Art and Politics: The Aesthetics of Resistance
Camnitzer, Luis
For Latin Americans, it is essential to distinguish between art as a tool to create culture and achieve independence, and art as a globalizing commercial enterprise. When discussing visual...
...9 VOL XXVIII, No 2 SEPT/OCT 199439 4 0 I 9 VOL XXVIII, NO 2 SEPT/OCT 1994 39REPORT ON CULTURE The Uruguayan Armed Forces evaluated this strategy in 1977 with surprising objectivity: "Surrounded by great publicity, these actions try to present the methods of the police and the government as clumsy and inefficient, so that the organization may appear, in ridiculing them, to be on the cusp of imagination and ingenuity...
...Their aim was to counter the government's publicity which presented Tucumin in paradisiacal terms and to reveal the real socioeconomic conditions of the province...
...and to a related song by the Olimareflos, a group of folk singers who were extremely popular at the time of the development of the movement...
...installation format provided three important openings: it introduced a viable use of three dimensions...
...What we do is transform protest into a festive party," Superbarrio explained in an interview...
...The story goes that in 1987 a street vendor-who had once been a wrestler-overheard a housewife in the process of being evicted from her home exclaim: "We need Superman to save us from these evil people...
...By the 1970s, art had returned to its original confines, although not necessarily reconnecting with old artistic traditions...
...Claiming the need to rebury a relative who had died in Argentina several years earlier, a funeral cortege was hired which was comprised of five cars and a van...
...On July 16, the guerrillas stole the flag used by a group of 33 patriots who had entered Uruguay in 1825 to fight for the country's independence...
...23 (January, 1980), which contains statements by the groups and an essay by Rita Eder...
...2 0 Coming from different specializations (among them, philosophy, poetry, photography, mural painting, and architecture), the group members executed their visions in different media such as publications, street theater, film, installations, and combinations of these...
...In a typical work in 1980 called "Not to Die of Hunger in Art," the artists distributed powdered milk in a shantytown, secured a blank page in the magazine Hoy with captions which suggested the idea of milk and shortage, read a text in front of the United Nations building in Santiago, exhibited some milk bags (and a text) in a gallery, had ten milk trucks parade from the factory to the Fine Arts Museum, and "closed" the entrance of the museum with a white sheet...
...The main difference, however, between the Tupamaros and other guerrilla movements was that the former were not interested in seizing power...
...5. The name "Tupamaros" had a triple reference: to Tupac AmarO, the rebellious Inca leader executed by the Spaniards in 1782 in Cuzco...
...Uruguayan Armed Forces, Subversion: Las Fuerzas Armadas al Pueblo Oriental, Montevideo, 1976, p. 360...
...Rubin was advised by R.G...
...7 Given that the group chose to operate in an urban environment-a situation without successful precedents-the Tupamaros were careful to devise guerrilla operations which would not alienate the public, but rather would garner its support...
...In 1978, the various groups tried to unify themselves, creating the Mexican Front of Cultural Workers' VOL XXVIII, No 2 SEPT/OCT 199441 VOL XXVIII, NO 2 SEPT/OCT 1994 41REPORT ON CULTURE Groups with the stated-though ultimately unsuccessful-goal of "joining proletarian and peasant struggles, and gaining control of the means of production and circulation of work...
...With that position, they run the danger, however, of becoming "mainstream" artists...
...Rather than being beholden to the unfriendly "mediation" of the mass media, the Tupamaros made use of a very direct and sympathetic rumor mill, exploiting the mechanisms of folklore more than advertising...
...The use of installations in Cuba became a trademark of the artists belonging to the "Volumen I" generation...
...3 0 While this article certainly doesn't constitute a history of recent Latin American art, it may at least point in directions that traditional histories tend to overlook...
...2 6 Meanwhile, in Cuba, installations came to exemplify a cultural-economic trend...
...In that sense, in Cuba, installation art is akin to the African-based religion of Santeria, which synthesizes and adapts the symbols and artifacts of Catholicism...
