 were trained in abstract Bauhaus-style methods of working, and had a rigorous sense of pictorial form and color. Still, by the mid-1960s, both had taken the participatory gamble. For Clark, people become the work, while Oiticica was committed to exploring a collective state of invention in his work with the poor residents of Brazil’s shantytowns. For Oiticica, a gay man, art was to become a total experience of life and transgression of all social norms.
The right-wing military junta in Brazil exiled some and jailed other artists involved with the Tropicalismo movement, still their extraordinary artistic innovations suggested lines of resistance to many South American artists during the age of the dictators.
The rising tide of reactionary military dictatorships swept over Latin America with close support from the U.S. government. Artists involved in avant garde activity, and many working in more traditional ways with political themes found themselves enemies of these states. To avoid imprisonment, many turned to subtle ways of questioning the state and its institutions, using the methods of conceptual art and social sculpture. Much the same ferment was brewing in the Eastern European states under authoritarian communist rule.
Stickin’ to the Union
The Argentinians were perhaps the most daring. Bizarrely 1966, the year of the military coup, was already officially declared the “year of the avant-garde.” Artists took full advantage of the ironical opportunity. A group called Arte de los Medios (Art of the Media) made an “anti-happening” – an event that never took place (media makes the event was their point).
At an “Antibienal” held in Córdoba to contest the 1966 3rd Bienal Americana de Arte sponsored by an American corporation, artists produced street interventions, ambient pieces, happenings, conceptual art and contemporary dance works. The most radical action was saved for the end. An audience gathered to see a new Happening, “There’s Room in the World for Everyone/ En el mundo hay sitio para todos.” The door of 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 globa