with powerful news media corporations. In the following weeks, hundreds of thousands of #YoSoy132 protestors repeatedly took to the streets across the country to demand the democratization of the news media and the liberalization of the political system in Mexico. The original video, ‘131 alumnos de la Ibero responden’, is posted in YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7XbocXsFkI (accessed 21 November 2012). The inclusion of the hashtag in the movement’s name indicates its use of Twitter and other social media as organizing tools. 6 UNAM law professor John M.  Ackerman astutely notes that ‘The central problem is that Mexico is one of the only countries in Latin America where the democratic “transition” has not been accompanied by a renovation of its political class (Ackerman, October 2014). Elsewhere, Ackerman writes ‘The struggle for justice for the disappeared students of […] Ayotzinapa has rapidly been converted into an historical battle for the present and future of the nation. […] Neither Enrique Peña Nieto nor the members of his cabinet could survive a public face-to-face debate, without a teleprompter, with any of the students or Ayotzinapa family members’ (November-December  2014). 7 We might also expand this to the idea of an international public sphere that, as Manuel Castells argues, ‘exists within the political/institutional space that is not subject to any particular sovereign power but, instead, is shaped by the variable geometry of relationships between states and global nonstate actors’ (2008, 80). 8 If we extrapolate to aesthetic terms, sabotage cannot remain at the level of aesthetic rupture; it must also think that action in relation to the role of aesthetics in developing a collective space of interaction and a collective relationship to the political. This issue has been at the heart of the fraught but productive entanglement of art and politics from the historical avant-garde onward. Any aesthetic address to the political must mediate between the private, individual nature of the aesthetic experience and the public, collective nature of the political sphere. That is to say, the praxis of representation must bridge the divide between the necessary indeterminacy of art and the necessary determinacy of politics. For an expansion of this idea see Kaiser (1999). 9 Commissioned by the new UNAM Tlatelolco Centro Cultural Universitario (CCU Tlatelolco; inaugurated in late 2006, in a space previously occupied by the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (SRE) [Secretary of Foreign Affairs]) that includes the permanent exhibition “Memorial de 68”. A short documentary film of Voz Alta can be seen at: http:// www.lozano-hemmer.com/voz_alta.php (accessed 28 October 2012). In Spanish, the term ‘en voz alta’ means roughly, ‘aloud’, ‘out loud’, or ‘in a loud voice’. Lozano-Hemmer has recently proposed restaging Voz Alta in 2015 to address the Ayotzinapa disappearances. 10 Sergio Aguayo makes a similar comparison, but notes that, unlike the Tlatelolco massacre, the state has not been able to repress information and international attention in the case of Ayotzinapa because of social media and alternative news sources (2014).

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Notes to Pages 194–199 11 Michael Head’s observations regarding political sabotage seem relevant here:  ‘Political activities that are regarded as a threat to the established political system, public order or the existence of the nation-state itself. […] Ironically, in some instances, the proscribed activities could be regarded as laudable if conducted in support of the nation-state, rather than against it. […] Sabotage […] conducted in the interest of one’s country would be officially rewarded, not punished. It is the political or ideological content of the conduct that is generally of concern, not the nature of the activities per se’ (2011, 2). 12 Against claims by Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam that Ayotzinapa was the result of renegade local forces outside the control of the state, investigative reporters Anabel Hernández and Steve Fisher published evidence of the involvement of the local police, the federal police and the military in the Ayotzinapa disappearances, confirming the widespread belief in the complicity of the Mexican state (Hernández and Fisher 2014). 13 As of this writing, the state’s attempts to brutalize and repress the demonstrations have been undermined by the national and international attention focused on the Ayotzinapa movement. In particular, international condemnation forced the release of eleven protesters arbitrarily arrested at the 20 November demonstrations, beaten, falsely accused of attempted homicide and thrown into high-security prisons. 14 On the Mexican Miracle, see Babb (2001, 75–105). 15 It is now widely recognized that Echeverría was principally responsible for orchestrating the massacre. Casualty figures vary enormously and have never been fully confirmed. John Rodda concluded that more than 300 had been killed, a number that has since been frequently cited (1972). See Scherer García and Monsiváis (1999). 16 President Vicente Fox (PAN) was elected against the PRI in 2000, in part on his pledge to prosecute the Tlatelolco criminals – a promise that remained unfulfilled. See No author (2001), Monsiváis (2008), Méndez (2008). 17 See Gutmann (2002, 67). 18 In 2012, Elena Poniatowska compared the impact of the Tlatelolco massacre to Mexico’s current drug war: ‘1968 cannot be compared with the more than 60,000 dead and disappeared of today, but one can compare the treatment accorded to the victims who have concerned [Movement for Justice with Peace and Dignity leader] Javier Sicilia since the day his son was murdered in Cuernavaca, Morelos. Still, the 1968 student movement and the October 2 massacre in Tlatelolco was the kick-off to the violence that Mexico has suffered during the past fifty years. […] Until Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas decided to lower the flag to half-mast on 2 October, when he was mayor of Mexico City in 1997, the student movement and its mortal turn was taboo in Mexican newspapers. Why is it just and necessary to remember it now? Because it forms part of our history’ (Poniatowska, cited in Paterson 2012). 19 Lozano-Hemmer recounts, for example, the son of a soldier involved in the massacre, who spoke in Voz Alta of having lived with that guilt his whole life, and of a fireman who participated in Voz Alta in order to denounce the government’s requirement that he put colouring in the water used to spray protestors so that they could be easily identified: ‘I became a fireman to protect people, not to be part of the apparatus of repression’ (Lozano-Hemmer 2013). 20 Tlatelolco’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas is the site of a pre-Columbian city centre, a Spanish colonial church and a 1960s modernist housing complex designed by Mario Pani. Both Pani and the state rhetorically positioned the plaza, not as a site of conquest and cultural antagonism, but as a harmonious melding of all three historical eras. 21 Even as I recognize that the Mexican state has never truly had a ‘single voice’ but was rather always itself riven with tensions and contradictions, what I point to here is the will of the state to present the image of a unified authoritative voice – something at which