...Art had to perturb society, the group argued, and achieve results similar to those of political actions...
...Jean Tinguely, a Swiss artist, was famous for his mostly nonsensical and satirical moving sculptures...
...Installation became an artistic form of mestizaje, and of nationalizing devices...
...It was a poverty that, without a positive attitude, could seriously hamper creativity...
...They assembled interviews, mural photographs, and research about the accumulation of wealth by the richer families...
...We have to open the faucets of creativity, of popular ingenuity, of collective memory...
...It was a tradition which social realism had tried to overtake, but failed because of its own rigidity and aspirations of institutionalization...
...Gitlin equates the production of meanings in commercial mass culture to the production of value through labor (with the same lack of control by the people...
...Armed propaganda has more to do with the internal than with the external guerrilla front...
...The National Museum in Havana has room after room filled with paintings...
...The general theory which guided the group was that "revolutionary actions lead to revolutionary situations...
...While in North America and Europe the installation mode was the product of formalistic speculation connected with the spirit of "performances" developed during the 1960s, in Cuba it became a form of "bricolage," or assemblage...
...This institution, which has existed in Cuba in its present form since 1976, is based on cannibalizing parts, recycling them, and 42NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 42REPORT ON CULTURE using a redesign-philosophy instituted by Che Guevara in the Sierra While the Maestra...
...In this regard, it is useful to contrast the Tupamaros and the U.S...
...this enabled them to develop an unusual mode of thinking which they were able to translate into political actions after their escape...
...Furthermore, it forces us to expand the limits of what is considered art...
...Art galleries mostly limited themselves to exhibiting harmless traditional paintings...
...The manifesto distributed at the opening of the show in Rosario called for a revolutionary art: a total art-which modifies the totality of the social structure...
...10-11...
...The whole approach flew in the face of both the Cuban and Vietnamese experiences, which were the standard models for guerrilla warfare...
...With respect to a later television appearance, he reports that "I waited until the camera was on me while I was talking and near the end of my rap I mouthed some words soundlessly, putting in the word 'fuck' for those who were up to a little lip reading...
...war resistance movement of the 1960s...
...First practiced by Latin American artists living in Paris and New York, installation art exploded during the mid1970s and early 1980s, particularly in Mexico, Cuba and Chile...
...Abbie Hoffman staged an equally theatrical event for television viewers...
...The bricolage aesthetic freed artists from problems posed by imports and scarcity...
...See Abbie Hoffman, "America has more televisions than toilets," in Douglas Kahn and Diane Neumaier, eds., Cultures in Contention (Seattle: The Real Comet Press, 1985), p. 141...
...1 71...
...Until 1981, Cuban art was primarily two-dimensional...
...Some went underground and joined the guerrilla movement, some were "disappeared," and at least one of them-Eduardo Favariodied in action after joining the Revolutionary Army of the People (ERP...
...The TAI group was composed of Luis Acevedo, Alberto Hijar, Andres de Lun, Felipe Leal, Morris Savariego and Atilio Tuis...
...38REPORT ON CULTURE "Not to Die of Hunger in Art," an operation of the Collective for Art Actions (CADA) in Santiago de Chile, 1980...
...Cultural critic Guy Debord clearly expressed this point when he claimed that it is not only economic hegemony, but also the hegemony of the "spectacle" which defines the domination of underdeveloped regions...
...These factories operated by assembling new units out of fragments of discarded pieces...
...The procession-replete with weeping family members-stopped at several points along the route to pick up "relatives...
...One consists of declaring art a universal set of skills and values within which everybody has freedom of expression...
...Two concepts emerge from this interplay: politicized aesthetics and aesthetified politics...
...2 4 Thus the work became officially acceptable since it deviated from the "art-for-the-masses" movement which prevailed in Chile under the socialist government of Salvador Allende, but remained "clandestine" in its reading...
...The goal was the development of political awareness...
