This article examines the rise and reception of conceptual art in Argentina. Against dominant readings of the 1960s' and 70s' visual avant-gardes in Latin America, I reconsider the stakes of art's so-called “dematerialization” and its unique claim on ideology critique in the work of the Grupo Arte de los Medios [Media Art Group], a collective of young artists led by the philosopher and literary critic Oscar Masotta. Arguing for a re-historicization of the 1960s avant-garde as one that emerges as a self-reflexive reaction to the novel articulation of late capitalism in Argentina, I trace a critical continuity between the Grupo Arte de los Medios and the avant-gardist claims on the fusion of art and militant politics among its immediate successors. I suggest that the Argentinean avant-garde defined its radical political stance through a reflection on the immanent relation of structural cause to symbolic form, probing and pointing to the limits of the operation of estrangement.
This review article examines two recent books, Ver onica Gago's La potencia feminista o el deseo de cambiarlo todo (Buenos Aires, Tinta Lim on, 2019) and Diego Sztulwark's La ofensiva sensible: Neoliberalismo, populismo y el reverso de lo pol ıtico (Buenos Aires, Caja Negra, 2019). Both works approach the crisis of neoliberal governance in Argentina, and the new forms of collectivity that it has produced, as a heuristic lens for understanding the dynamics of contemporary political economy. In doing so, both authors also make important claims on their own mode of inquiry, which, derived from their earlier work as members of the Colectivo Situaciones, aims to decipher, rather than prescribe, forms of practical knowledge operating in the political situations they study. The present essay explores the way each book formulates the specificity of this knowledge and the language of its transmission.
“In Search of a Model for Life” traces a brief history of the autonomous, experimental art movement known as los Grupos (the Groups) in which the essay’s author, Felipe Ehrenberg, played a central role. Based mostly in Mexico City in the late 1970s, the Groups critiqued the predominant academicism as well as the burgeoning support for commercially viable experimental work in Mexico’s state-run art institutions. “In Search of a Model for Life” first appeared as one of three external appendices to the catalog for the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil’s 1985 retrospective of the Groups, De los Grupos los individuos (From the Groups, Individuals). Ehrenberg’s essay challenges the teleological narrative that the catalog’s text traces, from a collective movement of rebellion to the individual insertion of the movement’s members into the art market. In doing so, “In Search of a Model for Life” begins to theorize the conditions for a critical and emancipatory art practice beyond the complicity of state and market.
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