Practica Suberversivas
Practica Suberversivas
Practica Suberversivas
Subversive Practices
Art under Conditions of Political Repression
60s80s / South America / Europe
May 30 August 2, 2009
Artists
Carlos Altamirano, Gbor Altorjay, Lucy Angulo, ngelo de Aquino, Luis Arias Vera, AutoPerforations-Artisten, Artur Barrio, Lszl Beke (Archive), Horia Bernea, Ricardo Bofill/Taller de
Arquitectura, Eugeni Bonet (Archive), Teresa Burga, CADA, Ulises Carrin, Dalibor Chatrny,
Carlfriedrich Claus, COAC Archive, Attila Csernik, Lutz Dammbeck, Guillermo Deisler, Eugenio
Dittborn, Juan Downey, Jorge Eielson, Mikls Erdly, Roberto Evangelista, Constantin Flondor,
Fernando Frana Cocchiarale, Enric Franch (Archive), Die Gehirne, Carlos Ginzburg, Ion Grigorescu,
Claus Hnsel, Rafael Hastings, Paulo Herkenhoff, Emilio Hernndez Saavedra, Taller E.P.S. Huayco,
Joseph W. Huber, Pavel Ilie, Indigo Group, IPUT (superintendent: Tamas St.Auby), Iosif Kiraly, Jiri
Kocman, Kollektive Aktionen, Carlos Leppe, Gasto de Magalhes, Oskar Manigk, Francisco Mariotti,
Alfredo Mrquez, Gonzalo Mezza, Ivonne von Mllendorff, Muntadas, Paul Neagu, Olaf Nicolai, Csar
Olhagaray, Clemente Padn, Letcia Parente, Grupo Parntesis, Catalina Parra, Gyula Pauer, Luis
Pazos, Dan Perjovschi, Jlio Plaza, Fliks Podsiadly, Pere Portabella, Robert Rehfeld, Herbert
Rodrguez, Juan Carlos Romero, Lotty Rosenfeld, Jess Ruiz Durand, Juan Javier Salazar, Hugo
Salazar del Alczar, Valeri Scherstjanoi, Cornelia Schleime, Grupul Sigma, Petr Stembera, Gabriele
Sttzer, Grup de Treball, Regina Vater, Cecilia Vicua, Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Sala Vinon (Archive),
Krzysztof Wodiczko, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeld, Horacio Zabala, Sergio Zevallos
Idea and Concept
Iris Dressler, Hans D. Christ
Cocurators
Ramn Castillo / Paulina Varas (Santiago de Chile / Valparaso); Fernando Davis (Buenos Aires);
Cristina Freire (So Paulo); Sabine Hnsgen (Bochum); Miguel Lopez / Emilio Tarazona (Barcelona /
Lima); Ileana Pintilie Teleaga (Timisoara); Valentn Roma / Daniel Garca Andjar (Barcelona);
Annamria Szke / Mikls Peternk (Budapest); Anne Thurmann-Jajes (Bremen)
Content
Introduction
p. 5
Progressive Images.
Art in Chile under Dictatorship, 1973-1990
Curators: Ramn Castillo and Paulina Varas
p. 7
p. 11
Alternative Networks
Curator: Cristina Freire
p. 19
Collective Actions:
Trips Out of Town, 1976 2009
Curator: Sabine Hnsgen
p. 23
Crosscurrent Passages
Dissident Tactics in Peruvian Art, 1968-1992
Curators: Miguel Lpez and Emilio Tarazona
p. 25
p. 35
19691979:
An Approach to the Confluences between Art, Architecture, and Design in Catalonia
Curators: Valentn Roma and Daniel Garca Andjar
p. 43
Tomorrow is Evidence!
Curators: Annamria Szoke und Mikls Peternk
p. 47
p. 53
p. 55
Credits
p. 59
Program Symposium
p. 61
Introduction
Iris Dressler, Hans D. Christ
Subversive Practices devotes itself to experimental and conceptual art practices that had
established between the nineteen-sixties and eighties in Europe and South America under
the influence of military dictatorships and communist regimes. The exhibition which
comprises more than 300 works by around eighty artists has been developed by a team of
thirteen international curators in close collaboration with the Kunstverein over a two-year
process.
The exhibitions nine sections focus on various contexts and strategies of artistic production
along with their positioning vis--vis political and cultural repression in the GDR, Hungary,
Romania, the Soviet Union, Spain, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. Of equal concern
here are both the particularities of and the relations between the different temporal and local
environments.
The exhibition undertakes the experiment of a shifted cartography and an extended
understanding of conceptual art, which has become established well beyond the AngloAmerican canon. In this respect, the related interdisciplinary, collaborative, and sociopolitical
potentials are particularly emphasizedthat is, the paradigm shifts between visual arts,
politics, society, sciences, architecture, design, mass media, literature, dance, theater,
activism, and so forth, which have been educed by these potentials.
Furthermore, the focus is on artistic practices that not only radically question the
conventional concept of art, the institutions, and the relationship between art and public, but
that have, at the same time, subversively thwarted structures of censorship and opposed the
existing systems of power. Here, body, language, and public space represent the pivotal
instruments, of resistance, symbolic and performative in equal measure. The appropriation of
media and distribution channelsespecially the postal servicehas in turn played a
distinctive role in the establishment of the widely ramified networks between (Eastern)
Europe and Latin America.
In lieu of conceptualizing a comprehensive and homogenized discourse, the exhibition
reflects specific questions and problems. The curators each developed individual
presentational models for their respective exhibition section. In different ways they approach
to the problem in presenting ephemeral, time- and location-specific art forms. Thus, the
exhibition can be experienced also on a formal level as a polyphonic parcours, a
multidimensional cartography.
The exhibitions network traces back to the research project Vivid (radical) Memory (2007),
carried out by the University of Barcelona, the Wrttembergischer Kunstverein and the
Center for Culture and Communication in Budapest. Subversive Practices again is a project
by Wrttembergischer Kunstverein in collaboration with the Center for Culture and
Communication in Budapest and the Arteleku center of culture in San Sebastian. Further
events referring to the content of the exhibition will take place in Budapest and San
Sebastian.
A publication on Subversive Practices will be released in fall 2009.
WORKS (SELECTION)
All texts by: Ramn Castillo and Paulina Varas
Carlos Altamirano (1954, RCH)
Retratos (Portraits), 19792007
Digital print, Courtesy: Carlos Altamirano
Portraits is a work in which the artist composes a collage with a series of colour images taken from the
communications media and the collective national imaginary. He then adds to these photographs of
missing Chilean prisoners. This is a register or archive in progress that has gone on growing, in the
midst of a landscape that traverses the time and space of Chiles fractured recent history.
CADA Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (1979 1985, RCH)
The Colectivo de Acciones de Arte was formed in 1979 by the writer Diamela Eltit, the poet Ral
Zurita, the sociologist Fernando Balcells and the visual artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo. They
carried out a series of actions in both public and private spaces, as well as interventions in the press in
opposition to the military dictatorship in which they set out to question the idea of the social body as an
organism in conflict with its historic memory.
Para no morir de hambre en el arte (In order not to die of hunger in art), 1979
On October 3, 1979, CADA handed out a hundred half-litre bags of milk to the residents of La Granja
municipality in Santiago de Chile. As they gave people the milk they asked them to return the bags so
that artists could use them as a support for their works, which would be exhibited in the Centro Imagen
gallery in Santiago, together with the material documenting this action. The bags were printed with the
legend 1/2 litro de leche (1/2 litre of milk).
Inversin de Escena (Inversion of Scene), 1979
On October 17, 1979, CADA obtained 10 trucks from a national dairy company and drove them in
convoy to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. CADA also covered the faade of the museum with a
white cloth to represent the censorship that Chile was living under at the time.
NO+, 1983
The phrase No+ was used by CADA as the beginning of a series of actions that various people
inscribed on walls in different parts of Santiago and in other cities. It was a case of using this slogan to
introduce a series of phrases that expressed an anti-dictatorial tendency. The NO+ (no more) that
originated in this CADA action was extended to the most varied forms of expression and protest at
socio-political issues in Chile and other parts of the world.
Guillermo Deisler (1940, RCH1995, D)
Selection from the Deisler archive
Courtesy: Laura Coll
Together with other Latin American artists, during the 1960s Deisler was actively involved in artistic
exchanges, giving rise to a significant body of mail art in the South American continent, which was
subsequently extended to the rest of the world. Before living in Europe, Deisler carried out a series of
publishing and art projects in Chile, which provided the basis for many of the alternative networks for
the circulation of his work and that of other artists in a number of cities.
Eugenio Dittborn (1943, RCH)
Historia de la fsica o fsica de la historia (History of physics or physics of history), 1985
Video, color, 18, Courtesy: Eugenio Dittborn
In a video lasting 18 minutes, Eugenio Dittborn alternates popular images with stories of his private life
and the action of spilling oil in the desert carried out in 1982. The pouring out and burning of 300 litres
of oil in the Atacama Desert was unable to cover more than a small area. The artist does all he can to
extend the spill, while the different images that succeed one another in the story, like an audiovisual
collage, reconstruct in parallel different situations of supreme bodily effort: in boxing, in swimming, a
singer, a woman in childbirth. The video and the fragmentation of the images were structured
according to the sequence of Fibonacci numbers.
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11
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WORKS (SELECTION)
All texts, unless otherwise noted: Fernando Davis
Carlos Ginzburg (F; 1946, RA)
rbol (Tree), 1970
Photos from the exhibition Escultura, Follaje y Ruidos (Sculpture, Foliage and Noises), Plaza Rubn
Daro, Buenos Aires, each 8 x 24 cm, Courtesy: Carlos Ginzburg
Ginzburgs intervention at Sculpture, Foliage and Noises consisted of affixing a sign on Plaza Rubn
Daros trees printed with the word rbol (tree).
Vivienda otoal (Autumn Housing), 1971
Photo and Text, 18 x 24 cm, Courtesy: Carlos Ginzburg
Ginzburg wrote about this work:
My very clean and bourgeois house, located at 462 9 Street, was occupied by the wind and
autumn leaves. I threw hundreds of dried leaves into every space in my house, taking
possession of tables, beds, all parquet and tiled flooring, bathroom (...), wardrobes, TV, radio,
bookshelves, refrigerator, record player, paintings and sculptures, boiler, kitchen and other
obvious sectors in a house. I also covered myself with autumn leaves. For about an hour I
carried out my daily life normally, but invaded by leaves. The experience culminated with the
arrival of my family and their insults and desperation caused by my work.
Tierra (Earth), 1971
Photos from the exhibition Arte de Sistemas (Systems Art), Museo de Arte Moderno/CAYC, Buenos
Aires, 24 x 18 cm, Courtesy: Archive Carlos Ginzburg
In July 1971, Ginzburg participated in the exhibition Systems Art in the Museo de Arte Moderno de
Buenos Aires. Ginzburg placed two large posters on the wall of a wasteland, located in front the
museum displaying the following text: An unexpected aesthetic experience is being developed inside
here. But . . . what does it consist of? In order to get to know the hidden work, you are invited to go up
to the ninth floor of the Museo de Arte Moderno, Corrientes 1530 (right in front), and discover, looking
through the upper window, what is in fact on the ground. It was the word Tierra (earth).
Ginzburg: 10 ideas de arte pobre (Ginzburg: 10 Ideas of Poor Art), 1971
Portfolio with ten projects, Ed. La Flaca Grabada, La Plata, Courtesy: Centro de Arte Experimental
Vigo, La Plata
The portfolio Ginzburg: 10 Ideas of Poor Art includes a sequence of ecological art projects
introduced by a selection of texts by the Italian critic Germano Celant about Arte Povera. Some of
these projects (none of them carried out) suppose violent destructions of nature disturbing its
designation as ecological: like the proposal to melt several Antarctic icebergs with a flamethrower, or
to evaporate Nahuel Huapi Lake, located in Argentinean Patagonia.