...These years would eventually become known as the "Silence of Tucumdn Arde...
...Others tried to convey a sense of material poverty by using perishable, non-archival materials...
...In Commission and the African Commission Against the Material t the Biennial of So Paulo, 1987...
...First, the guerrilla leadership is assumed to be operating outside the city and therefore to be out of contact...
...From an immediate practical point of view, Operation Pando failed since a confrontation with police during the group's return to Montevideo resulted in NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 4 a 40REPORT ON CULTURE the death of three Tupamaro guerrillas and the arrest of 18.16 From a operations were a long-term and aesthetcross between ic point of view, however, the operation was political actions a remarkable success...
...4. "Tucuman arde" was a collective and partly anonymous operation...
...Posing as members of a neighborhood political club, the guerrillas ordered a truckload of goods from a major food supplier, including-given the proximity of Christmas-a large supply of sweets...
...The use of aesthetics in politics may enter into cultural and anthropological analysis, but only when it takes the form of official and ritual pomp, not when it is a means of resistance...
...it gave an opening to a repertoire of an infinite amount of "things" to be used artistically...
...In The Whole World is Watching (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1980), Todd Gitlin traces this aesthetification for media consumption to Jerry Rubin's appearance in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1966...
...It gave them a medium that encouraged appropriation, not only on a material level, but also on a theoretical one...
...Once the group was assembled in Pando, the guerrillas overpowered the hired drivers...
...2 2 A room stressing waste materials to evoke a shantytown construction, the crate contained popular religious, sports and mortuary symbols...
...In 1965, the Convention of Innovators and Inventors was created, and finally, in 1976, the ANIR came into being, dedicated to Che's memory...
...These icons were not literal illustrative images of the movement or their cause, but rather the general image that the movement projected.17 This projection required the use of the mass media...
...On May 15, they took over a major radio station during the broadcast of an international soccer game, and played a political message six times during the next half hour...
...Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), p. 55...
...The group claimed that they wanted "to become publicizers and activists in the social struggle in Tucumdn," and "to create a parallel subversive culture which wears out the official culture machinery...
...Nelly Richard refers to this as a "buoyancy of meaning," in "Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973," Art& Text (Melbourne), No...
...In August, 1968, artists from Rosario and Buenos Aires organized the "First National Meeting of AvantGarde Art" to plot the development of a form of art which was totally new ethically, aesthetically and ideologically.' Concerned with the traditional co-optation of any form of art capable of disturbing society, the group agreed that the development of art could no longer consist of the creation of an avant-garde movement, that the showplace for art could no longer be a gallery or a museum, and that art could no longer restrict itself to addressing only an elite public...
...a social artwhich merges with the revolutionary fight against economic dependency and class oppression...
...Installation a; time and timing more often applied to filmmaking...
...Only in a couple of connecting passageways does one come across some sculptures...
...Mexican artists stood out in this development, not so much for their formal innovations as for the fact that they organized in groups-called "Los Grupos"which stressed collective authorship...
...He is the author of New Art in Cuba (University of Texas Press, 1994...
...21, p. 31...
...Using arms stashed in the coffin, the group took over the police headquarters, the fire station, the telephone building and, finally, the four banks in town...
...2 7 It groups together scientists and hegemony of the technicians who are spectacle " plays called upon to solve "spectacle" plays with ingenuity instead a role in the of parts any technical problem that arises dur- domination of ing production...
...His aesthetics are connected with the local wrestling scene and the comic-book culture that surrounds it...
...Conversation with the author, Sept...
...The media spotlight brought the incandescent light of social attention and then converted it to the heat of reification and judgement" (p...
...This created a spectacle that could only be appreciated from outside the rally, not by the participants themselves...
...1 4 On January 1, 1969, Tupamaros stormed the district court where proceedings against some of their members were being conducted, and took back 41 weapons that the police had found earlier in a hideout...
...2 1 The TAI group designed an Export-Import walk-in crate for the occasion...