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the Mexican government has long excelled and used to great effect, particularly in terms of presenting itself as the benevolent arbiter of Mexico’s modernizing progress. On this issue specifically in relation to Tlatelolco and its surrounding housing development, see Flaherty (2014, 401–417). Scherer García and Monsiváis (1999, 4). On the relationship of art to the state, see Greeley (2012, 31–54). See Greeley (2022). Muñoz installed 2 de octubre in the Galería José María Velasco, not far from the site of the massacre. Muñoz indicates that although he was the individual author of this work, it was produced through collective discussion with Carlos Fink and José Antonio Hernández Amézcua. Muñoz installed the second work, Ring, in the Palacio de Bellas Artes as part of the exhibition 3 informaciones 3. The Ring installation consisted of a raised platform surrounded by barbed wire and hanging garbage bags, and covered with objects such as abandoned clothing and shoes, destroyed books, and jute sacks looking ominously like body bags, alluding to state repression from Mexico and Guatemala to Chile. Muñoz, Fink and Hernández Amézcua would later take the name Grupo Proceso Pentágono when Felipe Ehrenberg joined in 1976. See Hijar (2008, 62–65). The iconic model of ethical resistance is, of course, José Revueltas’. Echeverría’s government carried out an often highly contradictory policy of courting amenable intellectuals while simultaneously mounting the guerra sucia (dirty war) against more radical or intransigent leftists. However, this government’s tolerance for certain forms of leftist production must be matched against the fact that, through such cultural patronage, the state was clearly seeking to repair its severely tarnished reputation as the protector of Mexico’s citizen body. See Salas (2007). For example, Grupo Proceso Pentágono’s response to the Sección de Experimentación in 1979 of ‘hoy no habrá nada’ [‘today there will be nothing’]. By contrast, graphic production soared. See Grupo Mira (1981). The mass media colluded with the state to present the violent encounter at Tlatelolco as having been provoked by armed communists and ‘foreign terrorists’ under the influence of Chinese and Cuban communist infiltrators of the student movement. See Guevara Niebla (2004) and Del Castillo Troncoso (2008). A major effect of this was that for almost three decades, official institutions did not collect contemporary Mexican art. Not until the late 1990s was this rift between official institutions of culture and contemporary artistic practice overcome, in large part because of globalization and the international art market rather than from dynamics internal to the country. See Montero (2013). Medina interestingly argues that ‘in a sense, the failure of monumentality became instrumental in preventing the exorcism of the memory of 1968’, thereby becoming ‘a major source of reflection and production’ regarding current efforts to memorialize the massacre (2009). Pani’s Nonoalco-Tlatelolco complex was championed by President Adolfo López Mateos as a centerpiece of officialist ‘revolutionary nationalism’ in architecture. See Castañeda (2014). See Gallo (2009). ‘There is this intention of amplification to an urban scale. Yet  although it’s there, it’s very frail, ephemeral, and has a tendency to disappear’ (Lozano-Hemmer cited in Lozano-Hemmer with Boucher and Harrop 2012, 150). Voz Alta also capitalizes on the history of popular performativity generated in response to the government censorship that erased almost all traces of the massacre from the official news media. Students formed ad hoc news brigades, staging street theatre plays and

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producing posters and flyers to counter the state’s disinformation campaign and to disseminate their own concerns and views. Participants in las brigadas noted the connection between performativity, public space and information circulation: ‘We were like mobile newspapers’, said Ana Ignacia Rodríguez (cited in González de Bustamante 2010, 23). Of course, the interesting parallel of las brigadas with the Ayotzinapa movement’s savvy use of social media should also be underscored. For Bourriaud, art’s job is to produce ‘a specific sociability’, in which the art ‘object’ is made subservient to social exchange (2002, 16). Taken from Noble (2012, 193). Gilberto Guevara Niebla cited in Vargas (2008). On Arendt’s well-known concept of ‘the right to have rights’ and its specific interpretations vis-à-vis citizenship, the right to politics, and the right of the excluded to claim rights for themselves, see Kesby (2012). On Ngugi’s trenchant critiques of political exclusion, especially in relation to colonialism, see Ngugi (1998). For Ngugi, however, these elements of performance only acquire their power in relation to an audience. Audience provides the connection to ‘other centers and fields of [social existence]’ that activate space, transforming it into ‘a magnetic field of tensions and conflicts […] a sphere of power […] [in] actual or potential conflictual engagement with all the other shrines of power, and in particular, with the forces that hold the keys to those shrines’ (1997, 13). Ngugi continues by arguing that ‘the performance space of the artist stands for openness; that of the state, for confinement’ (1997, 11). See Ngugi (1981). The urgency and power of Ngugi’s model has been of course, as Edward Said noted, a highly influential contribution to ‘the vast post-colonial cultural and critical effort’ aimed at analysing ‘the long and extraordinarily varied socio-cultural interplay between ruler and ruled’ (1988, ix, vi). They also contradicted the ubiquitous transformation of the private-domestic into corporate-controlled mass media spectacle along the lines of reality TV and talk-show melodramas. Castells is adamant in arguing that the nation state is not disappearing, but rather reformulating itself in key directions in response to globalization. Mexico can be said to embody the marked tensions experienced by many developing nations regarding the struggle over access to technologies of communication both internally and on the stage of the world market, in which access is often highly unequal. Recent protests over Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto’s current proposals to regulate internet content and access exemplify the frictions among the continued effects of the government’s hierarchical models of state power, Mexico’s history of state-telecommunications collusion and the changing generational access and importance of the internet versus television for Mexican citizens. See Sánchez (2014) and Torres (2014). Butler, perhaps over-optimistically, notes the potential of these political spaces of appearance for us today. ‘These are anarchist moments’, she argues, ‘when the legitimacy of a regime is called into question, but when no new regime has yet come to take its place. This time of the interval is the time of the popular will, not a single will, not a unitary will, but one that is characterized by an alliance with the performative power to lay claim to the public in a way that is not yet codified into law, and that can never be fully codified into law’ (2012, 119–120).