Text by the artist published in the portfolio:
MELTINGS
The kinetic energy of molecules in motion is a function of temperature, and as both are
modified they modify in turn the states of aggregation of matter. In line with this principle, and
with a powerful flamethrower, I am going to melt a number of Antarctic ice floes that have
broken off the Ice Shelf. In the course of the ecological expedition on an old whaler I am
going to project streams of fire (50 m long) against the spectacular icebergs: as the strength of
their molecules is weakened they will be converted into liquid water.
EVAPORATIONS
Evaporation is the transformation of a liquid into gases and the diffusion of these in the
atmosphere as a result of the application of heat, the fire of a flamethrower in this case.
Accordingly, from a boat, I am going to invade with fire the green waters of the lake NAHUEL
HUAPI. The degree of evaporation will be very rapid, sending up an immense cloud of water
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vapour in continuous ascent. I plan to repeat these vaporizations on the lake of Palermo and
on the levels of the Atlantic Ocean.
MOTHER EARTH
An exploration of the intrinsic structure of terrestrial matter in a geopsychoanalytical
dimension: I am going to dig in the fertile plains of the Pampas a gigantic uterus three
kilometres long.
STELLAR SIGNAL ON PLANET EARTH
An exploration of the intrinsic structure of terrestrial matter in a cosmic dimension: I am going
to dig in the San Lus desert a gigantic star with 8 (eight) points (three km. long each point).
MAR
The word MAR floating in the Pacific Ocean. The three letters that constitute it will respectively
be 100 metres high. They will be constructed of welded or riveted steel plates, and composed
of several watertight compartments so that they wont sink if a boat holes them with its keel.
Since they will be subject to violent stresses they will be held in place, thanks to an anchoring
system, by enormous iron bolts driven deep into the sand or silt of the seabed. In addition,
they will have flashing lights at night (white for all three letters, the number of seconds
between two flashes will encrypt the word MAR; these will prevent boats from sweeping MAR
away) powered by a battery for electric lighting. Finally, each letter will have a specially
adapted audio mechanism, intermittently emitting the phoneme MAR, which will function with
the rise and fall of the waves.
FLOWER
I am going to plant in the ALMIRANTE BROWN park four mixed beds of multicoloured
flowers, which will be laid out to form the word FLOR. During the growth period I will tend the
soil, the plants and the flowers with the operations necessary for them to flourish.
ARIADNES THREAD IN THE SUBTROPICAL FOREST OF MISIONES
I am going to set out on an ECOLOGICAL SAFARI into the subtropical forest of Misiones,
travelling extensively and at random through the bush for several weeks. In the course of the
journey we will progressively unwind a red cord (total length 1000 km) in the most
heterogeneous sectors of the jungle; almost impenetrable areas of bush; undergrowth;
creepers; huge tree trunks; lianas; darnel; grass; swamps; at ground level, on the gloomy
forest floor where few plants can survive, or through the tree tops where birds live; from the
waterways to the ruins of the Jesuit Missions and amid orchids, waterfalls and millions of
butterflies.
MAN AND PREHISTORY
At Punta Norte in Peninsula Valds, in the province of Chubut, is the most important colony of
elephant seals in the world. The American naturalist William G. Conway, director of the Bronx
Zoo in New York, visited the colony in December 1964 and described the time he spent there
as a day in prehistory. On the pebble beaches elephant seals rest and sunbathe, untroubled
by the proximity of people. Therefore, I am going to walk along the beaches occupied by the
colony (3 km), scattering human skulls among the ancient beasts.
BONFIRE TO THE AURORA BOREALIS
One of the most prodigious spectacles nature offers is the aurora borealis: an enormous
display of light illuminates the firmament; it rises and falls in great arcs, in constant motion, the
rays appear here and there or leap so swiftly that they are called dancers. With the first
crackles of electricity that announce Eos, I light a giant bonfire made of tree trunks. Then they
will be born together as magically influenced [sic], though separated by the ice, the Fire and
the Aurora. I intend to repeat this bonfire evoking the Midnight Sun and the evening rainbow.
NOCTURNAL BONFIRES ON THE PATAGONIAN COAST
Over several thousand kilometres of the Patagonian coast, solitary beaches extend in
unbroken succession, their waters of an intense blue and high salinity (Atlantic Ocean). The
nocturnal bonfires will be set out from El Cndor to Rada Tilly, spaced at a distance of 100
m from one to another and with a height of 20 to 30 m each depending on the size of the
trunks, with a conical form. When the sun goes down the mythical bonfires will be lit and fire
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will take possession of bays, gulfs, isthmuses, caves, cliffs, peninsulas, beaches and infinite
horizons. (translated by Graham Thomson)
La pirmide de la muerte (Death Pyramid), Published in Hexgono 71 cf, 1973
Artists text
Death Pyramid. Project presented to the Eighth Paris Biennial
1: For a month I will remove, using a truck, the dead flowers left in the rubbish bins of the
Paris cemeteries.
2: I will accumulate a gruesome and foul-smelling pyramid one hundred metres high, in the
context of the Biennial.
3: I will throw on the floral pyramid the skeletons of human beings, spiders, bats and
scorpions.
4: I will throw on the floral pyramid hundreds of books: on psychological terror, on political
terror, on genocides and wars, on the economic and social situation of the Third World, on
nihilist philosophies, on vanished cultures, etc. (Carlos Ginzburg, translated by Graham
Thomson)
Hexgono 71
Artist publication, Ed. Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Courtesy: Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo, La Plata
Edgardo Vigo edited the experimental journal Hexgono 71 from 1971 to 1975. Toward 1973 it was
launched as a platform of circulation of essays, projects to be undertaken, poor graphic material,
mail art, sealamientos, and political slogans brought together in loose sheets and diverse formats,
without any apparent order, inside an envelope.
Luis Pazos (1940, RA)
Hacia un arte del pueblo (Toward an art of the people), 1972
Text in the catalogue of the exhibition Arte e Ideologa en CAYC al aire libre (Art and Ideology. CAYC
in the Open Air), 24 x 18 cm, Courtesy: Juan Carlos Romero
The art of the people should be: A) CLEAR: That is to say, direct, accessible, comprehensible
to everyone. B) ETHICAL: In other words, the content must take precedence over the form,
with each work having a clear function of consciousness raising. C) NATIONAL: The subjects
should relate to the reality of the country in question. D) COMMITTED: Through her work the
artist should constantly question the forms of Power, be it cultural, political, economic, social
or religious. E) VIOLENT: Like every expression of peoples struggling for their liberation.
(Luis Pazos)
Monumento al prisionero poltico desaparecido (Monument to the Disappeared Political Prisoner),
1972
Photo of the exhibition Arte e Ideologa en CAYC al aire libre (Art and Ideology. CAYC in the Open
Air), Plaza Roberto Arlt, Buenos Aires,24 x 18 cm, Courtesy: the artist
In September 1972, Pazos participated in the exhibition Art and Ideology: CAYC in the Open Air with
three tombstones entitled Monument to the Disappeared Political Prisoner. During the exhibition, three
anonymous persons lay down in front the tombstones, occupying the place of the absent bodies.
Several works from the exhibition referred to the massacre of Trelew, the shooting of sixteen guerrillas
imprisoned in a prison in Rawson in retaliation for an escape attempt. The exhibition was closed by
police two days after its opening and the works were abducted.
Transformaciones de masas en vivo (Transformations of Living Masses), 1973
Series of 8 photos, 36 x 24 cm, Photos: Carlos Mendiburu Eliabe, Courtesy: the artist
Transformations of Living Masses is a sequence of photographs of live sculptures, in which a group
of Edgardo Antonio Vigos students designed with their bodies, in accordance with instructions given
by Pazos, an average repertoire of forms. An order to the bodies was not only reflected in the police or
military repression, but also in the disciplinary order at the interior of revolutionary armed
organizations. Luis Pazos presented the work in the context of the exhibition Art in Change, initiated
within several days of Hctor Cmporas assumption of the presidency and the amnesty granted to the
political prisoners.
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Violencia; in a second space, he brought together fragments of texts by various authors, proposed
as partial definitions of the terms; finally, in a third sector, the artist displayed front covers of a
sensationalist magazine, with photographs of the police repression in Argentina, and the word
violence reiterated in bold headlines.
Los juegos diablicos (The Diabolical Games), 1976
6 Photos, Courtesy: Private collection
Los emergentes (The Emergents), 1976
6 Photos, Courtesy: Private collection
In The Diabolical Games a group of children are dragging each other through the grass; in The
Emergents they are coming out of the river at Hudson Beach. In contrast with other projects by the
artist in which violence is referred to directly, in these works Romero alludes to it in a more subtle way.
Violencia (Violence), 1977
Artist book, Courtesy: the artist
In 1977 Juan Carlos Romero secretly made an artist book in which he revived several elements
presented in his production from the early years of the decade: For example a text taken from
Leonardo Da Vincis Breviarios (Breviaries) (1942), which Romero distributed during 1972 in a series
of flyers, where violence is characterized as consisting of four elements: weight, force, motion, and
impact:
VIOLENCE IS COMPOSED OF FOUR THINGS:
WEIGHT - FORCE - MOVEMENT - BLOW
THE MOST POWERFUL OF THESE IS THE ONE WITH THE SHORTEST DURATION
1 EVERY WEIGHT WANTS TO DESCEND BY THE MOST DIRECT ROUTE
2 WEIGHT WANTS TO ENDURE
3 WEIGHT IS OVERCOME BY FORCE
4 FORCE IS VIOLENCE
5 SLOWNESS INCREASES IT, VELOCITY DIMINISHES IT
6 ITS POTENCY INCREASES WITH CONSTRAINTS
7 NOTHING MOVES WITHOUT FORCE
8 FORCE COMES FROM MOVEMENT IT HAS THREE FUNCTIONS: TO PULL TO
PUSH TO IMMOBILIZE
9 MOVEMENT COMES FROM THE DEATH OF FORCE
10 THE BLOW COMES FROM THE DEATH OF MOVEMENT
11 THE BLOW IS THE SON OF MOVEMENT AND THE GRANDSON OF FORCE
LEONARDO DA VINCI - BREVIARIES - 1492
J. C. ROMERO - FOR A STRATEGY OF VIOLENCE - 1972
BS. AS. AUGUST 1972 (translation by Graham Thomson)
Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1928-1997, RA)
Sealamiento I: Manojo de semforos (A Handful of Traffic Lights), 1968
Photo, 24 x 36 cm, Courtesy: Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo, La Plata
In October 1968, through local media, Vigo made the surprising announcement of his first
sealamiento entitled A Handful of Traffic Lights. The proposal consisted of a precise action: to sign
an ordinary urban object (traffic lights) from the point of view of its aesthetic potential. In Manifesto:
First White Non-Presentation, he wrote: The practical-utilitarian functionality of some constructions
must be signed and thus produce questions that (...) approach (...) from an aestetic digression (...).
Manifiesto: Primera No-Presentacin Blanca (Manifesto: First White Non-Presentation), 1968
Text by the artist
With this First White Non-Presentation which will be held on October 25 at 8 p.m. on
Avenida 1 corner 60, and is given the title of A Handful of Traffic Lights a series of
Sealamientos is set in motion in order to exploit to the full the possibilities of
communications media. Making a sum of two negative factors (non-poetic-image plus nonvisual-image), Edgardo Antonio Vigo, who is the author of the experience, generated a
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positive result under the equality of real image. The skin that is producing in the world today a
constant bombardment of images that alienate being to the point of making it lose its
individuality and its profound exploration of aesthetically important factors, so demands it. The
functionality of the practical-utilitarian character of certain constructions should be signed so
as to produce questions that do not arise from mere vertical utilitarian approach but from the
aesthetic digression. Faced with a society that is based on form-function, which exploits the
possession of the thing as goal and end, and has taken control of the communications media
to grow but to advertise itself, the Sealamientos will produce: A halt before the gratuitous
act of aesthetic digression, an admission of community ownership, and the anonymity of the
constructors.