...Aestheticized politics is left out of art history...
...3 The group began by gathering information about living conditions in Tucumin with official help...
...For underdeveloped instance, plywood has been created from regions, the bagasse (a residue of sugar cane), and hinges spectacle can have been "mass-prodevelop its own duced" from aluminum scraps using nails as an antibodies...
...In its text in the exhibition catalogue, the TAI group declared that its goal was to achieve "the increase of the possibilities of rupture with those ideas, feelings and perceptions ruled by the ideology of the dominant class...
...An examination of these issues from the point of view of resistance may help us redefine the purpose of art-making, and popularize strategies that have been carefully excluded from the creative process...
...Within that relatively staid tradition, the Superbarrio in action with evicted tenants in a Mexico City neighborhood in 1992...
...He sees this relationship with media as contributing to the demise of the New Left...
...Thus, it comes as no surprise that Santerfa has influenced much of the Cuban art of this century, and that some of the most accomplished installation artists of the 1980s generation-among them, Jos6 Bedia and Ricardo Rodriguez Brey-are also involved in the rituals...
...Describing their project simply as leading to a cultural profile of the province, the artists held press conferences to publicize their activities...
...246...
...The audience was not intended to be on-site-where all were marchers-but would, hopefully, be watching the demonstration on the news at home...
...2. Sueldo, Andino, and Sacco, Acci6n de la vanguardia, p. 60...
...In 1962, a guerrilla group in Uruguay-who would come to call themselves the Tupamaros-undertook the first of a series of actions...
...Still other arguments against an urban-based movement were based on the difficulty of leading "double" lives, the difficulty of being totally underground, and the lack of control over activities...
...They saw themselves as the "people's prosecutors," uncovering corruption in government, banks and industry...
...While the ANIR's ability to overcome today's complex problems may be somewhat in doubt, the institution is still a metaphor for the use of ingenuity on the periphery and for a true aesthetic of poverty...
...2 8 The artists in that show worked with the premise that "cubanta" (Cuban identity) was not contingent on insularity, and could be enriched by the digestion of artistic contributions from all over the world...
...activists catered to the media format, the Tupamaros were relatively independent...
...The choice of options was a matter of strategy...
...Politicized aesthetics, on the other hand, is discussed mostly as styles associated with political leaders who exercise rigorous controlsuch as Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini...
...Discussing this issue recently, former Tupamaros speculated that two factors affected their creativity...
...the group even received flattering coverage in the mainstream media...
...After initially taking it from an army deposit, the group had decided that the explosive was too dangerous for their purposes...
...Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, p. 69...
...These operations approached a level of aesthetics which led observers like Debray to refer to the Tupamaros as a "cultural phenomenon," and which Jose Bedia, The India elicited descriptions of their use of World...
...In Revolution in the Revolution...
...both were politically valid, although on the whole confined within the parameters offered by the traditional art audience...
...It represents a strategy of accommodation and appropriation...
...Realism was not any longer about things...
...Although a clear solution to the question of how to erase the border line between art and politics was not found, the terms of the contradictions were clearly established...
...6. "30 preguntas a un Tupamaro," Revolucion y Cultura (Havana), No...
...A new format of presentation had been introduced in the cultural centers during the 1960s: the "environment" or "installation...
...The theory was that the image would not be corrupted by the media, while any declaration would be relayed in a distorted form (p...
...The controversies that the exhibition raised, the myth it created, and the openings it provided for the artists themselves had repercussions which are still being felt in the production of Cuba's youngest artists today...
...Fidel Castro himself proclaimed the city "a cemetery of revolutionaries and resources," supporting the case against any urban-based guerrilla movement.1 2 Yet the strategy worked: the Tupamaros' activities evoked a sympathetic response from the public, and had an effect far beyond the immediate functional results of a given operation...
...By the interdisciplinary art movement in Cuba, I am referring to projects like the Cuban Pavillion in the Montreal World's Fair of 1968 and other architectural/visual/musical enterprises which the Cubans undertook during the 1960s...