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Note to Page 214–217

Afterword 1 Interview of Sebastián Piñera with the morning TV show Mucho Gusto on Chilean national TV channel Meganoticias (2019). 2 On the Chilean 2019 uprising, see Garcés (2019); Dragnic (2020). 3 On religious influence on anti-gender political agendas in Latin America, see the 2020 report published by the Sexuality Policy Watch and the Género & Política en América Latina cluster (Corrêa 2020). 4 Manuel Baquedano was a general considered a national hero for his participation in the armed conflict among Chile, Bolivia and Peru, known as the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), a key event in the construction of Chile’s modern nation-state. Slightly less known is his role in the violent occupation of Araucanía (also called the ‘Pacification of Araucanía’) in which the Chilean state stole the ancestral lands of Indigenous Pehuenche and Mapuche people. 5 As Marina Warner (1985) has shown in her book Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, this archetypical approach to the female body is not unique to this specific context. 6 The Mexican government commissioned artist Pedro Reyes to design a sculpture of the head of an Indigenous woman to replace the Columbus statue. Dissatisfied with the absence of a democratic process in selecting the artist and with the proposed sculpture, feminist collectives not only protested the decision but also have – temporarily at least – used the plinth of the former monument to erect instead the monochrome, purple antimonument of a woman with a raised fist. They have in turn renamed the roundabout where the anti-monument is now located as the ‘Roundabout of Women Who Struggle” (Glorieta de las mujeres que luchan). 7 For more on the porosity of artistic and political movements in the Chilean context of the 18-0, see Pinochet Cobos (2021). 8 See Barriendos Rodríguez (2013) and Stewart (2021).

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Index abjection 76 abstraction eccentric 26 geometric 119 actionism 36, 42, 112, 185, 200, 209 activism 8, 175 administration, aesthetic of 86–87 administered society 87, 101 Adorno, Theodor 58, 86, 101 adversity (262)n.15, 5, 160, 162 advertising 76, 115–116, 120, 172–173, 182 aesthetics 101, 117, 125, 188, 190, 200 of hunger 159–161 performative 9, 190–191, 198 of poverty 161 relational 205 Third World 160 of violence 161 Agamben, Giorgio 35, 43, 154, (218)n.20, see also state of exception aggression 14, 24, 32 agora 198, 205, 207–208 alienation 15, 20, 23 alterity 162 anachronism 75, 202 anarchism 42, 54, 108, 161, 189, (233)n.44 Andrade de, Oswald 160, see also Antropofagia anonymity 2, 176 antagonism 8, 54, 186

anthropology 8, 151 anthropomorphism 63 Antropofagia 160 apercepción 100 Appadurai, Arjun 152, 164–165 see also transvaluation appearance, space of 188, 191–192, 198, 207–209 appropriation 42, 69, 153, 163, 170, 197 architecture 159, 174, 190, 192, 202, 204 anti-monumental 204 relational 205 archive 37, 45, 49, 80, 98, 127 Arendt, Hannah 90, 191–192, 197–198, 206–208 see also appearance, space of Argote, Iván 80 Retouch 80 Arte de los Medios de Comunicación de Masa see Grupo de las Artes de los Medios de Comunicación de Masa Arte Povera 69, 138, 161 artefact 42 assemblage 13–14, 18, 21, 119 authoritarianism 35, 78, 85–87, 102, 117 bureaucratic 87, (222)n.7 autonomy of art 3, 117, 132 avant-garde 2, 44, 46, 206 Argentine 30, 109–110, 117, 124

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Chilean 117, 124 historical 4, 9, 119, 132–133 international 17, 22 Latin American 125–126 neo- 7, 108–109, 113, 117, 133, 147 Avanzada, Escena de 112–114, 121 Ayotzinapa teacher-training school 8, 188–194, 210 Aztec architecture 202 sacrifice 52 Bakhtin, Mikhail 24, 32 banal, the 72, 136 Barnitz, Jacqueline 19 barrio 153 Barrio, Artur 160 bartering 8, 151–152, 159, 163–164 Bartra, Roger 41, 202 Basualdo, Carlos 125, 160, 162–163 Bataille, Georges 6, 35–37, 40–44, 51–54 déchirure 38, 54 dépense 43 see also Kurtycz, Marcos Beauvoir, Simone de 22–23 Belting, Hans 126 Bentes, Ivana 161 Beuys, Joseph 44, 65

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Index Biennale, Venice see exhibitions and biennales Bishop, Claire 23, 174 body 20, 44–45, 48–49, 60–65, 75–76, 87, 97 administered society and 101 art 65, 113 vulnerability 96 Bogotá 8, 152–154, 158 Bois, Yve-Alain 52 Bolaño, Roberto 65 see also Infrarrealistas Bonami, Francesco 133–134, 138 Bonito Oliva, Achille 133 Branco, Castello 96 Breton, André 7, 43, 130, 132–133, 138–142, 144 Cinderella Ashtray 139, 37 see also chance encounter; found object Brett, Guy 132, 135–136, 138–139 Brigada Ramona Parra 109 Bruguera, Tania 1–3, 178 Bruscky, Paulo 6, 85, 93, 95–96, 101 Ação Postal – Post Ação 21, 22 Buchloh, Benjamin 86, 102, 130, 137–138, 145 Buenos Aires 14, 21–23, 28, 30, 97, 110 bureaucracy 6, 48, 84–90, 95, 97 cultural 69, 99 intimate 90, 101 malfunctioning 95 sabotage of 84, 95–96, 102 bureaucratic authoritarianism see authoritarianism Buren, Daniel 86 Butler, Judith 190–191, 209