IT IS PROPOSED
Not to construct more alienating images but to sign those that without having aesthetic intent
as an end make it possible.
A revulsion in order that the depersonalized man that constructed it observe personalized on
that construction being signed.
A return to the everyday urbanistic as activation of society toward the aesthetic process.
IT IS PROCLAIMED
The street hosting the signed object presents to mans constant aesthetic structures the
possibility of being present in our daily transit rather than being sheltered or hidden in
museums or galleries. The contemporary being leads an urban, not a home-centred life. The
collective aspect of living, the demographic, are factors that art must not fail to bear witness to.
They are signals that mark an era. But these should not represent but present. Human
movement, the boulevards, propaganda, useful objects, which are outside and not inside
the architectonic habitat, are current issues, but man alienates himself with the souveniri.e.
picture, sculpture, object, libraryand its possessive sense and the physical environment
diminished by containing all these things that stifle him. Consequently, man must arrive at
mental communication by way of the senses. Liberation is in the measure to which man
shake off the heavy baggage of the possessive concept of the thing so as to be an observeractive participant of a collective everyday signaled element. (Edgardo Antonio Vigo;
translated by Graham Thomson)
Obras (in) completas ([In] Complete Works), 1969
Mail Art, Courtesy: Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo, La Plata
In 1969 Edgardo Vigo started his projects to realize. One of the first consisted of the distribution by
postto a group of artists and friendsof an envelope with four labels printed with the legend (In)
Complete Works, including instructions for their free use: You are receiving these four headings of the
(In) Complete Works respecting the theory of an art of participation and a transfer of some
percentages of the creation. Place them where you desire.
Sealamiento V: Un paseo visual a la Plaza Rubn Daro (A Visual Walk around Plaza Rubn Daro),
1970
Postcard; 2 photos of the exhibition Escultura, Follaje y Ruidos (Sculpture, Foliage and Noises), each
24 x 18 cm, Courtesy: Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo, La Plata
In 1970 Vigo participated in the exhibition Sculpture, Foliage and Noises, organized in the Plaza
Rubn Daro in Buenos Aires. Vigo distributed among the audience a piece of chalk and a printed card
with the minimum keys of a project to be undertaken: take a piece of chalk, and use it to mark a
cross or the limit of one or several paving stones, or chalk up the surface determined by you. Place
yourself in the demarked area and turn around 360, note what you have seen, draw your
conclusions. Ultimately you have made A Visual Walk around Plaza Rubn Daro.
Sealamiento IX: Enterramiento y desenterramiento de un taco de madera (Burial and Exhumation of
a Wooden Piece), 1971-1972
Photos: Juan Jos Esteves, each 24 x 18 cm, Courtesy: Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo, La Plata
Sealamiento IX articulates two sequences of actions having taken place, in each case, before two
eyewitnesses. The first stage of the action was held on December 28, 1971. Vigo marked an area of
his studios patio with a banderole showing an arrow that was pointing toward a specific place. There
he dug a hole and buried a wooden piece of cedar. Than he edited a documentation with his signature
and that of the two witness who attested that it had happened. Also, Vigo assumed the commitment of
exhuming the object the following year, on the same date, at the same hour. Thus, on December 28,
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1972 the second stage of Sealamiento IX took place: Vigo proceeded to exhume the wooden piece.
In the act was written: I certify presently that Edgardo Antonio Vigo has proceeded in the property
located at 1187 15 Street in La Plata City, on December 28, 1972 at 7 p.m., to exhume a wooden
piece of cedar whose dimensions are 7 x 14 x 28 centimeters, executing the acquired commitment
when it took place on December 28, 1971 at 7 PM its burial, concluding this way the called Ninth
Sealamiento '7172. Both acts were later signed by a notary.
Sealamiento IX appropriates the bureaucratic conventions of the judicature exposing its codes and
protocols. At the same time, in years of growing political conflict, the two actions seem to have
advanced the even more violent years yet to come, where countless people disappeared and people
to defense themlseves buryied books that could endanger their lives or those of their dear and fellow
beings.
Horacio Zabala (1943, RA)
Este papel es una crcel / This Paper Is a Jail, 1972
Photo, 24 x 18 cm, Courtesy: the artist
In 1972 Zabala had a photograph taken of his hand while writing the sentences Este papel es una
crcel. This paper is a jail on a piece of paper.
Art Is a Jail, 1972
Paper work, 110 x 35 cm, Courtesy: the artist
Art Is a Jail shows the repeated impressions of a rubber stamp superimposed on tracing paper,
replicating the title of the work.
Revisar / Censurar (Checking/Censuring), 1974
Paper work, 5 pieces, each 15,5 x 23 cm, Courtesy: the artist
The works presents a sequence of school maps of South America, being intervened upon by the
repeated imprint of two rubber stamps with the words Revisar (checking) and Censurar (censuring).
The last map of the series is covered almost entirely.
300 metros de cinta negra para enlutar una plaza pblica (300 Meters of Black Ribbon to Put a Public
Square into Mourning), 1972
Photo of the exhibition Arte e Ideologa en CAYC al aire libre (Art and Ideology. CAYC in the Open
Air), 23,6 x 16 cm, Courtesy: the artist
Zabalas intervention in Art and Ideology: CAYC in the Open Air consisted of three hundred meters of
black plastic ribbon with which he surrounded the perimeter wall of the square at which the exhibition
was being held.
Anteproyecto..., 1974
Series, pencil on tracing paper, each 35 x 50 cm, Courtesy: the artist
Anteproyecto de crcel sobre columna para artistas
Draft of a prison on column for artists
Anteproyecto de crcel subterrnea para artistas
Draft of an underground prison for artists
Anteproyecto de crcel flotante para artistas
Draft of a floating prison for artists
19
Alternative Networks
Curator
Cristina Freire
Artists
ngelo de Aquino, Artur Barrio, Ulises Carrin, Dalibor Chatrny, Attila Csernik, Roberto
Evangelista, Fernando Frana Cocchiarale, Paulo Herkenhoff, Jir Kocman, Gasto de
Magalhes, Clemente Padn, Letcia Parente, Jlio Plaza, Fliks Podsiadly, Petr Stembera,
Regina Vater, Krzysztof Wodiczko
Back in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, alternative networks of exchange brought together artists
from different countries. In those days, the postal service was the privileged medium of communication
in this extended circuit, unaware of the art market and the concerns of the hegemonic art centers. In
Brazil, one of the destinations for this flow of artistic exchanges was a public university museum that,
despite the military dictatorship ruling the country during that period, became a meeting place for
artists and an exhibition space for work from around the world. Of the many European artists who took
part in its exhibitions and events, most were from Eastern Europe and, like their Latin American peers,
they too were in search of strategies with which to circumvent the censorship imposed by a dictatorial
regime. Photography as a record of performances, actions, and situations was a significant presence
in that network. Virtually anyone could set up a clandestine darkroom at home, and images of the art
experience, often involving the artists own body, could be sent by post to any place in the world. In
this flow of exchanges, the body and the actions of the artists present shared tactics of symbolic
resistance, articulate art and life, and reveal, even today, a stimulating utopian potential. (Cristina
Freire)
20
WORKS
Courtesy for all works: Collection: Museu de Arte Contempornea da Universidade de So Paulo,
Brazil
All texts, unless otherwise noted: Cristina Freire
ngelo de Aquino (1945, BR)
O nadador, aquele que sabe nadar (Swimmer able to swim there), o. J.
Series of four photos, bw, each 24 x 30,1 cm
Artur Barrio (1945, P)
Sit.....City.....y.....Country... (Sit.....City.....and.....Country...), 1970
Series of slides on DVD
Commenced in 1969, the Situations were transitory actions, made of perishable, precarious materials
and usually performed in a public space.
Sit.....City.....and.....Country... is the record of the Situation in which the artist anonymously placed
bundles of loaves in very different places around Rio de Janeiro at the height of the political
repression. The bound bundles of loaves provoked a sense of strangeness in passersby, and were
described by the artist as an ephemeral medium of condensed energy.
A constelao da tartaruga (The constellation of the turtle), 198182
Series of sixteen photos, bw, variable dimensions
Ulises Carrin (1941, MEX 1989, NL)
To Be or Not to Be, 1976
Photo, bw, 29,1 x 20,8 cm
The work To Be or Not to Be is the photographic record of the performance together with its
description. The performance took place in the Kontakt Gallery in Antwerp, and its recording was then
sent to Brazil. In this work, the artist read the soliloquy from Hamlet, and as each word was uttered a
little ball was dropped onto the floor.
Dalibor Chatrny (1925, CS)
Mirror relations at the opposite horizon, ca. 1973
Series of nine photos, each 12,9 x 17,8 cm
Fernando Frana Cocchiarale (1951, BR)
Sequela (Aftermath), 1974
Photo, 23,5 x 14,5 cm
Attila Csernik (1941, YU)
Experiments, 1974
Series of eight photos, each 29,8 x 21,1 or 21,1 x 29,8 cm
Roberto Evangelista (1946, BR)
Mater Dolorosa, 1979
Color, sound, 11 48
In this poetic essay, filmed at Lake Arara on the Rio Negro (Amazon), the artist reflects on the
creation and survival of forms. The critical content of the video refers to the destruction of the
environment and the economic exploitation of the local population. The concepts of the country
drowning and the shipwreck of culture, derived from Hlio Oiticica, are poetically materialized by the
calabashes, a species of fruit typical of the region, which float in the river and are molded by the water
current.
Paulo Herkenhoff (1949, BR)
Estmago Embrulhado (Sickness), 1975
Jejum (Fasting), Black-and-white, silent, 07 20
Sobremesa (Desert), Black-and-white, sound, 02 41
21
In Fasting the artist chews a number of newspaper cuttings about censorship until he starts to gag,
then swallows them, washed down with saliva and printers ink, finally absorbing the content of the
news reports in his body. Desert is a proposition of eating an artwork. The work chosen was one of the
Clandestine Headlines (Painter Teaches God to Paint), by Antnio Manoel printed in the
newspaper O Dia on May 29, 1973.
Jir Kocman (1947, CS)
The End, 1973
Series of two photos, each 18 x 13,2 cm
Gasto de Magalhes (1953, BR)
Deslocamento do Gramado do Parque (Displacement of the Lawn from the Park), 1974
Series of eight photos, each 18,2 x 24 cm
The photographs are records of an action performed by the artist during the 6th Young Contemporary
Art show (1972) in the University of So Paulos Museum of Contemporary Art. In the action, which
the artist recorded himself, lawn from the garden of the museum was taken inside the exhibition
gallery, thus isolating and focusing attention on an everyday activity and critically evoking the tension
between the inside and outside of the art system.
Circulao Postal (Postal circuit), 1976
Series of two photos, each 24 x 18 cm
This is Poem, 19752008
Series of four photos, each 29,7 x 21,1 cm
Clemente Padn (1939, ROU)
O artista a servio da comunidade (The Artist in the Service of the Community), 1974
Series of four photos, each 26 x 107 cm
A photographic record of the project was submitted to the exhibition Visual Poetics in the Museum of
Contemporary Art at the University of So Paulo, which consisted in having an artist guide the visitors
around the exhibition and comment on the works on show. At the time, Clement Padn had been
imprisoned by the military dictatorship in Uruguay, and the piece was carried out by Francisco Iarra,
a Spanish artist living in exile in Brazil. We see here the application of the concept of Non-objectual
Poetry developed by the artist, an art without an object, a poem that is made concrete by action.