...See also Fernando Farina and Hernando Ameijeiras, "La muestra 'Tucum~n arde' fue un hecho inbdito en el pais," La Maga (Buenos Aires), Feb...
...In one of their strategy papers, the Tupamaros discussed "armed propaganda": Armed propaganda becomes particularly important under certain conditions, like when a guerrilla movement is becoming known at the beginning of its development...
...First, the members of the movement distrusted any kind of stereotype, a distrust which made them dissidents from traditional political groups...
...The artists put up installations using the entire building of the General Workers Union (CGT) in Rosario and Buenos Aires...
...Below left: The collective distributes milk in a shanty town...
...The most "radical" work in Volumen I was probably Gustavo P6rez Monzon's installation, which was made up of a web of strings connected with stones...
...I will illustrate the first concept with the example of "Tucumin arde," a political exhibition which was the product of the radicalization of a group of Argentine artists...
...Art and Politics: The Aesthetics of Resistance 1. Sueldo, Andino, and Sacco, Acci6n de la vanguardia contra acci6n de la politica (Rosario, Argentina: Kraft, 1987), p. 57...
...The man got a costume and a mask, embroidered an "SB" on his chest, and started to show up at evictions...
...They created an eclecticism of survival, and an eclecticism of despair...
...Subversion, see chronology, pp...
...The following artists were among those involved in the implementation of the project: Beatriz Balb6, Roberto Jacoby and Leon Ferrari, from Buenos Aires...
...W ithin the Latin American context, "Tucumin arde" and the Tupamaro operations can be seen as the climax of a tradition of politicized aesthetics and aestheticized politics which included Mexican muralism, the different Latin American schools of popular graphics and poster art, and the interdisciplinary art movement in Cuba during the 1960s.1 9 That tradition, even if it did not consistently lead toward the disappearance of art as a commodity, at least tried to subvert the lore of art as property and to insist on the class issues related to art...
...Yippy events, with the advantage of a less repressive environment, were designed to be viewed on the television screen...
...21 (December, 1970), p. 22...
...The other is to consider that no matter how one paints, from the moment a brush is lifted, even before it reaches the canvas, the result is already destined to be a product and example of colonization...
...While the Tupamaros did not consciously have aesthetic aims, they were eager to establish an efficient system of communications...
...This kind of operation was abandoned in later years because the Tupamaros came to believe that the investment of time and risk in such operations was not balanced by the actual help provided to the people...
...1 8 While the U.S...
...The ploy worked...
...12...
...to independentista Uruguayan gauchos of the early nineteenth century who, while fighting against Spanish rule, identified themselves as Tupamaros in honor of Tupac Amari...
...participants, explained in a recent interview that the group aspired to create "a space opened up by art, in which social reality is offered over and above denunciation of the kind that usual social or political chronicles provide...
...Second, the position assumes that an urban leadership must necessarily be bourgeois, alienated and inefficient...
...On February 19, dressed as policemen, Tupamaros took $220,000 from the plush San Rafael gambling casino in Punta del Este, but then offered to return the percentage of the money due for employee tips...
...5 Organized by dissidents from several political groups-in particular, the Socialist Party and the Anarchist Federation-and from the student population (including art students), the Tupamaros did not have artistic ambitions...
...On the other hand, artists like Catalina Parra and Eugenio Dittborn, who favor more casual finishes and the use of perishable materials in their work for the sake of developing a more local identity, are liable to become the targets of the mainstream's paternalism...
...Considered the second national emblem after the Uruguayan national flag, the 1825 flag carries the phrase "Freedom or Death...
...Unlike the publications of many other guerrilla movements, those of the Tupamaros were mostly without pictures...
...The most elaborate and spectacular of the maneuvers was "Operation Pando," which involved about 100 guerrilla members...
...On February 7, the group left a package with 220 pounds of explosive gelinite in front of the house of an army official who was a known bomb expert...