Cabañas, Lucio 60, 66 cacerolazo 107 Cage, John 142 Calderón, Elkin 168 and appropriation 170 balineras 179, 47, 48, 49, 50 Colombia, el riesgo es que te quieras quedar.../ Colombia, the Risk is Wanting to Stay… 170, 171, 180 and participatory art 186 pola (balinera) 180, 45 and risk 171, 178–179 and sabotage 170 and violence 172, 175–176, 178 Calhoun, Craig 208 Camnitzer, Luis 28, 108, 117–119, 124–125 camouflage 116, 139, 172 canon 2–3, 7, 72, 74, 108, 117, 119 capitalism 67, 86, 89, 101, 119, 175 Carnevale, Graciela 30 carnival 24–27, 32, 61, 75, 168 Carnival of Ideologies, The 62 carnivalesque, the 5, 14, 26, 30, 75 Carpentier, Alejo 147–148 Carrión, Ulises 87–89, 102 Mail Art and the Big Monster 87, 19 Cartucho, El 8, 152–154, 156–158, 165 Castells, Manuel 84, 209 censorship 29, 59, 69, 87, 89, 92–93, 197 chance 142, 170 chance encounter 132, 142 see also Breton, André chaos, aesthetic of 95, 183 Chaves, Raimond 153 Christo 21 citizenship 9, 191, 194, 200–201

classification 95, 164 see also declassification coercion 1, 24, 71, 84, 204–205 Cold War 28 Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA) 7, 112–116, 118, 121 Inversión de Escena: Acción de arte/Stage Reversal: Art Action 26, 27 No + 30 Para no morir de hambre en el arte/In Order Not to Starve To Death in Art 112, 114, 122 Viuda: Prensa Acción/Widow: Press Action 28 Colectivo Cambalache 152–154, 163–164 A toda mecha/Quick Cut 154 El Museo de la Calle/The Museum of the Street 8, 151–152, 154, 159, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43 collaboration 22, 109, 120, 183 collective action 190–192, 198 collectives art 62, 65, 109, 112, 118, 154, 200 curatorial 127 see Colectivo Acciones de Arte; Grupo de las Artes de los Medios de Comunicación de Masa; No Grupo collectivism 84 colonialism 5, 74, 197 neo- 147 post- 119, 145, 192, 208 commodity 26, 164 commodification 165 communication 41, 48 circuits 90 mass- 29, 205

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Index technology 102 community 32, 153, 162, 168, 171, 174, 179 conceptual art 86, 102, 118, 119, 124, 137 conceptualism, Latin American 108, 117–119, 124–127 Conceptualismos del Sur 127 consecration 40, 50, 53 de-consecraction 66 consensus 174–175, 202 conservatism 107, 119 resistance to 16, 30, 152 Constructivism, Russian 110, 205, 206 contact 36, 54, 61 contamination 43, 116 aesthetic of 96 cooptation, state 201 Cortés, Hernán 62 counter-culture 5, 29, 35 Cox, Neil 43 creativity 162 informal 163, 185 Cueto, Óscar I Love Contemporary Art 79

self- 6, 16, 32, 45, 65, 70 Dezeuze, Anna 162 Di Tella Torcuato, Instituto 24, 26–30, 97, 99, 110, 120 dialogue 5, 9, 49, 107, 133, 181 Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo 194 dictatorship 31, 68, 96, 116, 161, 195 Didi-Huberman, Georges 54 Dirty War 31, 66, 195 disappearance 8, 59, 80, 87, 112, 188–189 disrespect 66, 71, 79–80 disruption 84–85, 96, 102, 112, 172 dissensus 58, 66, 175 dissidence 47 drugs 152, 153, 173 cocaine 178–179 Duchamp, Marcel 76, 132, 137–138, 204 Box-in-a-Valise 138 Fountain 137 rendez-vous 132, 142 see also readymade Dürer, Albrecht 62, 63

danger 1, 14, 37, 61, 153, 170 ‘Day of the Dead’ 37–38 Debroise, Olivier 35 declassification (218)n.19, 42–43 decorum, civil 59, 66, 68, 69, 78 defacement 3, 80 Deisler, Guillermo 87 dematerialization 110, 118, 161 democracy 174–175, 197, 205 deprivation 160–161 Derbyshire, Philip 21 derivative 70, 127 desarrollismo 87, 91 desire 46, 75, 102, 140, 145–146, 161, 173 destruction 2–4, 13, 26, 36–41, 51, 72 Arte Destructivo 17

Echeverría, Luis 91–92, 194, 200 ecology 161 economy 8, 28, 30, 151, 154, 162 Eder, Rita 49 Ehrenberg, Felipe 6, 68, 85, 90–93 Obra secretamente titulada Arriba y Adelante…y si no pues también/Work Secretly Titled Upwards and Onwards...Whether You Like it or Not 85, 90, 20 Elizondo, Salvador 37, 51 Eltit, Diamela 114, 116, 121 Lotty Rosenfeld, Viuda: Prensa Acción/Widow: Press Action 114, 28

emancipation 5, 206 emblem 6, 58, 60–63, 65, 68, 72 embodiment 20, 36, 44, 53, 72 empowerment 162 self- 5 environment 18, 24, 26, 32 ephemeral 14, 38, 156–157, 204–205 eroticism 17, 24, 76, 78, 92, 101 Errázuriz, Luis Hernán 112 Errázuriz, Paz 115 Escobedo, Helen 48–49, 68 ethics 1, 59, 71, 159, 171, 201 ethnography 159, 162–163 everyday, the 78, 132, 154 evisceration 58, 62–64, 70, 80, 81 exchange 8, 108, 151, 156 artistic 14 cultural 28 commodity 26, 163–164 economic 164 gift 40, 164 mail art 93 value 43 see also bartering exclusion 206 exhibitions and biennales 3rd Bienal de Venecia (1999) 159 43rd Salón (Inter) nacional (2013) 178 45th Biennale di Venezia (1993) 7, 130, 133, 135, 138 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003) 125, 160 53rd Biennale di Venezia (2009) 1 Da Adversidade Vivemos/ Adversity We Live (2001) 159, 160 Experiencias/Experiences 68, 29 Global Conceptualisms: Points of Origins

