the theater was blocked up, so that no one could leave or enter. After about an hour, the restless angry audience was treated to the entrance of a large group of students, on strike after one of their leaders had been killed, who burst into the place singing slogans and delivered a fiery speech. This work demonstrates that for many Argentinian artists there was already no more wall between art and politics.
In Argentina, before the dictatorship took hold, artists of the Rosario group used their privileged position as social signifiers of modernity to turn the art system towards representations of the social reality of inequality. In the Tucumán Arde (“Tucumán burns”) project of 1968, the group used a mysterious billboard campaign to build interest in their exhibition. This turned out to be an indictment of the government’s exploitative development of the Tucumán province based on the findings of a joint team of artists and sociologists exhibited in a union hall. Quickly shut down, the show nevertheless raised an important issue critically.
The Rosario artists used the art system to dramatize social realities, as in the gallery exhibition opening lock-in mentioned above. Another artist, Oscar Bony, exhibited a working class family on a pedestal – mother, father, neatly dressed little boy – at an art fair (Familia Obrera, 1968).
Sadly, as in the days of Stalin a world away and an age before, some artists and many political activists paid for their critique with jail terms, torture and disappearance. In Brazil Artur Barrio dramatized the presence of state terror with his “Bloody Bundles: Situation” project, tied-up bundles of rags and animal blood and bones deposited in public places around the city of Rio de Janeiro. (The spectacle of anonymous murdered bodies turning up was not unusual at the time.) Each of these “bloody bundles” was investigated, and Barrio photographed and documented each investigation of his planted provocations.
A number of South American artists were ‘68ers, that is, participants in the global 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 p