...603-766, a factual and quasi day-by-day description of Uruguay between 1960 and 1973 which focuses on events considered to be connected with what the army perceived as the subversive Left...
...The contraption had the characteristics of a Tinguely sculpture...
...Everything is to be reinvented every time on location...
...With their own mobile radio station, leaflet production, and occasional takeover of public air waves, the guerrillas were less in danger of having their image manipulated...
...38-39...
...8. MLN, Actas Tupamaras (Buenos Aires: Schapire, 1971...
...The Tupamaro leadership was not conscious of this aspect of their work...
...Actas Tupamaras, pp...
...One of the more immediate reasons for the group's demise was the rapid growth in its membership in a very short time without appropriate screening systems to safeguard against enemy infiltration of the higher ranks...
...There is no traveling dogma," he writes, as if describing the creation of a work of art, "no revolutionary strategy independent of the conditions determined by the place and time...
...Superbarrio is the name of a Mexican social activist who fights to save impoverished tenants from eviction...
...Artists started to borrow, digest and reassemble the solutions of other artists, putting these solutions to local use...
...The members of CADA were Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo (artists), Fernando Balcells (sociologist), RaOl Zurita (poet), and Diamela Eltit (novelist...
...6 Analyzing the Tupamaros in relation to other Latin American guerrilla movements, political analyst R6gis Debray points out the group's lack of prejudgment...
...0 The Tupamaros' strategy papers are rather dry and boring, as if the group reserved all its creative energy for its operations...
...Both examples are from the 1960s, the period in recent history when the blurring between art and politics peaked...
...Today, a team of Superbarrios-at least three individuals and maybe more-operates under the name...
...Art as a willful attempt at resistance may thus be a more useful concept...
...In the narrative and mass-media sequence of events, the art...
...Most of them stopped producing any kind of art for several years...
...7. Regis Debray, La lezione dei Tupamaros (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1972), p. 6. Debray's admiration is particularly remarkable because the Tupamaros acted against his wisdom...
...To achieve this, they needed some kind of iconography...
...Several assumptions are implicit in this position which did not apply in Uruguay...
...9. Debray, Lezione, p. 19...
...4 A kind of de facto art strike spontaneously ensued for a prolonged period of time...
...The problem for political artists is that once their work is produced in isolation from the original political context and seen within the lens of the mainstream's internationalism, the formal devices they use end up being interpreted as individual trademarks rather than as expressions of a collective culture...
...While this approach may go against what the mainstream has determined to be "good" art in Latin America, it allows us to identify issues that make some art "important...
...If we conceive of art as a cultural phenomenon in Latin America, we must explore the border lines between art and politics...
...In court, he presented legal objections that were strong enough to prevent more than 1,500 evictions in five years...
...The group promised to return the flag to the museum once the situation merited it (at the time of this writing, it has still not been returned).' 5 On several occasions, the group took over the projection booth of a movie theater and projected guerrilla propaganda on the screen...
...I will illustrate the second with the body of operations of the Uruguayan National Liberation Movement (MLN), better known as the Tupamaros...
...The installation mode, while not precluding traditional painting and other media, has been internalized by Latin American artists...
...It is also important when a group needs to clarify its positions toward the people during those periods in which drastic measures have to be taken which do not clearly illustrate the guerrilla's aims and which might be difficult for the popular mind to comprehend...
...25 Several artists embraced installation as the appropriate medium for more individualist art as well, with different degrees of allegiance to and deviation from the international formal code...
...After a couple of days, police pressure on the unions forced the CGT to cancel the exhibits...
...Second, most of the movement leaders had been in jail before the major operations...
...24, 1993, pp...
...Graciela Bortchwick, Jorge Cohen and Jorge Conti, from Santa Fe...
...The reburial was to take place in Pando, a city of 20,000 inhabitants about 25 miles from Montevideo...
...Some sought to ease the communication of their messages by adhering to the international formal repertoire: glossy photographs, fluorescent lights, and a certain design quality...