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Index exhibitions and biennales (cont.) 1950s-1980s (1999) 125 Great Circus of the World, The (1999) 75 Irrespetuosos, Los/ Disrespectful (2013) 79 Last International Exhibition of Mail Art, The (1975) 93 Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century (1993) 118 Otra Bienal, La (2013) 8, 179, 48, 49, 50 Salón Independiente (1970) 90–91, 200 Structure of Survival, The (2003) 125, 160 Tucumán Arde (1969) 29, 120–121, 29 Worthless (Invaluable): The Concept of Value in Contemporary Art (2000) 159 existentialism 13–14, 21–23, 26 exoticism 44, 125, 146, 177–178 expenditure 6, 41 exposure 54, 70, 102, 173 self- 6 Faguet, Michèle 161–163 failure 79, 92, 121, 127, 146, 201–202 sabotage as 32, 171 FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) 177 feminism 23, 66 Fer, Briony 143, 147 Ferrari, León 30 Ferrer, Christian 17 flow 109 Fluxus 51, 69 found object 18, 102, 130, 132–133, 139, 144–146

França, José-Augusto 19 Frank Duch, Leonhard 96 Frankfurt School 101 freedom 88, 197 individual 16 of speech 67, 87, 89 gallery see museums and galleries García Canclini, Nestor 59, 109 García Terrés, Jaime 59 generosity 151 Giacometti, Alberto 139–140 Object to Be Thrown Away 139 gift 37, 40–41, 151, 159, 164 counter- 49–50 of rivalry 48 sacrificial 46 Ginzburg, Carlos 84 Giunta, Andrea 21 globalization 5, 133, 152, 162 of art 126 González Camarena, Jorge Allegory of the Patria 72 Greco, Alberto 138 Vivo Ditto 138 Grotowski, Jerzy 45 Groys, Boris 46–47 Grupo de las Artes de los Medios de Comunicación de Masa/Mass Media Art Group 7, 128 Participación total o happening para un jabalí difunto/Total Participation or Happening for a Dead Boar 110, 25 Grupo Espartaco (Spartacus Group) 109 guerrilla 36, 47, 66, 71, 89, 161, 177 parodic 65 Guzmán, Enrique 6, 58 Amistad/Friendship 61

Día Patrio/Patriotic Day 68 Mano con Bandera y Navaja/Hand with Flag and Blade 62 melancólico, El/ Melancholic, The 65 ¡Oh Santa Bandera!/Oh Holy Flag! 66, 70, 72, 76, 16 Pacto de sangre/Blood Compact 65–66 (Paisaje) Interior/Interior Landscape 66 patria, La/Motherland, The 66, 70, 15 Plataforma con señal/ Platform with Signal 66 Sacrificio/Sacrifice 62 Señora Tehuana/Mrs. Tehuana 61 Símbolos patrios/Patriotic Symbols 70 Sin título/Untitled 61, 13 Sonido de una mano aplaudiendo o marmota herida/Sound of a Hand Clapping or Wounded Marmot 63, 14 Guzmán, Federico 153 Haacke, Hans 86 happenings anti- 110 of Minujín, Marta 13–14, 23, 26, 110, 114 hegemony 175, 210 Hendrix, Jimi 27, 29 hierarchy 41 anti-/non- 28, 201, 205–206, 208 hippie 5, 26, 28–30 see also counter-culture historiography 3, 7, 117, 124, 126, 147 history of art 9, 107–109, 107, 118–119, 125–127

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Index of colonialism 5 of iconoclasm 3–4, 46 of self-mutilation 65 of terrorism 46 of violence 176, 183, 185 Holbein, Hans The Ambassadors 145 homoeroticism 72, 75–76 homosexuality 76 Horkheimer, Max 101 humanism 86 humour 9, 24, 48, 75–76, 85, 102 hunger 122 aesthetics of 159–161 Ibargüengoitia, Jorge 60, 68 iconoclasm 42 and the avant-garde 2 and critical art 46, 53, 62, 146 as sabotage 3–4 iconophilia 3, 6, 46 identity 21, 44, 110, 126 critique of 173 Latin American 148 and nation 29, 68, 200, 202 and psychoanalysis 146 of resistance 4 see also Mosquera, Gerardo; Spivak, Gayatri ideology 71, 124 critique of 206 immersion 14, 32, 181 situations 24 immolation 77 self- 13, 58, 60, 78 infiltration 86, 118, 125 of institutions 51, 54 and mass media 85, 116 as sabotage 17, 22 informality 154, 161–163, 165 information control 189, 194, 197 society 87, 102 technologies 102, 189 theory 102 Infrarrealistas 65

injury 65, 172–173 insertion 61, 101, 108, 114–118, 182 installation 14, 28, 75, 110, 130, 200 institution art 36, 72, 99, 120, 137, 201 art as autonomous 132 art as space 200 cultural 69 critique 86 discourse 146 metropolitan 119, 130 museum 8, 152 national 209 profanation 35, 54 recuperation 2 socio-political 87, 89, 90, 92, 174, 206 institutionality 48, 120 institutionalization 7, 75, 133, 165, 199, 201 instrumentalization 70, 145–146, 152, 162, 181 insubordination 58, 61, 70 intellectual intellectuals 120, 197, 199, 200 property 151, 153 interference 7, 60, 96, 108, 117 interruption 2, 26, 53, 107–109 intimacy 42, 52, 102, 204 intimate bureaucracy 90, 101 irreverence 14, 43, 63, 68–69 Iversen, Margaret 132, 141 Jacoby, Roberto 110, 112, 116, 120, 121 with Eduardo Costa and Raúl Escari, Participación total o happening para un jabalí difunto/ Total Participation or Happening for a Dead Boar 25

