art 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 performance art on political themes could emerge into the open. In 2003 Regina José Galindo walked with basin of blood from the constitutional court to the national palace in Guatemala City, periodically dipping her feet to leave footprints in the work “Who Can Erase the Footprints?/ Quién puede borrar las huellas?”
Women from Hell
In the United States, artists who aligned themselves with the feminist movement in the 1960s and ‘70s worked naturally within collectives. Early radical feminism was driven by direct action political formations, using inventive attention-grabbing strategies. WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) hexed Wall Street and the Chicago federal building, and agitated against the Miss America beauty pageant in 1968, crowning a live sheep. (In this they clearly followed the Yippie strategy of animal candidacy; Abbie and his group nominated a pig for president in 1968.) The women who joined the loosely cohering radical Art Workers’ Coalition in 1969 after a protest for artists rights at the Museum of Modern Art, soon found themselves dissatisfied by the men’ refusal to address their issues. Ad Hoc Women Artists and WAR (Women Artists in Revolution) formed to launch a sustained campaign of demonstrations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, decrying their bias against women artists. This campaign is continued today by the Guerrilla Girls, a group of masked anonymous women artists.
At the same time, GAAG (Guerrilla Art Action Group), a subcommittee of the Art Workers Coalition, organized numerous street theater actions. Painter turned conceptual artist Lee Lozano announced her work of “total withdrawal” from the artworld, a slow systematic self-alienation from all social and institutional engagements. Like Gaag, Lozano’s was an internal art action, not really public. The work of all these activists functioned for the most part as internal representations, intended to affect attitudes of their peers within the cultural sphere.
Lozano declared her withdrawal to be a work of conceptual