l uprising that had as a kind of historical focal point the Events of May in Paris. Several were in fact expelled from France for their political activity. Julio Le Parc of GRAV was one of them. Although the artists of GRAV were abstractionists, exclusively concerned with optical and somatic effects achieved by technological means, they were also deeply interested in participation. Another artist France booted out in ‘68 was the Costa Rican artist Juan Luis Rodriguez, who made environments in Paris under the name Rodriguez Sibaja. Sibaja fled to Brussels, where he was still illegal. There the renowned conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers, who had never met him, put Sibaja up for six months. During a meeting in Antwerp, Sibaja and a group of artists also illegally staying in Belgium worked with Joseph Beuys to build ice barricades in the street to stop police from entering the café where they were gathered.
Upon Sibaja’s return to Paris, he produced an installation resembling an expressionist boxing ring which featured melting chairs of blood-infused ice and the sound of boxing match crowds and old boxers talking. He returned to Costa Rica in ’72 to teach and influence the artists of the ‘80s.
There is a regular commutation between South America and Paris. The avant garde scenes are profoundly connected between these two Romance language-speaking countries, just as today Italian and Spanish activists in the social center movement are closely linked. It is likely that the Anglophone models of Happenings were less influential in this circuit of aesthetic understanding than other theoretical formulations that have yet to be well known to English speaking students of art history.
Looking at these artists who’ve been neglected by Anglophone historians for decades, one begins to sense that the Beuys model of social sculpture, forged in the hot steel political environment of postwar Germany, is somewhat creaky. His is fundamentally a political argument, setting the stage but in fact not enacting social sculpture. It is part of Beuys’ pedagogical period, a very heady, idealist, line of argument. Somehow the Beuysian model, for all its force, does not really expand and deepen introspectively and subjectively, especially in the terms of the body like the formulas of Clark and Oiticica.
Beuys’ notion of a social sculpture was rooted in polemic, founded in his experiences teaching (in themselves remarkable), and reinscribed through constant touring and lecturing, making chalk talks around the world. His very public lecture tours of the mid-1970s put the idea of an aggressive social sculpture out at a time when revanchist dictatorships were in full stride. His was a positive vision, preaching a hopeful role for art in a time when hope for many was closing down.
Despite the political violence that wracked their countries, many Latin American nations continued to hold important international art exhibitions. These offered artists the opportunity to – well, if not to make political statements, at least to make powerful art based on the kind of life they were forced to lead, or simply to offer artistic opportunities to experience a kind of freedom.
Women artists often took the lead in this work. Margarita Azurdia aka Margot Fanjul followed Lygia Clark in exploring the sensual in a prominent 1970 work, “Please Take Off Your Shoes/Favor quitarse los zapatos” – required to enter a cavernous wooden structure with a floor covered in sand. Fanjul worked for many years with other women in undocumented performances during the height of the counterinsurgent war in Guatemala. Throughout the ‘80s she was a busy poet, painter, sculptor, choreographer and producer of Happenings. Other artists were not so well received. The Panamanian Manuel Montilla, inspired by Joseph Beuys’ 1974 “I Like America” performance, locked himself up with a dog in a small space cluttered with artworks in the small town of David near the Costa Rican border. The townspeople dismissed his work as an act of madness.
In 1997 peace treaties were signed in Guatemala, and performan