Letcia Parente (19301991, BR)
Marca Registrada (Trademark), 1975
Black-and-white, sound, 11 44
The works of the first Brazilian video artists are characterized by their radicalism in the use of images
of a social and political body, in contrast to a self-referential narcissism. Here the artist stitches the
inscription Made in Brazil, focused in close-up, on the sole of her foot with a needle.
Jlio Plaza (1938, E 2003, BR)
Evoluo/Revoluo (Evolution/Revolution), 1971
Series of ten photos, each 24 x 18 cm
Feliks Podsiady (1936, PL)
Metamorphosis, 1977
Series of twelve photos, each, 24 x 18,2 cm
The experience of transculturality, issues raised by anthropology, and the limits of the artists own
identity are all present in this series of photographs by the Polish artist Feliks Podsiady, in which the
European transforms himself into an African, in a metamorphosis that generates an intense,
expressive charge. The portraits of the artist have an aura that is made explicit in the accompanying
letter, in which he writes: The inspiration for this work came from living for four years in Africa. The
form of the work does not interest me. What I am interested in is the change in a man in the course of
his mental development.
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23
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25
Crosscurrent Passages
Dissident Tactics in Peruvian Art, 1968-1992
Curators
Miguel Lpez, Emilio Tarazona
Artists
Hugo Salazar del Alczar, Lucy Angulo, Luis Arias Vera, Teresa Burga, Jorge Eielson, Rafael
Hastings, Taller E.P.S. Huayco, Francisco Mariotti, Alfredo Mrquez, Yvonne von Mllendorff,
Grupo Parntesis, Herbert Rodrguez, Jess Ruiz Durand, Emilio Hernndez Saavedra, Juan
Javier Salazar, Sergio Zevallos and others
Crosscurrent Passages is an attempt to review a series of dissident practices and artistic output that
were in conflict with consensual systems of representation and social and political situation, framed
between the 1968 military coup and president Alberto Fujimoris self-coup in 1992. The 1968 military
coup marked the start of a dictatorship that was singular in many ways: it attempted to accelerate the
breakdown of the oligarchy and to support industrial modernisation through radical reformist
measures, which at the same time generated a persecutory police climate. In the seventies entailed a
splitting of the course of experimentation in the plastic arts in two directions. On one hand, there was a
surge of a conceptual institutional criticism of the art system. And on the other there was an
emergence of new forms of collective production in dialogue with Andean culture, protected by the
military government.
The crisis of the military government and the reinstatement of democracy in 1980 created an
atmosphere of critical thought that corresponded to the start of the armed struggle against the
government by the subversive group Shining Path culminating in genocide politics against broad
sectors of the population, carried out by the seditious group as well as the army. In the eighties,
launched by the collaborative activities of various art groups, art became accepted as a space of
political denunciation and redefinition based on an Andean modernity. Through performances and
interventions other artists allegorised the psychological and physical repercussions of violence.
(Miguel Lpez, Emilio Tarazona)
26
WORKS
All texts, unless otherwise noted: Miguel Lpez, Emilio Tarazona
All English translations: Nuria Rodrguez
Lucy Angulo, Hugo Salazar del Alczar, Jess Ruiz Durand, Mario Pozzi-Escott and Leslie Lee
Por el derecho a la vida (For the right to life), 1985
Video documentation of the collective installation, Translation and subtitles by Janine Soenens
In January 1985 a group of artists presented an installation under the title For the Right to Life at the
Miraflores public gallery in Lima. This exhibition was one of the first examples of artists within the
official art world turning their attention to the attacks on human rights in Peru, committed by the Army
and by the clandestine group PCP Shining Path. This documentary video screened here for the first
time shows images of the set-up and a series of interviews with artists, intellectuals, politicians and
activists of the time, who give their opinion on the situation of violence.
Teresa Burga (1940, PE)
Autorretrato. Estructura. Informe. 9-6-72 (Self-Portrait. Structure. Report. 9-6-72), 1972
Installation with graphical work, photos, sound-light unit, among other materials, Courtesy: Teresa
Burga and Miguel Lpez/Emilio Tarazona archive
Under the notion of 'self-portrait', Teresa Burga displayed a series of documents and diagrams that
provided an approximation of herself. The installation was divided into three areas: Face Report, Heart
Report, Blood Report, displaying data collected in the course of a single day (June 9, 1972).
Contacta. Festival de Arte Total (Contacta 71. Total Art Festival), 19711979
Initially driven by artists such as Francisco Mariotti and Luis Arias Vera and subsequently supported
by the Military Government through SINAMOS (National System for the Support of Social
Mobilisation), the Total Art Festivals project was to become one of the most exceptional examples of
multidisciplinary arts experimentation in the seventies. The festivals, based on an open call for
participation, took place in July 1971 and 1972 over four days 24 hours, non-stop in public space,
mixing 'official' arts with experimental arts, theatre, poetry, music, cinema and traditional arts and
crafts. The success of Contacta 72 led to other festivals being organised in inland Peru, such as the
Inkarri Festivals (1973). In 1979, a few artists from Colectivo Parntesis and Francisco Mariotti
organised a further Contacta Festival.
Jess Ruiz Durand (1940,PE)
Cuatro afiches de difusin de la Reforma Agraria (Four propaganda posters for the Agrarian
Reform),1969-1972
4 Offset prints, 100 x 70 cm., Courtesy: Museo de Arte de Lima Collection, Contemporary Art
Acquisitions Committee 2007
Under General Juan Velascos military government, Jess Ruiz Durand designed a propaganda
strategy to publicise the regimes Agrarian and Industrial reform, which aimed to return land to peasant
communities and change Perus social structure. Unlike other reform processes in Latin America, the
implementation of the reform in Peru did not emerge in response to mass actions. Rather, it was the
official line promoted by the technical and military leadership, forcing the Government to generate
mass diffusion strategies. The posters produced by Durand in collaboration with SINAMOS (a public
institution created to channel independent social organisations without links to the government) were
heavily distributed among Andean and peasant communities. The artist subverted and resignified
North American pop art in order to produce a vernacular, Andean 'pop' with reminiscences of myth.
Jorge Eielson (1924, PE 2006, I)
During the late 60s, Jorge Eielson conceived a series of sculptures specifically designed to be buried
in various cities he had some kind of connection to. Subterranean Sculptures brought together ten
objects, utopian in their intentional concealment and their impossible manufacture. The project
unfinished in the end included sculptures thought up for Rome, the Eninger Weide in Reutlingen,
Paris, Lima, Antwerp, Bangkok, Sardinia, New York and Tokyo, together with an additional object that
Eielson unsuccessfully conceived for the Moon, and even sent to NASA.
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Escultura horripilante (Horrifying Sculpture), Plaza de Armas, Lima, June 20, 1967, from the series
Subterranean Sculpture, 1966-1969
To Csar Moro, S. Salazar Bondy and Javier Sologuren
Text of the work, English translation:
Working only 27 minutes per night, over two and a half years or exactly 915 nights of the
tireless efforts of my closest collaborators were necessary in order to place the following
object 17 meters below-ground:
1 Materials:
a) a compound based on synthetic bone-marrow, used as an electronic (field) and placed
within the sculpture to act as vital fluid;
b) a methane gas pipe from the city;
c) a complete television circuit between the (eye) of the sculpture and the outside world.
d) thousands of screws, nuts, hooks, hinges, etcetera;
e) a Winchester submachine gun.
f) the head of a talking doll;
g) two arms of an adult chimpanzee;
h) faecal matter;
i) a full radio system;
j) frozen food;
k) a megaphone from an RCA phonograph, 1920 model;
l) 14 litres of human blood;
m) 15000 metres of tape containing recordings of the most important poetic texts of all time,
including the Bible;
n) toilet paper.
2 Operation:
a) the sculpture actually has no limits, if you take into account its ultra shortwave radio system;
b) anyone wanting to make a copy should take into account two factors of prime importance:
I. the sculpture constantly regenerates at the fixed rate of 75 grams of matter per
second;
II. its waste materials, which are totally irreversible, accumulate at the variable rate of
57 to 65.7 grams of dead matter per second, which translates into a real increase in
the objects size of between 18 to 10.3 grams per second, with a total growth volume
of 0.10 cubic metres per day;
c) the sculpture which will continuously recite the most beautiful poems conceived by
humankind, through the dolls mouth will behave accordingly; that is, it will satisfy its
primordial needs, repeating the human gestures of eating, procreation, defecation, etcetera,
although in this case such needs are simply an contrivance to improve the recital of the
poems. (Rather than being a repulsive simulacrum of a human being, as one could initially
think, the sculpture will be the result of thousands and thousands of years of civilisation);
d) only on very rare occasions, in spite of its inevitable contact with the outside world, will it
take up the submachine gun or spill a single drop of its precious human blood in defense of a
just cause.
e) as the possessor of a poetic soul, the creature will often emerge from the bosom of the
earth and, with is hairy arms (essential for the art of recital), choose a rose or a lily of the field;
f) the creature will explode, with disastrous results, on the very day that it finishes reciting all of
the poems recorded on the magnetic tape.
(Translated by Nuria Rodrguez)
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Skulptur mit komprimierter Stimme (Sculpture with compressed voice), Eninger Weide (Reutlingen),
October 7, 1968, from the series Subterranean Sculpture, 1966-1969
Text of the work, English translation:
The object deposited here which can only be seen on nights of extreme sensitivity is
somewhat like a glittering spiral that reflects thousands of birds in flight. It is actually a cylinder
1
measuring 99 meters in length, with an 11 meter diameter and lined with miroleg . The
authors voice and Stockhausens Song of the Youths have been hermetically sealed within
2
it, along with a fistful of IBK . The cylinder, with 200 microcomputers functioning in its base, is
placed in an oblique position 44 meters below the ground, at an angle of 75 degrees due East.
At pre-programmed intervals, the computerised system will transform the recitative voice into
blue light, or inner light. Not even the most corrosive infiltrations of the ground beneath it, not
coal, not, iron, and not the ashes of the dead in both world wars, should alter its precious
contents. Until the day when it flies off towards its distant destination, taking with it the
reflection of thousands of earthly birds, the music and the voice of a man who climbed the
green hill of Eningen on October 7, 1968. (Translated by Nuria Rodrguez)
Rafael Hastings (1945, PE)
Untitled, 1970
Documentation of the installation, three photos, Courtesy: Miguel Lpez/Emilio Tarazona Archive
A newspaper announced the artist's solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Lima under
the headline 'Hastings to judge Peruvian painting', highlighting the fact that he renounced painting.
Hastings exhibited two sets of diagrams: one panel related to the evolution of Peruvian painting; the
other diagram contained data relating to the life of Peruvian art critic Juan Acha, openly exposing the
role of the critic as just one of many elements in the system of social and political relations that
permanently constitute the art system.
Projet de non-ralisation (Non executable project), 1971
Print on paper, 114 x 84 cm., Courtesy: Private collection
Non-executable Project is part of a series of projects that the artist carried out around the role of
criticism, conceptual' art and audiences. It is a work conceived to be sent by post and/or distributed as
photocopies, which could be exhibited anywhere, and which Hastings created in response to French
critic Jean Marc Poinsots invitation to participate in his Mail Art exhibition organised for the Paris
Biennale in 1971. Hastings explicitly addressed this conceptual art work to Poinsot without actually
mentioning his name in order to confront the role of the critic, who he sarcastically challenges to
'resolve' or 'complete' the work.
Taller E.P.S. Huayco (Francisco Mariotti, Maria Luy, Rosario Noriega, Herbert Rodrguez, Juan
Javier Salazar, Armando Williams, Mariela Zevallos), 19801982
Arte al paso (Art on the way), 1980
Documentation of painting on the surface of 10,000 empty cans of evaporated milk, Courtesy:
Francisco Mariotti
Sarita Colonia, 1980
Documentation of Painting of the portrait of unofficial saint Sarita Colonia on the surface of 12,000
empty cans of evaporated milk, Courtesy: Francisco Mariotti
In 1979 a group of young artists began to carry out a series of projects combining experimentation
with poor materials with a reworking of the imaginary of urban and popular icons, from the political
left. This was the start of the E.P.S Huayco workshop, which would remain active for almost two years.