Jameson, Fredric 32 Jodorowsky, Alejandro 68 Joselit, David 132, 141–144, 146, 148 justice 189, 194, (229)n.6 injustice 172 social 161, 195, 202, 210 Kahlo, Frida 78, 147 Kant, Immanuel 100 thing-in-itself 144 Kemble, Kenneth 17 Kester, Grant 174, 183 King, John 28, 30 kitsch 61 Krauss, Rosalind E. 52 Krishna, Hare 27 Kuri, Gabriel 135 Kurtycz, Marcos Artefacto Kurtycz 13 and Bataille 36–37, 42–43, 51–52 Cruz-Cruz 45, 46 letter bombs (mail art) 47, 48, 51, 11, 12 performance 36, 37, 45, 54 Potlatch 6, 36, 37, 40, 7, 9, 10 as shaman 44, 53 as terrorist 46–47 and violence 6, 53 Kusama, Yayoi 34 labour 22, 70, 78, 151, 161–162, 212, 236 Lacan, Jacques 138, 145, 146 real (the) 132, 141, 144, 146 thing (the) 141 lack 36, 70, 71, 161, 179, 201 and Breton 140, 141 real as 146 language 2, 4, 59, 68, 118, 125, 152, 157, 207 affective 173 Art & Language 118 body 61, 66, 75 and noise (223)n.11 official/bureaucratic (226)n.1, 95

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Index Latinidad 4 Lebel, Jean-Jacques 21 legitimacy 71, 189, 199 liberation 19, 141 Libertson, Joseph 43 Lieberman, Ilán 80 light 173, 197, 204, 205, 207, (216)n.17 liminality 43, 44, 53 Lippard, Lucy (222)n.6, 26 Longoni, Ana 109 loss 15, 36, 126, 140, 170, 171, (223)n.11 Lotar, Éli 52 Lozano, Catalina 161 Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael 196, 197, 199, 208 and quantum physics 204 and relational architecture 205 Voz Alta 9, 201, 51, 52, 53 luminosity 68, 202, 204 mail art 24, 69, 84–90, 93, 102 see also Kurtycz, Marcos Malagón-Kurka, María Margarita 172 maliciousness 171, 183, 185 Malinche, La 62 manoeuvre 76, 189, 194 marginality 8, 163, (226)n.17 market 29, 42, 125, 135, 151 art 7, 79, 90, 161 free 87, 116 Masotta, Oscar 23, 100, 110, 112, (215)n.3, (222)n.6 ‘pop art’, El 17 social sadism 23 Three Argentines in New York 20 materialism base 43 materiality 3, 28, 39, 190–192 materialization 42 de- (222)n.6, 118 Mauss, Marcel 40–41, 48, 49 Mayer, Mónica 36

McLuhan, Marshall 102, 110 media 63, 65, 152 mass 29, 68, 85–86, 100, 110, 120 mixed 75 new 36, 47–49 non-traditional 17, 69 social 189 Medina, Cuauhtémoc 35, 199, 201 Meltzer, Eve 102 memory 71, 135, 141, 198, 298 historical 199, 207 space of 86, 199 Mestman, Mariano 29, 120, 209 Mexican Miracle 194, 202, (230)n.14 Mexican Revolution 195, 202 Mexican School of Painting 62 Miessen, Markus 174–175 migration 19, 152, 171 military 2, 87 coup 114 government 29, 96, 99, 202 operation 117 regime 108, 111, 120 repression 115 surveillance 112 mimicry 62, 70, 71, 101, 163 minimal art 135, 138 Minujín, Marta batacazo, El/The Long Shot 19 Chambre d’amour/ Chamber of Love 23, 24 Colchones/Mattresses 14, 18, 25, 1, 2, 4 destrucción, La/The Destruction 13, 14, 15, 21, 23, 3 Espi-art 32, 6 feria de las ferias, La/The Fair of the Fairs 14, 26, 28 Importación-exportación/ Import-Export 28, 5

Minuphone (216)n.16, 28 ¡Revuélquese y viva!/ Wallow Around and Live! 23, 24, 27 Simultaneidad en simultaneidad/ Simultaneity in Simultaneity (215) n.9, 22 Suceso plástico/Plastic Event 23 misery 8, 160, 162 mobilization collective 8, 189–190, 201 political 9 public 175, 207 modernism 75, 119, 152, 202 modernity 86, 89, 202 post- 126 modernization 87, 92, 160, 204, (217)n.2 Monsiváis, Carlos 64, 68, 199, 200 monstrous 19, 87, 99 Montes de Oca, Marco Antonio 60, 70, 71 monument 153, 176, 197, 205 anti- 204 monumentality 69, 201–202 morality 76, 92, 164, 208 Morawski, Stefan 42, 54 Mosquera, Gerardo 4–5 Mouffe, Chantal 174–176 Munn, Nancy 164 Muñoz, Victor 200 muralism 61, 62, 72, 75, 109, 119 Museo de la Calle 151 see also Colectivo Cambalache museography 159 museums and galleries Carrillo Gil Museum of Art 79 Casa de la Cultura de Aguascalientes 71