...Che carefully organized a shoe factory and a weapons factory for the guerrilla in the hills...
...Rather than blurring politics and art as a form of resistance, installations dealt with the limits of art and everyday life...
...We have to rescue our traditions and our cultural forms for the battle...
...Below right: A procession of milk trucks from a factory to the museum...
...and Eduardo Favario, Osvaldo Boglione, Aldo Bortolotti, Nora de Schork, Graciela Carnevale, Noemi Escandell, Rodolfo Elizalde, Emilio Ghilioni, Marta Greiner, Rubbn Naranjo, Roberto Puzzolo, Juan Pablo Renzi, Marra Teresa Gramuglio, Maria de Arechavala, Estela Pomerantz, Nicolas Rosa, Jos6 Lavarello, Edmundo Giura, Carlos Schork, David de Nully Braun, Roberto Zara, Oscar Bidustwa, RaOl P6rez Canton, Sara L6pez Dupuy and Jaime Rippa, from Rosario (Sueldo, Andino and Sacco, Acci6n de la vanguardia...
...At the New York Stock Exchange on August 24, 1968, Hoffman created havoc by throwing 300 one-dollar bills among the stock runners...
...Debray, Lezione, p. 13 and pp...
...23 In Chile, the most interesting art appeared, paradoxically, during the Pinochet dictatorship (1974-89...
...Engaging the help of sociologists, economists, journalists and photographers, the group decided to launch a "counter-information" operation...
...54-55...
...During their imprisonment, they had contact with common prisoners...
...Confronted with a censorship that was harsher on the publicity around events than on the events themselves, and that was unpredictable in its aesthetic judgment, the artists had to negotiate their language...
...This format seemed to fit the needs of Latin America much better than those of hegemonic cultures...
...a transformative art-which destroys the idealist separation between the artwork and reality...
...Monthly Review Press, New York/London, 1967, p. 56), Debray proclaimed that "armed propaganda follows military action, but does not precede it...
...Pando set the tone for other the development theatrical stagings in of political which Montevideo and its inhabitants played awareness...
...In 1959, a worker initiative, based on that experience, created the Parts Committee in different factories in revolutionary Cuba...
...For an overview, see Artes Visuales (Mexico), No...
...The main point is that under present conditions, the most important form of propaganda is successful military actions...
...3. Rosario, February 21, 1992...
...See Nelly Richard, pp...
...Although I recognize the caricature of the polarization, I confess that I am temperamentally closer to the second position...
...2 Rub6n Naranjo, one of the NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer is a professor of art at the State University of New York at Old Westbury...
...Not all countries are equipped like Cuba to "nationalize" foreign traditions, and the steadily increasing globalization of information is not always enriching...
...137-178...
...They told the truck to deliver the goods to an address close to a shantytown, at which point the group seized the vehicle and gave the food away to the shantytown residents.' 3 During the Book and Print Fair of 1968, the group left a box on the ground which gently exploded and spread propaganda leaflets into the crowd...
...Volumen I, a 1981 exhibit of 11 artists in Havana, became a historic landmark for the change in Cuban art after the more dogmatic 1970s...
...2 9 The spectacle, however, can also generate its own antibodies...
...it could be things...
...and it allowed for the development of an alternative to representational realism and refined abstraction...
...6, 1993...
...For those in the underdeveloped world, it is essential to distinguish between art as a tool to create culture and achieve independence, and art as a globalizing commercial enterprise...
...In 1960, consult ng committees were formed to focus on the production of parts...
...the script written by the guerrilla "actors...
...axle...
...The group engineered its first major food-distribution plot in 1963...
...One joint effort, the Collective for Art Actions (CADA)-which ambiguously means "each" in Spanish-did try to operate outside art institutions and to appeal to the public at large, though it did not completely dispense with exhibition spaces...
...We have to reinvent those forms of action where people are not spectators, but protagonists...