One of its most important projects was Art on the Way, presented at Galera Forum in Lima. The
artists reproduced images of salchipapas, a kind of fast-food, by creating a carpet of painted tins that
covered the floor, referring to the dots of color used in Pop art. They also circulated a manifesto with a
text by left-wing critic Mirko Lauer that confronted the bourgeois taste of art.
1
2
29
Not long after this, the artists reproduced the image of a non-official saint, Sarita Colonia, who was
worshipped by a broad community of migrants to Lima, and by marginalised social groups. The image,
again placed on tins, was presented this time at the Panamericana Sur highway: the landscape of a
migration route soon becoming a site of pilgrimage for many of the faithful.
Text about Art on the way by Mirko Lauer:
Art on the way. Take One
Art on the way: it doesnt fill you up, you wont need a siesta, in the midst of everyday activity
for an instant it will help you satisfy an urgent hunger that goes beyond conventional media
genres and boldly explores beyond strictly aesthetic realms. At a time when galleries flourish
and each new exhibition is more conventional than the last, this combination of screen prints,
industrial waste, theoretical formulas, photos and sellers of salchipapa [a kind of sausage and
potato fast-food] screams out that the reality of art is more complex than the reality of the Fine
Arts' or the Plastic Arts. It also tells us that the visual forms of the new sensibility of the
people are writ everywhere: in the unsubstantial films that advertising agencies design to
stultify us, in the forms and metamorphosis of the already-consumed, in the beset shapes of
objects handled by the oppressed. Today the most up-to-date visual forms are those of
merchandise, which contains within its colours, its textures, the everyday history of
exploitation.
Art on the way: a response, an effort to destroy what has grown old retaining its best aspects.
Critical of galleries in an attempt to save them from their status as mere display windows for
fleeting commercial transactions, the legendary fifteen days that lie between the artists
workshop and the buyer's gallery: what matters most here cannot be sold. Critical of the
famous religious-expressionist methods that show young artists how to feel rather than
think: here lies the work of plastic artists who approach their own and societys problems, and
try to resolve them politically through the visual. Critical of the role of the plastic artist as a
maker of a particular product, proposing instead a kind of work that begins with the visual and
projects itself into all areas of culture: the creator is an agitator, unloved by the enemies of the
peoples freedom. Critical also of the false modernity of the imported. Only the popular is truly
modern in Peru today.
Art on the way: an environmental exercise revealing the umbilical cord that connects the
waste of the city to the art of the city; in the midst of tins that are empty when they reach the
shantytowns and then find their way to the gallery, painted, and will return to the shantytown
tomorrow painted, so that for once they will be full when they reach the shantytown. An
ecosystem exists among the waste, food and art, and it must be revealed with increasing
clarity. Just as the double edge of advertising forms must be revealed: they are the very image
of abundance for some, the very image of need for others. Here, art wants to see itself
reflected in the double face of the visual, which is often its own double face also. In a medium
that had lost the political drive in art since the 50s, Luy, Mariotti, Noriega, Salazar and
Zevallos are among the truly new and valuable things in todays plastic arts. And not because
we are now dazzled by their forms fresh and undoubtedly high quality in a kind of parade
of avant-garde novelties, but because they express themselves in relation with the
fundamental reality of art in Latin America, poverty.
Art on the way: a collective work effort and a proposal for a new relationship among artists and
between artists and their work. Not a group working under any old heading within the fiction of
'the collective', but a true division of labour and a process of debate that even ends up
changing individual directions. Today, one of the outstanding characteristics that defines
young plastic artists in Peru is their isolation, their neglect at the hands of theorists, their nonexistent access to information, their weakness in the face of a plastic arts market that is
starting to regain its power as the State begins to be run directly by entrepreneurs. Young
plastic artists must come together, they must learn the disciplines of collective work, precisely
in order to safeguard their individualities, which will otherwise be gradually flattened by the
fashions that update markets or by the stagnation of those doomed to follow these fashions.
Art on the way: is not comfortable, is not likeable, does not dazzle; but for a few days it is the
point of convergence for some of plastic arts biggest hopes in Peru: today it is the work of five
people, but its spirit is the spirit of many artists who have talent but not success equally
important it is the spirit of a growing sense of being fed up with the 'dumb art' that
generations of paintbrush specialists try to perpetuate. Art on the way: can be taken away, but
there is only one way to do it: put it in your mouth through your eyes, and chew it up as you
go. (Translated by Nuria Rodrguez)
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Grupo Parntesis (Lucy Angulo, Fernando Bedoya, Emei [Mecedes Idoyaga], Jos Antonio
Morales, Rosario Noriega, Juan Javier Salazar, Ral Villavicencio), founded and disbanded in
1979.
Proyecto mecenas (Patron Project), 1979 [10-03-79 / 18-03-79 / 25-03-79]
Three newspapers adverts, 58 x 37 cm. each one, Courtesy: Museo de Arte de Lima Collection,
Contemporary Art Acquisitions Committee 2008
Grupo Parntesis made its first appearance in Lima with the publication of three advertisements
inserted into the cultural section of El Comercio a newspaper with a large circulation among the
middle and upper classes containing the phrase: Plastic artists seek patron. The phrase includes
an ironic play on words ('me'-'cenas', roughly 'you dine me'), aimed at the plastic arts market in Lima.
Herbert Rodrguez (1959, PE)
Per, 1984
Assemblage, 62 x 96 x 46 cm., Courtesy: Herbert Rodrguez
Tenga esa figura que siempre so (Get the figure you ever dream of), 1983-1984 ca.
Photomontage, 36 x 25 cm., Courtesy: Herbert Rodrguez
Taller y Proyecto Arte-Vida (Workshop and Project Art-Life), 1986-1991
Documentation of the workshop and intervention in public space, Courtesy: Herbert Rodrguez
From the mid-80s Herbert Rodrguez, an ex-member of Taller E.P.S Huayco, carried out a series of
precarious works in response to the internal violence in Peru, which combined images of sex, politics
and religion. In 1986, he began the project Art-Life at the Carpa Teatro in Puente Santa Rosa (Lima),
through an experimental materials workshop to create precarious objects and photomontages in
different public spaces, with an aesthetic influenced by punk and dada. Since 1988, he moved his
workspace to the University of San Marcos and then to the Catholic University and other exterior
spaces, from which he produced mural newspapers and paintings as a space of resistance and
struggle against discouragement and death.
LUZCA BELLA CADVERES (LOOK BEAUTIFUL CORPSES), 1984-2000
Book made of photocopies, 42,5 x 30 cm., Courtesy: Herbert Rodrguez
Since 1984, Herbert Rodrguez created a series of photocopied notebooks consisting of dozens of
collages and photomontages made from photographs, phrases and fragments of text from the press,
conceived as a kind of chronicle of death. LOOK BEAUTIFUL CORPSES is a compilation of several of
his early notebooks and can be read as an alternative, subversive and politically incorrect story of the
internal violence between 1980 and 1992. Its rough aesthetic is antithetical to recent attempts by the
official Peruvian cultural powers-that-be to review war crimes.
TO THE PUBLIC OPINION, ca. 1988
Manifesto; English translation:
Violence continues to increase...
... as does passivity, indifference !!!
SEX AND VIOLENCE the most profitable trade, selling hypocrisy
innocent consumer goods: detergents, fashionable clothes, an exclusive restaurant...
all of it like an obscene illusory world in the face of the
CORPSES-DISEASES-POVERTY of our everyday lives.
(disconnected discourses, avalanche of images)
why this swindle? why try to translate into words and images the rage, the impotence,
the anguish caused by the lack of harmony in people and in the world?...,
an idiotic exercise in this pretentious discourse!
VISUAL PROMISCUITY... such pleasure! to strip back reality,
strip back the putrid authoritarian-dogmatic-paternalistic discourses that
insist on dictating the norms of good and bad, of what we should think, of what we should
desire, of what we should be...
we assert ourselves in our intuitions,
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WORKS (SELECTION)
All texts if not otherwise noted: Ileana Pintilie
All english translations: Dana Chetrinescu Percec
Horia Bernea (1938, RO; 2000, F)
Berneas works from 1968 to 1972 are regarded by the artist as a personal artistic ideology, an
individualistic act of detachment and protest against the communist ideology that all artists had to
display during official exhibitions. The exhibited objects and the paintings seem to be remains of some
experimental actionhighly conceptual and abstract, which he called an iconography after
knowledgeposited in conceptual expressionism.
Untitled, 1972
Mixed technique on canvas, 112.5 x 63 cm, inv. 308
Object, 19701971
Metal, painted plaster, 44 x 42 x 4 cm
Shroud, 19701971
Metal structure, painted canvas, 196 x 196 x 17 cm
Two photos
b/w, 20 x 30 cm each, 1972
Horia Bernea in his studio among the works dating from this period.
Constantin Flondor (RO; 1936, UA)
A member of the most important experimental groups in Romania during the nineteen-sixties and
seventies (The Group 111 and The Sigma Group), Flondor is a multimedia artist with an interest in
various visual experiments, ranging from constructivism and op art to land art. The photos taken
during those years are the result of complex visual research, sometimes with a performative character,
which is even more conspicuous in certain films (Bolting and Modelling), while in other films the artist
tries to analyze visual perception.
Andplevision, 1979
DVD recording of a two-channel film projection, S8mm, color, 7 24
The film is based on a collage of experimental images shot on various occasions. It offers a survey of
the artists visual research done during the constructivist period and also of natural structures turned
into objects of study and employed in future works.
I You Witness (The Visual Consciousness), 1979
DVD recording of a three-channel film projection, S8mm, color, 13 6
An experimental film about the visual perception regarded as Trionticity (after the theory of
perception elaborated by the Romanian psychiatrist Eduard Pamfil), postulating the existence of
several visual consciousnesses.
Bolting and Modelling, 1985
S8mm on DVD, color, 5 24
Anno-Aversion, January 26, 1982
S8mm on DVD, b/w, 2 30
Anno-Aversion was occasioned by dictator Nicolae Ceauescus birthday. The communist leader used
to be celebrated on a national scale, with the involvement of all of the media. The national TV channel
in particular, which had only two hours of daily broadcasting, was consumed entirely by this event. The
title is a punon a genuine anniversary and a stomachache. The artist is seated in front of the black
screen of the national TV channel at a table full of dairy products which were unavailable in those
times. When the broadcast begins, the food suddenly vanishes . . .
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38
forms greater than that of skirts and even cleavages, detaching themselves from the rest of
the body.
The more its demands on my personality, the more I tell it: I give you everything, which is to
say, independence and authority, but not space, there are also others in the body. (Ion
Grigorescu; translated by Dana Chetrinescu Percec)
Mimicry, 1976
N8mm film on DVD, 1
Boxing, 1977
N8mm film on DVD, 2 44
Boxing dwells on the theme of the double. The artist is boxing, knocking out his alter ego shrunk to the
size of a mere shadow.
In Our Beloved Bucharest, 1977
N8mm film on DVD, 14
Grigorescu uses a hidden camera to make a documentary film of life in the capital, seen from tram no.
26. The film was made in 1977, after the earthquake that had struck the city and engendered a series
of systematic demolitions for the dictators megalomaniac project of erecting a new town on the ruins
of the historical center.
Dialogue with Ceauescu, 1978
N8mm film on DVD, 7 11
In Dialogue with Ceauescu the artist plays two opposing roles, in one of which he is wearing a mask
with the face of Ceauescu.