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Index Centro Cultural Tlatelolco 197, (229)n.9 Di Tella Institute 24, 28, 29, 97, 110 Forum of Contemporary Art in Mexico (fca) 37, 45, 53 Galería Birger, 31 Galería Florida 18 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 118 Museum of Modern Art of Mexico 47, 75 Reina Sofía, Museum 160, 161 University Museum of Science and Art (MUCA) 90 Valenzuela Klenner Gallery 177, 178, 179 mystification 7, 112 narrative 5, 108, 116, 127, 132, 205 counter- 170, 174, 179 official 9, 199, 204 nation 68, 168, 189, 194, 197, 200 nationalism 29, 62, 68, 204 cultural 75, 201 revolutionary 200 Navarro, Óscar No más porque somos más. Dia internacional de la mujer, Santiago/ No More Because We Are More. International Women’s Day, Santiago 31 neighbourhood 109, 153, 157, 162, 171, 179–181 neoliberalism 73, 89, 116, 151, 161 Neomexicanismo 72 neutralization 43, 152, 204 Ngugi, wa Thiong’o 192, 197–198, 206–209 nihilism 3, 14, 65, (215)n.2

No Grupo 65 noise 2, 7, 108, 127, (223)n.11 Nouveau Réalisme 14, 21 object and iconoclasm 3–4 art 110, 116, 145 everyday 142 found 18, 102, 130, 132, 139 mass-produced 97, 138, 141 subject as 19, 20, 23, 42 surrealist 148 use-value of 156, 158, 165 obliteration 4, 5, 9, 21, 43, 132 self- 14 O’Donnell, Guillermo 87 see also authoritarianism, bureaucratic Ogaz, Damasco 84 Oiticica, Hélio 138, 160 Bólides/Fireballs 138 Operação Limpeza 96 operative 196, 206, 208 Orozco, Gabriel Empty Shoe Box 7, 130, 33, 35 plasticine 138–139 Working Tables 38 Yielding Stone 7, 130, 34 Yogurt Caps 136, 36 Orozco, José Clemente The Carnival of Ideologies 61 overidentification 86, 100–101 Pacheco, José Emilio 58, 81 pain 65 painting 6, 37, 69, 90, 148, 152 as medium 42, 64 still 77 see also Mexican School of Painting Palacios, Carlos 79 Pane, Gina 65

Pani, Mario 202, 204, 205 Papastergiadis, Nikos 19 parody 29, 79, 85, 93, 114 self- 63, 65, 75 Parque del Tercer Milenio (Third Millennium Park) 154 participation 2, 87, 174–175, 183, 205 participatory art 171, 179, 186, 190 Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI) 35, 68, 206, 210, (217)n.2, (228)n.5 patriarchy 23, 76 Peña Nieto, Enrique 189, 194, 210, (228)n.5 perception 40 see also apercepción performance 42, 45, 65, 110, 152, 198 performativity 19, 42, 73, 101, 157, 205 performative aesthetics 191, 198 periphery 22, 28, 118–119, 126, 133 photography 19, 51, 80, 96, 142, 201 Pinochet, Augusto 112, 122 Plate, Roberto 29 Plato 198, 207 polis 206 Pop Art 26, 90, 110, 119 see also Masotta, Oscar populism 17, 67 pornomiseria (226)n.17, 163 portrait 52, 53, 78, 100 portraiture 55, 153 self- 51, 62, 75, 96, 157 post-modernism 42, 72, 126 see also modernism Potlatch 36, 37, 41–43 see also Kurtycz, Marcos poverty 152, 159–161, 163 see also Arte Povera; pornomiseria

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Index power bureaucratic 6, 85, 101 institutional 48, 87 of the mass media 68, 112, 116 official 84, 111, 114, 190, 198–199, 207 performance of 198, 207–208 sites of 71, 198 structures of 24, 84 subaltern 61 see also hegemony precariousness 80, 125, 160, 162, 179, 183 privacy 32, 80 see also intimacy process 9, 14, 66 artistic 6, 63 bureaucratic 97 of commodification 26, 165 of destruction 51 paranoid 20 of representation 78, 80 ritual 53 see also transvaluation profanation 35, 43, 53, 54 propaganda 170, 200, 205 protest 8, 35, 76, 107, 188–189 public space 8–9, 190, 192–193, 201 art and 179, 198 control of 68, 114, 189, 207 intervention in 101, 152–153, 210 plaza as 190, 194, 202 public sphere 101, 188–190, 204, 209 artists’ involvement in 108, 209 control of 194–196 operative 206, 208 see also Butler, Judith; Calhoun, Craig; Castells, Manuel; Ngugi, wa Thiong’o punishment 63, 176

Quiles, Daniel 21, 100 Quiñones, Edinson 196 radicalism 30, 46, 65, 75, 120 Ramírez, Mari Carmen 108, 117–119, 124, 161 readymade 97–98, 132, 138, 141–142 realism 62, 76, 144 figurative 75, 109 magic (realismo mágico) 168 reality 8, 59, 116, 136, 141–144, 147–148 see also realism, magic rebellion 79–80 reception 108, 125, 133, 147, 148, 152 recuperation 2, 124 recycling 154, 161–163, 165 relics 66, 143 religion 43, 154 repression 30, 32, 59, 71 cultural 35 economic 29, 116 military 115, 122 state 86, 89, 189, 197, 199 resistance 30, 42, 54, 114, 117, 200 artistic 9 identities of 5 strategy of 3, 85 Restany, Pierre 26 revisionism 118 revolution 60, 121, 161, 162, 200 see also Mexican Revolution Reyes, Alfonso 59, 79, (220)n.41 Richard, Nelly 109, 113, 121 ridicule 70, 92 risk 1, 42, 170–173, 176, 179, 186 ritual 26, 36–37, 44, 53 masculinist 73, 75 performance 45, 54