...The name first appeared in a leaflet put out by the National Liberation Movement (MLN) entitled "T.N.T., Tupamaros No Transamos" (We Tupamaros do not compromise...
...U.S...
...Above: A woman receives half a liter of milk...
...Davis, then director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, to wear an American Revolution costume...
...Today inter-dimensional explorations are conducted as a natural component of art-making endeavors...
...In the March Against Death to the Arlington National Cemetery on November 13, 1969, the demonstrators held black balloons to symbolize the casualties of war...
...They served visitors Tucumin coffeewithout sugar-and darkened rooms every ten minutes to indicate the frequency of child mortality (explained each time the lights went out by a voice over the loudspeakers...
...The official help disappeared, however, once the exhibit opened...
...In the early 1960s, he created "Homage to New York," a contraption that self-destructed in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York...
...The catalogue published for the occasion includes an introduction by Gabriel Garcia Marquez who defends "Los Grupos" with the old argument that not to participate in the exhibition would have left the space open for their reactionary adversaries...
...Four groups-"Taller de arte e ideologia" (TAI), "Proceso Pentagono," "Suma" and "Tetraedro"-represented Mexico in the Tenth Biennial of Paris in 1977, thus returning to a more orthodox artistic arena...
...They chose the province of Tucumrin in northwestern Argentina as the subject for an exhibit...
...They led takeover of each building constituted a comultimately to plex sub-plot...
...One could resort to anything usable within the context of relative material poverty...
...In 1961, Che himself promoted the slogan "Worker, Build Your Own Machinery...
...The axiomatic quality of these ideas for the movement separates the Tupamaros from most of the other Latin American guerrilla movements...
...When discussing visual arts in the underdeveloped world, two extreme approaches are possible...
...But distinct from political actions, they asserted, art should shape culture on a deeper level and have a more long-lasting impact...
...Artists like Alfredo Jaar and others believe that not to follow the hegemonic "look" in art impedes communication...
...They found the solution by using internationally validated avantgarde formats which appealed to the snobbery of the more intellectual wings of the military regime, while developing a codified ambiguity in the content...
...The 11 artists of Volumen I were Jose Bedia, Juan Francisco Elso Padilla, Jose Manuel Fors, Flavio Garciandia, Israel Leon, Rogelio L6pez Marin (Gory), Gustavo Perez Monz6n, Ricardo Rodriguez Brey, Tomas Sanchez, Leandro Soto and Ruben Torres Llorca...
...Since eviction notices are publicized in advance, Superbarrio is able to arrange to be present during critical moments...
...In some cases, installation artists tried to reintegrate politics into their work...
...The creation of an artist is so much the product of a forced interplay of values and internalized taste that the idea of freedom seems somewhat misplaced...
...28-29...
...8 The group's primary goal became publicity and communication, not military victories...
...So, in a gesture with great panache, they returned it to the official with a detailed note explaining the reasons for their change of mind...
...Both the immediately perceivable activity and its "memory"-as recorded by the media or by popular word of mouth-led ultimately to a revolutionary folklore...
...Mario Kaplan, "Superbarrio contra los desalojos," Brecha (Montevideo), March 5, 1993, pp...
...Instead, they were working to set the stage for a popular takeover...
...Their operations were a cross between events and massmedia art...
...These termswhich I came up with some years ago in a search for precision-have the advantage of eliminating the moral judgment built into accusations of derivation which the mainstream so often happily attaches to anything that is done in the South...
...In all cases, a hegemonic flow of information from the North and a seamless appropriation of means were at the root of the development...
...Police and army threats as well as the general climate of repression at the time led to the dispersion of the artists...
...The Tupamaros did not achieve their goal, but the failure is not explained by Debray's or Castro's arguments...
...In Cuba the bricolage aesthetic also followed the example of the National Association of Innovators and Rationalizers (ANIR...
...Rita Eder, "El arte publico en M6xico: los grupos," Artes Visuales, p. V. 24...
Vol. 28 • September 1994 • No. 2