English translation of the texts used in the film:
If the people cannot rule they should at least criticize!
I: In the last days you were speaking about the peoples content.
Ceausescu : Yes, there is a content created by the stimulated consumption, sometimes by the
lack. We are creating needs where the man is easiest to be scared at food. However the
country is hierarchized so that those who live in villages should be the most starved, but are
accustomed to endure; their civilization, is it still existing, is not based on food, nor on other
needs from today services. Its simply a handicap with which we are fighting and will not be set
on the progress way by equalizing the level of the country and the town. It is a matter of
economic objective laws.
I: These objective laws result from too simple speculation: who is exploited in the newest
relations the proletariat, would be destined to defeat exploitation and to be the future leader,
but now reality changes: the proletariat is too bound to the bourgeoisie to invent something
else than exploitation.
Ceausescu: We are those who suppressed property of the means of production.
I: You did anything but pushed by your bourgeois materialist side; exploitation is more
complex: on 2nd March 1978 at 8 oclock a.m. I saw two women pushing a full tomberon with
mud and juxtaposed the two or three visits at the presidential palace in the same day, where
militians pulled the begging childrens ears. Woman delinquency is very high we can speak
about pauperization. Of course there is no legal property but Carpati trust with buildings,
workshops and technical equipment, there are tenths of orders that submit all the enterprises
to the trusts needs, a lot of people are employees in this trust in slave conditions, not in the
sense they dont have access to this fortune, but these people are bought and sold for life.
What I mean by owning their lives is the partys own jurisdiction outside the law, trials without
public or defenders, and to the fact that the debts accumulated like that hide a capital
punishment. Too many people passed through prison.
Ceausescu: Only few men resist transformations!
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I: The only statements about people are: one cannot perform miracles over night (Brasov,
1978) and in comparison with 1938 But the poets are singing only miracles made over
night. Our dialogue, the dialogue is necessary because nevertheless there is a truth and a
science with which one analyses the social reality.
Ceausescu: Romania is fastened in the girth of the international economic relations, and
dependent of the pressure of the very developed countries, on their credits or crisis.
I: If a revolution would take place here would we go on the path the other countries are? That
is progress, ware, accumulation, investment.
Ceausescu: We make an original experience in original conditions, where the anarchy itself
co-operates in planning. Progress doesnt mean the capitalist one! Maybe the revolution
doesnt exist because the town was crushed by our most agrarian economy. Your proposals of
anti-capitalism (no to accumulation, no to the progress) not only will lead to misery and
general decay, inasmuch would be in economic isolation, but it NEGLECTS even which is
SOCIALISM: the GUARANTEE OF THE STABILITY (which could be your dream about the
lack of progress) on the path of collective responsibility on the enterprise and its proportion.
I: At least would seem to the people that you wish a capitalism for all: you encourage the
property of the apartments, autos, furniture, household apparatus, you are trimming the town
with stores. What stupefies those who follow you and strive to understand why you sustain
the systems superiority is your behavior of great capitalist you are always speaking about
economy, inspecting business, asking discipline, you are a great employer thirsty of
speculations in a stock exchange to whom you are the only investor, you only see men as
unhappy meanwhile you throw them in the circuit labor-buying power, proletarians-consumers.
Ceausescu: I dont understand why you dont observe the qualitative difference between our
today society and the one in the very developed countries when they were in the situation you
are speaking about. Poor peasantry and industrial proletariat from the outskirts and often the
middle of the town, the broad masses of men ruined by exploitation, war and economic crisis
ARE TODAY RAISED UP TO THE LESS TWO STEPS, they live in a block of flats with
reasonable cleanliness and minimum house comfort. To attain this end we had to give them
some work, in other words to offer a source of honest and continuous income featuring to
climb up the social hierarchy. Which is the aim of these salubrization and moral economy? We
really are a society based on economy, whose values are at first material ones.
I: You are the exponent of a minority the suburb one and will remain as such because the
services will always constitute in the stipulated system a majority beside the working class.
You overlooked the peoples yearnings, disinterested in economic efforts, they are rich people
in spite of your vision. A richness you dont know and what is worst, you are destroying it
unconsciously. There was material richness and today the food is a kind of rubbish. There was
a social richness. Today the peoples unity is only a slogan. Social classes are deeply
disunited, working is repulsive (in fact the conditions; there is a confusion between labor and
its conditions). In services there is corruption, so that the general atmosphere is antisocial.
The intellectuals who were about to rebirth in 1968-70 and were a social richness, are now
deviated they are people who repeat texts by heart. Our real phenomena became non
understandable, the intellectuals have no connection with the workers, they dont defend
them, they arent solidary not even between them. Romania has no intellectuals yet strange
preconsciousness of the party the new man will come the party said. This is why one
demolishes so much around us. (Ion Grigorescu; translated by Dana Chetrinescu Percec)
Pavel Ilie (1927, RO; 1995, CDN)
Pavel Ilie is an artist with a peculiar presence in Romanian art of the early nineteen-seventies. His
artistic endeavor capitalized on the concept and placed it above its forms of visual manifestation, be it
in drawing and photography or in object and environment. The successive forms the objects can take
are only work hypothesestransitory moments of an intuitive process, subject to creation. Ilie also
emphasized the fact that these open visual forms can be altered according to various conceptual and
artistic desiderata.
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Ritual-Performances (1970-1978)
16 photo documentations of the ritual-performances Horizontal Rain, Cake-man, Going
Tornado, Ramp, and Blinde Bite, Courtesy: Paul Neagu
For his ritual-performance the artist made himself a costume with many small transparent
pockets in which he habitually put messages for the public. These messages suggested "the
level of human communication" and their development within society. In the performance
series Gradually Going Tornado combining performances, drawings and other art forms ,
the artist like a dervish brought together all disparate parts in a circular movement.
GAG Generative Art Group (UK, 1970-1975)
In his British exile Neagu invented the Generative Art Group (GAG). The artist publicly
declared that he had founded a group of five artists, going as far as to give the names of his
four partners. For a few years, he supported this fictitious group, exhibiting and publishing
works in various "styles", all of them signed by the members of the GAG.
Dan Perjovschi (1961, RO)
Confessional, 19861994
Rolls of black plastic
Courtesy: Lombard Fried Gallery, New York
Confessional is an installation from the nineteen-eighties in which the artist uses long strips of drawn
paper for his drawings of caricature-like, schematic figures, the strips of paper being arranged in the
form of an enclosed space.
Red Apples, 1988
Series of 7 photos, b/w, 17 x 12 cm each
Photo: Dorel Gaina; Courtesy: Lombard Fried Gallery, New York
Red Apples was an intervention in the artists apartment in Oradea, Romania, where he lived with his
wife Lia, consisting of a wrapping up in white paper of their dwelling. On the paper support he drew
and wrote texts about the couple. The bed, the bedside table, the windows, and the TV set were
covered in large sheets of paper. On the TV set he drew a new screen and two twin figures
contemplating the room. The couple lived in this space for two weeks. Taking up the subject of
intimacy, the action also indirectly referred to the artists desire to isolate himself from the social and
political context.
Romania, 1993, Timioara
Removing Romania, 2003, Kassel
Wall installation with video (b/w, color) and letter
Courtesy: Gregor Podnar Gallery, Ljubljana.
The feeling of fear and frustration in Perjovschis earlier work reached a climax in the years following
1990, when in Romania everything that had been silenced for such a long time came to surface.
Under this impression he carried out in 1993 at the Zone Performance Festival in Timioara his antiperformance (Perjovschi) Romania, in which he tattooed the countrys name on his shoulder. Ten
years later in the context of Ren Blocks show In den Schluchten des Balkans (In the Gorges of the
Balkan), he decided to remove the tattoo. The surgical procedure of the new work entitled Removing
Romania consisted of laser bombardment of the tattoo, each black dot splitting into millions of pieces
and each of the pieces carried away through his skin by molecules. Perjovschis idea was that the
tattoo would not be erased but instead spread throughout his whole body.
The Sigma Group (Constantin Flondor, tefan Bertalan, Doru Tulcan), 19701978
Initiated in 1970, Sigma was the only experimental group in Romania to conduct research targeted at
the Bauhaus model, geared toward the visual language based on form. Although it had more
numerous membership in the beginning, in 1974 the group was reduced to its three senior members,
with Bertalan and Flondor having been, in fact, the founders and also followers of the Group 111 spirit.
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Multivision, 19721978
Video of a studio reconstruction of the original shooting place, sound, 15 45
First presented in 1978 at the exhibition Study I in Timioara, the work consists of experimental
recordings of natural phenomena (waterdrops, soap bubbles, etc.) on S8mm, edited with a sound
track and texts read by the three members of the group in turn, as well as by Eduard Pamfil, a
psychiatrist and the head of a bionic society. The film was presented with two projectors on ten
semitransparent screens, in an environment created by the artists. Due to its performative character,
there were only three projections under the original conditions (Timioara, Cluj, 1979 and Bucharest,
1980).
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WORKS (SELECTION)
All texts unless otherwise noted: Valentn Roma
Ricardo Bofill/ Taller de Arquitectura
Esquizo (Schizo), 1970
Film on DVD, 80
A study of the relationship between art and madness. An experimental documentary on the structure
of a brain, the disquiet of an artist and his distorted vision of the world. The film describes the horror of
the human condition, a mere instant between nothingness and nothingness.
COAC Space, Barcelona
The exhibition hall of the COAC (Association of Architects of Catalonia) was during the 1970s a space
which held numerous performances, workshops and lectures that discussed the role of the new artistic
languages in Barcelona.
Manuel Vzquez Montalbn
Report about information, 1965
In 1965, during his imprisonment in Lerida, Vzquez Montalbn wrote the Report about information,
perhaps the first book that analyzes the political and economic role of the media in Spain. This study
was strongly perceived by some conceptual artists who, at that time, began to critically question the
role of the media.
Antoni Muntadas (USA; 1942, E)
Reflexes sobre a morte (Reflections on Death), 1973
Slide projection with 80 slides
Courtesy: Muntadas/Collection: Museu de Arte Contempornea da Universidade de So Paulo, Brazil
Pere Portabella
Mir, laltre (Mir, the other), 1969
Script: Pere Portabella, Photography: Manuel Esteban, Music: Carles Santos, Editing: Teresa Alcocer,
Production: Jos Pedro Villanueva / Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Barcelona (COAC) / Films 59
One of the most significant projects at COAC was the film Miro, the other (1969) by Pere Portabella,
who recorded the action paintings of Joan Mir at the front glass of the building and the removal of
the same, carried out by the artist himself.
This short film not only records this polemic, artistic performance by Mir, it also sets forth a
conceptual axis, a combative, ideological intervention at the intersection of two views, which Pere
Portabella also articulates in another of his clandestine films against the Franco regime (the editing
por retroceso and the repetition of shots does not allow it to be understood as a realistic record of an
event or as a simple document). By confiding in the setting and the expressive materials of the
cinema, Pere Portabella eliminates any kind of verbal discourse in order to stick to the images and the
music as the only way to elaborate his small political manifesto. In this manner, the black & white/color
dichotomy functions like a surrealistic mechanism in the fight against the dictatorship (this dichotomy
is found in several short films and in a feature length by Pere Portabella during this period but
disappears from his films after the death of Franco). The initial images in this film, shot in the interior of
the building are in black and white, while there is color during the creation of this urban work, on the
windows of the Architects Association in primary colors, when Mir superimposes messy strokes and
spatters of a deep black. On the street, in front of a crowd of curious onlookers, Mir darkens the
chromatic joy of the buildings images, forming a graffiti of denouncement, a black protest gesture that
is almost expressionist, while at the same time he creates a break with the projected well-being and
the public norms of urban behavior during the dictatorship. This breaking-away gesture self-annihilates
(again now in black & white) as Mir himself erases his strokes, in order to reveal how the survival of
such impertinence is impossible in this context. The short film ends in black & white images of Mir
inside the building, again enclosed in a grey space, ostracized in his own country, a metaphor of the
impossibility of prolonging the subversion of the social order ruled by totalitarianism. By propagating
the ritual until the present, Pere Portabella transcended that limit: a film that combats a time of
censorship.