Rivera, Diego 61, 75 Rocha, Glauber 160 Estética da Fome/ Aesthetics of Hunger (223)n.13 Rodríguez Araujo, Octavio 59 Rosenfeld, Lotty (223)n.9, 114 rupture 18, 24, 32, 100, 189 politics of 190 tactics of 207 sabotage anti-hero posture 2 bureaucratic 84–85, 125 as entrapment 17, 32 as humour 6, 48, 85 industrial 2 as infiltration 17, 22, 54, (215)n.9 military 2 as noise 2, 7, 107–108 self- 2, 14, 26, 36, 71, 165, 171 strategy 2–3, 5, 16 sacred 4, 43, 51, 52 sacrifice 36, 40, 43, 52, 72 Christian 63 Saint Phalle, Niki de 24 Salcedo, Doris 172 Shibboleth 176 Sansi, Roger 41 Saper, Craig 89, 90, 101 Sartre, Jean-Paul 20–22 Schechner, Richard 45, 53, 54 Schneemann, Carolee 24 sculpture 5, 8, 14, 21, 132, 139 installation 18 quasi- 159 secularism 36, 40 shamanism 44, 45 shock 36, 46, 113, 114, 173, 200 Shukaitis, Stevphen 100 see also overidentification Shunk, Harry 21

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Index simulacrum 44, 47 skin 19, 66 slogan 91, 92, 122, 124, 169–170, 180 slumming 162, 163, (226)n.16 Smith, Terry 124, 126 sociability 53, 109, 164 society 20, 78, 85, 197 capitalist 93, 161 civil 193, 196, 199, 206, 208, 209 consumer 86 information 87 patriarchal 23 sound 27, 97, 204, 205, 207 spatialization 198, 199, 207 spectacle 41, 65, 130, 139, 199, 204 speech 2, 67, 80, 107, 198, (223)n.1 freedom of 67 public 145, 190 Speer, Albert 204 Spivak, Gayatri 4 stability 8, 152 instability 16, 189 state 85, 89, 183, 188, 192, 208 bureaucracy 109 nation- 6, 66, 71, 194, 209 of exception 154 one party 68, 73 violence 35–36, 69, 87, 102, 189, 198–199 Stavrakakis, Yannis 146 stereotype 125, 180, 186 strategy 69, 92, 108, 122, 124, 132 of apercepción 100 of counter-demolition 71 of insertion 118, 182 of resistance 3 street 32, 107–108, 114, 158, 190, 207 students 60, 71, 92, 153, 189

Ayotzinapa 8, 188, 194, (227)n.2 Tlatelolco Massacre 9, 35, 190, 202, 210, (230)n.18 subjectivity 14, 20, 44, 106, 201 inter- 162 subversion 17, 59, 71, 74, 126 suicide 1, 20, 72 surprise 136 Surrealism 133, 144, 147–148 surveillance 72, 86, 112, 114 symbolization 114, 144 systems 26, 84, 93, 100, 171 art 85 bureaucratic 85, 87, 90 of control 86 of representation 3 Taussig, Michael 176 technology 17 teleology 86, 201 terrorism 46, 47 counter- 161 state 184, 200 testimonial 173, 197, 199 theatre 45, 75, 209 Tibol, Raquel 69 Tlatelolco Plaza de las Tres Culturas 35, 190, 194, 197–198, 205 student massacre 35, 63, 92, 190, 195, 199 torture 20, 59, 86, 87, 96, 112 touch 54, (218)n.21 tourism 170, 171, 179, 180 transfiguration 78 transgression 43, 54 transvaluation 3, 8, 152, 165 see also Appadurai, Arjun trauma 45, 132, 171–173, 196

trickery 6, 85, 90, 93 Turner, Victor 36, 43, 44, 53 unconscious (the) 45, 110, 132, 161 utopia 32, 121, 205, 206, 209 Valtierra, Pedro 78 value 6, 156, 164–165 of art 3, 42, 43, 53, 160 symbolic 158 use 43, 161 van Gogh, Vincent 65 vandalism 4, 69, 78 Velasco, José María 68, 200 victim 14, 52, 66, 125, 172 Vigo, Edgardo Antonio 85, 93, 96, 101 La llave/abrelatas que viajó (junto a 200) La Plata/Buenos Aires/La Plata, el 7 enero ’71/The Key/ Can Opener that Travelled (along with 200 others) La Plata/Buenos Aires/La Plata, on 7 January ’71 99, 100, 23, 24 Villoro, Juan 59 violence 6, 32, 53, 171–172 aesthetics of 161 and the avant-garde 46 physical 23, 96, 176 self-inflicted 62 state 36, 112 virtual 189, 207 voice 80, 108, 197, 207 voyeurism 75 vulnerability 1, 36, 96 Warner, Michael 101 witness 21, 39, 117, 199 Wodiczko, Krysztof 204 wound 61, 62, 65, 74, 194

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1 PM

Index Zabala, Horacio 93 Zamora, Beatriz 69, (219)n.24 Zenil, Nahum B. Contacto de Ojo/Eye Contact 75 En el Zocao Frenlte al Palacio Nacional/In the Zócalo in Front of The National Palace 75 Gran Circo del Mundo, El/Great Circus of the World, the 75

Hombre con Condón/ Man with Condom 76 ¡Oh Santa Bandera! (a Enrique Guzmán)/Oh Holy Flag! (to Enrique Guzmán) 76, 77, 18 Personaje del Circo/ Circus Character 76 Retratos de Papá y Mamá/Portraits of Mum and Dad 78 Suicida I (a Enrique Guzmán)/Suicidal I (to Enrique Guzmán) 78

Suicida II (a Enrique Guzmán)/ Suicidal II (to Enrique Guzmán) 78 Tiro de Dardos/Game of Darts 74, 17 Tras–eros/Erotic Behinds 78 Zona Vedada/Forbidden Zone 78 Žižek, Slajov 141, 144–145 Zócalo, the 93, 190, 197 Zurita, Raúl 122

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