(Diego Trerotola, in: http://www.pereportabella.com/eng/laltre_esp.html)
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Grup de Treball
Francesc Abad, Jordi Benito, Jaume Carb, Alcia Fingerhut, Xavier Franquesa, Carles Hac Mor,
Imma Julin, Antoni Mercader, Antoni Munn, Muntadas, Josep Parera, Santi Pau, Pere Portabella,
ngels Rib, Manuel Rovira, Enric Sales, Carles Santos, Dorothe Selz and Francesc Torres
The appearance of Grup de Treball marked a turning point in Catalan culture. First, for their work as a
collective and, second, for their interest in moving away from conventional artistic practices and joining
a critical current where art had to fulfil a social function. Their brief contribution was made in a setting
characterised by an unstable political climate, which coincided with the hardening of repression that
marked the last years of the Franco dictatorship.
Grup de Treball set out to distance itself from the usual distribution channels of works of art.
Whenever possible they used the press to publish their communiqus and set up information centres
at their exhibitions.
Champ d'attraction. Document. Travail dinformation sur la presse illgale des Pays Catalans. 9
Biennale de Paris (Field of Attraction. Information work on the illegal press in Catalonia. 9th Paris
Biennial), 1975
Photography, sticker of colours, 11 copies, each 143,5 x 92,5 cm
Courtesy: MACBA, Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona
Shown for the first time at the IX Paris Biennial (1975) and later at the 1976 Venice Biennale and the
exhibition Venice Biennale. Art avantgarde and social reality in Spain 1936-1976 (1976-1977), this
work contains an analysis of the situation of the Catalan illegal press through images, graphic
elements, texts and a wide selection of copies of underground publications.
The passing of the terrorism law in 1975 and the declaration of the state of emergency meant that the
work had to be presented unsigned, which, once the Paris Biennial had finished, brought about the
end of the activities of Grup de Treball. Owing to the Spanish political situation and the dangerously
political character of the work, the text that was designed to appear in the Paris catalogue was not
published; two pages were left blank for fear of repression.
Treball collectiu que consisteix a verificar la distribuci de 44 professions entre 113 persones segons
una nota apareguda ltimament a la premsa (Collective work consisting of checking the distribution of
44 professions among 113 people according to a report which had appeared recently in the press),
1973
Paper work, 7 pages, each 29,7 x 19,3 cm
Courtesy: MACBA, Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona
This work is a distribution of the professions of the 113 members of the Catalan Assemblytwo of
whom belonged to Grup de Treballwho were arrested in the church of Santa Maria Mitjancera in
Barcelona in August 1973 and was included in the catalogue-dossier for the exhibition Terrassa, Art
Information. It is therefore a proposal in which specific condemnation is approached from procedures
related in some way to visual poetry.
Homenatge a l'arquitectura (Homage to Architecture), 1975
Paper work, variables dimensions
Courtesy: MACBA, Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona
This intervention was done using the official poster for the exhibition Homage to Architecture as
support. From a kind of conceptual diagram, Grup de Treball analyses its participation and makes a
frontal attack on the exhibition organization structures and their mechanisms for controlling the artists.
Cartell del col.lectiu "Solidaritat amb el moviment obrer (Poster by the Solidarity with the Workers
Movement collective), 1973
Paper work, 50 x 80 cm
Courtesy: MACBA, Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona
Published by the Solidarity with the Workers Movement collective to raise funds, this poster was
distributed clandestinely on the occasion of the anniversary of the Second Spanish Republic of 1934.
The work, which includes the entries repressi (repression), repressiu-iva (repressive) and repressor
-a (repressor), taken from the Pompeu Fabra Catalan Dictionary, recalls works that reflect on the
relation between language and art.
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47
Tomorrow is Evidence!
Curators
Annamria Szke, Mikls Peternk
Artists
Gbor Altorjay, Lszl Beke (Archiv), CAYC Hungary, Mikls Erdly, Indigo Group, IPUT
(superintendent: Tamas St. Auby), Gyula Pauer
The centrally administered institutional system of the art world between the 1960s and 1980s in
Hungary were determined by the ideology of the state party, which was exercised not only through the
cultural officials, juries, and the press, but also with the help of informers and agents enlisted into the
political deterrence. Albeit beginning in the 1960s a
gradual liberalization was discernible in all areas of culture, the principal method of Gyrgy Aczl
(the influential cultural politician) remained in force up until the collapse of socialism. In the second half
of the 1960s, in opposition to the official first public sphere of artists, another second public sphere
began to take shape including samizdat publications as well as exhibitions, educational lectures,
actions, art courses, film screenings and concerts that were organized in private homes, cellars,
studios, cultural houses, clubs, and various institutions connected with universities. Furthermore the
artists of the second public sphere established manifold networks towards foreign art scenes:
through personal connections and information that was spread by word of mouth or correspondence.
The works selected for this section were in their one-time circumstances subversive in many senses.
We are curious, however, to see whether they could be considered subversive today. Here, the
partially destroyed (Pauer), vanished (Erdly), ephemeral (Indigo) or simply never realized (Altorjay)
works of art figure together with works that were presented in Hungary or abroad. They are presented
in their original, recreated, or reenacted versions, the latter being undertaken by the artists
themselves, referring to events of present-day time. (Annamria Szke, Mikls Peternk; Title: Gyula
Pauer: Protest-Sign Forest, 49)
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WORKS (SELECTION)
All texts unless otherwise noted: Annamria Szke, Mikls Peternk
Gbor Altorjay (D; 1946, HU)
15 Actions for Marta Minujin, 1967
Gbor Altorjay began his career as a poet in the first half of the 1960s. From 1966 till 1967, he wrote
numerous scripts for happenings, actions, as well as for a fluxus-concert. He escaped to Germany in
1967, lived for a short time in Stuttgart and worked later together with Wolf Vostell in Cologne. The
figure of the Argentinean artist, Marta Minujin, which he saw on a photograph and which for him
symbolized freedom, independence and beauty, prompted him to offer his 15 actions to Minujin in the
summer of 1967. The premiere of 15 Actions for Marta Minujin was held on October 12, 2007 in the
aula and screening room of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest, as part of the event
series entitled The Time of an Artwork/The Artwork through Time. Altorjay met Marta Minujin for the
first time in 2009 in Stuttgart.
Script, English translation
1) Lets put on a crash-helmet. Lets tie our feet together with a rope flung over a pulley thats
at least 3 meters tall while we pull ourselves under the pulley with the other end of the rope
and lift our bodies up by our feet, then lower ourselves back, then up again, as long as we can
endure it. Meanwhile we should look around and say to ourselves: I SHOULD SINK
UPWARDS!
2) Lets strive to fulfill someones wish.
3) Lets cover our faces with band-aids. Lets fix portraits of ourselves above our hearts and
ask someone to pull the band-aids off our faces carefully.
4) Lets ask someone about the colors of the rainbow and after every color light up a new
cigarette.
5) Lets close our eyes and screech.
6) Lets blow up balloons with a vacuum cleaner. Paste newspapers, postcards and maps all
over the balloons. Pop the balloons.
7) Lets wash someones feet.
8) Lets go to the movies. In the dark, lets put on rubber gloves and think of MARTA MINUJIN.
(Lets throw an inflatable doll into the audience and yell: MARTA MINUJIN!)
9) Lets weigh ourselves and write the figure on our foreheads with charcoal. Lets spread
newspapers on the ground and lie down on them, cover ourselves with newspapers and
shave (or trim our nails).
10) Lets plunge our heads under water and leave them there until we can no longer endure it.
Lets then whisper to someone standing next to us what went through our minds when we
were under water and ask him/her to repeat it in a loud voice.
11) Lets stick tape on our television screens. Lets paint them silver. Lets pull off the tape.
12) Lets lick our knee three times and spit to get rid of the unpleasant, salty taste.
13) Lets readjust our watches by 4 minutes and then attempt to answer the question in 4
minutes: IS NUCLEAR WAR BETTER THAN HAPPENING?
14) Lets listen to the first acts of two operas simultaneously.
15) Look out the window and think of me; look into the refrigerator and think of me; look at
your fist and think of me; look at the calendar and think of me, look into the mirror and think of
me.
Anyone, anytime, anywhere, in any order.
(1967, Gabor Altorjay, Translated by Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszk)
Mikls Erdly
Solidarity Action, 1972
Script of a concept realized in photo-montage and statistical tables
English translation
1. It is generally known that war is institutionalized murder or rather, institutions become
murderous in war.
2. Institutions are established for the purpose of serving people, but in our days they have
become the masters, determinants, and often the murderers of people.
49
3. Along with retaining the useful role of institutions, people should be given the opportunity to
express their superiority to institutions.
4. When each person makes the same gesture at the same time, a form of human solidarity
manifests itself which reaches beyond leaders and the led, conflicting states or groups, or
guards and the guarded, a solidarity which shows that, for instance, the similarity between the
prisoner and the warder is greater than between the warder and the prison, or between the
prisoner and captivity.
5. According to the logic of massacre, if everybody kills two persons, all of humankind can be
exterminated in thirty-two moves, considering that a person cannot be killed twice.
6. If each soldier kills two persons on the average, at least half of the victims will be people
who have not killed anybody irrespective of the number of those involved in the battle. (The
number of innocent victims will be the same in the case as well, if each killer kills always a
killer and an innocent person which proves the absurdity of revenge.) And the weapons of
mass destruction distort this proportion to an incredible extent.
7. The diagram of massacre is like a reversed genealogical tree. The last killer alive could not
have been the cause of the chain reaction of massacre, as the whole process is over by the
time he appears on the scene. It looks rather as if the numerous innocent victims (in the last
row of the diagram) are those who start and cause the murderous process. This is the reverse
of the genealogical tree, where the ancestral progenitor is obviously the cause of all the
descendants.
8. The way of defence is the following: each man is to warn two other persons in case of
emergency. According to the principle that a man cannot be killed twice, they have to be
individually marked (as Gring recommends in the case of the pacifists). In this way it is
avoidable that a person is informed twice while others are kept in the dark.
9. If everybody marks only two persons without using any institutional and communicational
means, all people in the world can be warned in a very short time and they will be able to
defend themselves collectively. At a given moment, the siren-test of solidarity runs around the
world.
10. Let us fill the dead numbers of statistics with life!
(Translated by Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszk)
The Indigo Group
(Blint Bori, Zoltn Lbas, Jnos Sugr)
Temporary Sculpture Made of Styropor. The reconstruction of the 1981 Temporary Sculpture Made of
Cotton Wool, Budapest Berlin, 2009
Site-specific installation, styropor, wood, carbon paper used to cover the ceiling, 350 x 350 x 400 cm.
The original work was done for the exhibition entitled Hard and Soft (Post-conceptual Tendencies)
which was part of the exhibition series Tendencies, organized by Lszl Beke, buda Gallery,
Budapest, April 1430, 1981
INDIGO is the abbreviation of the Hungarian phrase interdisciplinary thinking (INterDIszciplinris
GOndolkods). This was the name of one of the artistic courses lead by Mikls Erdly from 1975 until
his death. The Indigo course transformed into a group at the beginning of the 1980s, which still exists
today. The group focused on topics that went beyond the scope of the individual tasks of art and
raised the question of the responsibility of the individual in society. The two texts distributed by Indigo
in the first half of the 1980s, the Indigo Call for Peace and the Deed of Foundation of the Voluntary
Legislative Assembly refer to this interest. In a broader or narrower sense they were linked to the
contemporary international peace movement and its ideas. The 1981 installation of the Indigo Group,
Temporary Sculpture Made of Cotton Wool, was its first work related to the threat of nuclear
annihilation.
Indigo Peace Call, ca. 1983
In: Documents on the Peace Movement in Hungary. Edited by Hugh Baldwin. London: European
Nuclear Disarmament Hungary Working Group, 1986. pp. 1213.: Section II: Artists & Peace The
Indigo Group.
English translation
[1] Appeals and statements about the nuclear threat to humanity are little more than
hackneyed phrases. Their form and rhetoric are ineffectual. Instead of making the endangered
populations realize the character and the dimensions of the impending catastrophe, they dull
50
their attention. And so, since they do not understand the essence of the new situation, they
are unable to feel their responsibility for their own future; they are isolated from their own
destiny by degrees, and sink down into uneasy indifference. In these circumstances they
cannot find the right forms either for prevention or for protest.
[2] From the situation into which humanity has fallen with the stockpiling of nuclear weapons
one must draw radical conclusions, so as to break away from false and conditioned ways of
thinking. We must find the new, mobilizing and concise forms of expression, which are now
necessary.
[3] The phrase nuclear weapon is itself misleading: it assigns to military policy and
considerations mad-made forces, which, in terms of their effects, have far outgrown it. (God
created the world in six days, mankind is able to destroy it in six hours.)
[4] The nuclear threat is not a part of the questions of strategy and of world politics: it is the
other way round. The production of devices of mass destruction, whose use threatens
everyone and offers advantage to no one, cannot be justified by the interests of any nation,
class or group. It follows that those who administer those portions of the earth divided by state
boundaries or by spheres of interest have no right to make any decisions as to the production
of such devices. Such a decision is, in itself, according to the Nrnberg Convention, a crime
committed against humanity.
[5] We are facing an ontological question that is not only beyond nations, but which is of
cosmic relevance, and which cannot even be approached with the concepts of humanism
the making of a decision which brings the threat of total annihilation is forbidden in the fullest
sense of the word.
The responsibility for making such a decision is immense in proportion to all that we know and
have already achieved, but it is infinite in relation to all that we dont know and have not yet
achieved. The damage which this stored-up destructive power may cause is infinite, since it
can rob any future from the many-million-year process, the unique result of which is human
intellect. It follows that the degree of responsibility is in inverse ratio to the infinitely small
probability of the evolution of life and of human intellect. And it also follows that every single
act, however small it may be, which is aimed at the prevention of this infinite loss has, in an
ideal sense, an infinitely high value.
[6] If the question is analyzed in this way, then the disproportionate relation between cause
and consequence becomes appallingly transparent. The present situation, which brings
extreme peril to everyone and to those who exercise power as well proves that the
exercise of power is itself an illusion: the institutions, like automata, move along their own
inertial course.
It is in vain that politicians admit and declare that to store nuclear warheads cannot be
justified, either theoretically or in terms of the defence of interests: still they can do nothing
about it. Nor can the so-called peace campaign act with effect; the danger goes beyond the
alternatives of war or peace. A nuclear missile overshoots the mark in any case.
[7] There can be no doubt that the present imperiled situation was prepared by the process
that we call history. We have to accept, however, that the nuclear weapon was made at the
lowest point in history. The purpose of its invention was to stop fascism and prevent
systematic genocide.
[8] The fact that the existence of fascism brought into being a device of mass destruction
which humanity could not get rid of until now, and that the destructive capacity of this has
increased to an extent that exceeds imagination, can be seen, as an after-triumph of fascism.
[9] At the moment there is no significant power in the world that is planning systematic
genocide. Neither are we aware of either side making preparations to use the stored-up
destructive force at their disposal. It would be unpardonable folly if so much went into the
production of totally useless, but harmless, things. But the devices under discussion here are
totally harmful and totally useless.
[10] Some people speak about unnecessary panic concerning the total annihilation of
humanity, since not everybody would be destroyed in the event of an accidental nuclear war.
Yet what we should fear the least now is that if there will be a few or a few million survivors
and these vegetating beings will reproach us: It was all a false alarm! Look, we are still alive!
(Translation by Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszk)
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Playing with the System. Artistic Strategies in the GDR from 1970 to
1990
Curator
Anne Thurmann-Jajes
Artists
Auto-Perforations-Artisten, Carlfriedrich Claus, Lutz Dammbeck, Guillermo Deisler, Die Gehirne, Claus
Hnsel, Joseph W. Huber, Kanal X, Oskar Manigk, Olaf Nicolai, Csar Olhagaray, Robert Rehfeldt,
Valeri Scherstjanoi, Cornelia Schleime, Gabriele Sttzer, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt
Reflection on art in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) cannot be undertaken
without considering the related political and social situationcensorship and socialist-realist dogma as
well as control exerted by cultural officials, or the espionage activities on the part of the Ministry for
State Security. This section focuses on the reprisals to which artists were subjected, but also to the
ingenuity they employed to nevertheless always be able to continue their artistic activities, indeed with
very enigmatic, astute, and ironic allusions to the system. The postcards camouflaged as Kleingrafik
(small-format graphic art) and stamps by the mail artists offensively targeted the situation in the GDR,
but also that of the whole of Eastern Europe and of Latin America. The artists attempted to take
advantage of even the smallest opportunities for free expression, such as the Kriechgalerie (creepgallery) in Robert Rehfeldts basement during the nineteen-seventies or the living-room galleries
that came into being in the eighties. This way, on the one hand, materials could be smuggled in with
the aid of the system, for instance through customs officers; on the other hand, original-graphic
newspapers from the so-called underground were indirectly produced for interested parties in West
Germany. The ideological liberalization of the nineteen-seventies made it possible for artists to take
part in the international Mail Art Network and to participate in the graphic arts biennials held in
Ljubljana, Cracow, and Fredrikstad. Thus, over the years alternative art forms developed. While for
artists like Guillermo Deisler and Csar Olhagaray from Chile or Valeri Scherstjanoi from Russia the
GDR basically represented more freedom than their homelands, the reprisals tactics practiced by the
Ministry for State Security led many artists to abandon the country, either temporarily or permanently.
(Anne Thurmann-Jajes)
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Exhibitions Archive
TITELS
Argentine Association of Art Critics (Ed.), Art Criticism in Argentina. Organizational Aspects of Art.
Theory of Institutions, 1978
Artpool and Enciklopdia Kiad (Ed.), Gyrgy Galntai. Lifeworks, Budapest 1996
Asociacin Argentina de Crticos de Arte (Ed.), Jordanas de la Crtica, Buenos Aires 1978
Albert Batlle and Narcs Selles (Ed.), Art a Olot durant el franquisme i la transici a la monarquia
parlamentria, Museu Comarcal de la Garrotxa, Olot, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas
2007
Lszl Beke, Elkpzels, A magyar konceptmvszet kezdetei, Beke Lszl gyjtemnye, 1971; Nylt
Struktrk Egyeslet, OSAS-tranzit.hu, Budapest 2008
BS1, Oak Lodge 2009
Budapest Film-T.I.T.-Balzs Bla Stdi K-szekci (Ed.), Erdly Mikls (1928-1986). Filmek/Films,
Budapest 1988
Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation, University of Texas
Press, Austin 2007
Graciela Carnevale, Ana Longoni, Ana C. Garca, Matthijs de Bruijne (Ed.), Tucumn Arde. Eine
Erfahrung. Aus dem Archiv von Graciela Carnevale, bboks, Berlin 2004
CAYC (Ed.): Rencontre International Ouverte de Vido, 1975
CAYC (Ed.): Third International Open Encounter on Video, 1975
CAYC (Ed.): Fourth International Open Encounter on Video. Video Cayc Alternativo, 1975
CAYC (Ed.): 20 Brazilian Artists, 1976
CAYC (Ed.), Veintin Artistas Argentinos en el Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte, Ciudad
Universitaria, Mxico, D.C., 1977
CAYC (Ed.), The Group of Thirteen. Cayc at the XIV Biennal of So Paolo, 1977
CAYC (Ed.), Jorge Glusberg, Retrica del Arte Latinoamericano: Primer Congreso Iberoamericano de
Criticos y Artistas, 1978
CAYC (Ed.): Cayc Group at the Bank of Ireland, 1980
Centro Cultural Parque de Espana (Ed.), Inventario 1965-1975. Archivo Graciela Carnevale,
Barcelona 2008
Donis A. Dondis, La sintaxis de la imagen; Introduccin al alfabeto visual, Editorial Gustavo Gili, 1985
Wolfgang Eichwede (Ed.): SAMIZDAT. Alternative Kultur in Zentral- und Osteuropa: Die 60er bis 80er
Jahre, Edition Temmen, Bremen 2000
Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universitt Bremen (Ed.), Frank Eckart, Eigenart und Eigensinn;
Alternative Kulturszenen in der DDR (1980-1990), Edition Temmen, 1993
Enric Franch/Ayuntamiento de Barcelona (Ed.), Objectes disseny. Dissenys cultura, Barcelona 1991
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Florian Merk
Mikls Erdly Foundation, Budapest
Museo de Arte de Lima
Museu de Arte Contempornea da Universidade de So Paulo
Museum of Contemporary Art, Bukarest
Anton Neagu, Timioara
tefan Pelmu Collection, Bukarest
Gregor Podnar Gallery, Berlin
Ren Rehfeldt, Berlin
Pedro Snchez, Santiago de Chile
Studienzentrum fr Knstlerpublikationen, Weserburg Museum fr moderne
Kunst, Bremen
Dr. Lutz Wohlrab, Berlin
Main support by
Further Support by
Ministerium fr Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst des Landes Baden-Wrttemberg
Kulturamt der Stadt Stuttgart
Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, Berlin
SEACEX, Sociedad Estatal para la Accin Cultural Exterior, Madrid
Institut Ramon Llull, Barcelona
Kulturinstitut der Republik Ungarn, Stuttgart
Institut fr Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart
Restaurant Valle, Stuttgart
D.P.D.Culture GmbH, Berlin
WRTTEMBERGISCHER KUNSTVEREIN STUTTGART
Schlossplatz 2, 70173 Stuttgart
Fon: +49 (0)711 - 22 33 70, Fax: +49 (0)711 - 29 36 17, info@wkv-stuttgart.de
www.wkv-stuttgart.de
HOURS
Tue, ThuSun: 11 am6 pm; Wed: 11 am8 pm
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PROGRAM SYMPOSIUM
May 30 + 31, 2009
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Saturday, May 30, 2009
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1 p.m.
Exhibition tour with the artists and curators
4 p.m.
The Strategy of Anonymity: Some Remarks on Artistic Practices in Peru
Lecture by Juan Javier Salazar (video recording)
Subsequent conversation with Miguel Lpez and Emilio Tarazona
5 p.m.
Critical Rereading of So-Called Catalan Conceptualism
Conversation with Valentn Roma, Daniel Garca Andjar, Antoni Muntadas, Fernando Marz and
Jess Carrilo
6 p.m.
Traces of the Hungarian Exhibition(s) at the C AYC (Center for Art and Communication),
Buenos Aires, 197374
Lecture by Mercedes Kutasy
19:30 Uhr
Performance
Marta Minujin, Gabor Altorjay
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sunday, May 31, 2009
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1 p.m.
Around 1970 Art Was a Prison
Lecture by Horacio Zabala
2 p.m.
Artistic Strategies in the GDR, 19701990
DVD presentation by Lutz Dammbeck about the first "Leipziger Herbstsalon"; Presentation of the
alternative TV-channel Kanal X by Norbert Meissner
3:30 p.m.
Moscow Conceptual Art Online
Lecture by Sergey Letov
http://conceptualism.letov.ru
4:30 p.m.
Subversive Art as Viewed in Eastern European Romania
Lecture by Ion Grigorescu